MEDIA IN THE CLOUD, STORAGE & MAM Silver Trak Digital Launches in New Zealand New GM for Silver Trak’s new Auckland office, David Elder. GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH and as part of the company’s continued expansion across the Asia pacific region, Silver Trak Digital has established a new office in Auckland, New Zealand. According to Silver Trak COO Christian Christiansen, “As we were when we opened our offices in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur and to meet the unprecedented demand for our services, we are delighted that we are now able to offer to the full range of Silver Trak solutions to all customers across New Zealand from our Auckland office.” Christiansen says the main services offered from the NZ office will be digital cinema mastering and management, including duplicating and distributing content via hard drives or IP delivery to NZ cinemas, working with DAMsmart to provide digitisation services and Media Room to provide advanced asset management services to the NZ market. The NZ office will also be a hub for technical assessment QC for SD, HD and 4K SDR/HDR content, preparation and packaging services for OTT and broadcast, general broadcast services and a variety of audio services. Heading up the newly-established Auckland office is industry veteran and technology specialist General Manager David Elder. Elder brings with him over thirty-two years’ executive leadership and senior management experience, reporting at CEO and director level and leading diverse teams in 24/7 mission critical operations. He has held roles as principal of DECompl3x, Head of Business and Product Development at MediaHub Australia, On Air Services Executive and Head of Presentation and Programme Traffic at SKY TV NZ, and Head of Presentation at TV3 in NZ.
“With New Zealand’s success in suppressing spread of the COVID-19 virus, many areas of content production and distribution have rebounded more quickly than in other territories.
The Silver Trak NZ GM role sees Elder actively pursuing new business opportunities for the company whilst simultaneously implementing business growth strategies throughout the region. He will develop and manage customer relationships with new and existing clients and oversee all required business operations. Elder will also manage all Silver Trak NZ personnel to ensure that they are able to give the company’s clients the very best possible service and solutions.
MEDIA IN THE CLOUD, STORAGE & MAM
According to Elder, “The New Zealand media industry is going through a massive change and restructure at the moment, with almost every broadcaster looking at significant change currently. TV3 up for sale, Sky TV is doing a massive restructure, TVNZ and Radio New Zealand are being looked at by the Government at the moment, and the Maori Media is also being examined, so there is massive change happening in the industry currently.
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“Silver Trak is in obviously an awesome position now to step in and help in that industry. We’re ideally suited for what’s going on. We’re available. We have a massive range of products that look like they will certainly be needed going forward. “Basically, we’re offering the full range of services that we currently offer in Australia and Malaysia. For some of those services we would be operating directly out of New Zealand, and some of them we would be simply providing a portal into the already-built infrastructure that exists for Silver Trak.”
Part of that infrastructure is Silver Trak’s recently expanded MediaTrak workflow management solution. MediaTrak collects a range of information for Silver Trak and turns it into a day to day manager for staff and equipment resources, client portal for complete visibility as well a database of IP for the services that Silver Trak has to offer. Its cloud-based, web interface allows clients to place an order for any number of services, track the order’s progress and watch it be delivered to a variety of broadcast and distribution outputs. MediaTrak works in parallel to Silver Trak’s Media Room, an advanced asset management solution available as a SaaS platform, to ensure every piece of content including film, TV and music masters, trailers, graphics, photos, metadata, captioning, subtitles and audio streams are digitally archived in one place keeping tracking and access simple and secure.
“The New Zealand media industry is going through a massive change and restructure at the moment, with almost every broadcaster looking at significant change currently.
With New Zealand’s success in suppressing spread of the COVID-19 virus, many areas of content production and distribution have rebounded more quickly than in other territories. According to David Elder, this will provide further impetus to the new office. “Cinemas are all open here now,” he says. “I got an email that the only cinema in Reefton, which is pretty much the middle of the southern alps, desperately needed a copy of Trolls and so, us being us, we went the extra mile. So, the first thing we did was got one [copy] into the couriers for them, but the second thing we did was started ringing around all the other cinemas within 200km of them and started trying to source a copy for them to get it to them faster than we could get the courier there, and succeeded. We’ve done it a few times now. When somebody wants something really last minute, we’re in the position that we’ll just make it happen.” And in the case of sporting clubs and the content they produce, Elder says, “At this point, they’re back up and running, everything’s coming together. Now the Aotearoa Super Rugby is in process. Even small club games, everything is as normal here now. In terms of Silver Trak’s relationship with them, they’ll be hearing from me in the near future. They’re definitely people I think we can do a phenomenal amount of work for and make their lives so much easier. The systems that are onboard at Silver Trak and are now coming onboard at Silver Trak should make life far, far more pleasant for anybody with an archive. “Digitisation of archives is a huge, huge opportunity for Silver Trak and for DAMsmart because Joe Kelly and those guys are the experts in it, and have a phenomenal reputation, so I’m sure that’s something else that I’m definitely going to be pursuing here.” David Elder can be contacted at Silver Trak’s New Zealand office by visiting 3D Delta Avenue, New Lynn, Auckland, 0600, New Zealand, emailing david@silvertrak.co.nz and by calling +64 21 025 00969.
