The State of the Remote Production Business

Carlyle Carzoli Garvin Levine Sullivan

The 2022 SVG Summit Future of Remote Production workshop began with a panel discussion featuring leaders in the remote production industry. The goal? To discuss some of the key business challenges and opportunities that are evolving at a rapid pace. Partially driven by the need for innovation but also driven by an explosion in event productions, everything from the shortage of freelancers to inflation to the future of trucks in a cloud-based world were addressed.

The panelists were: Mary Ellen Carlyle, SVP and GM, Dome Productions; Bob Carzoli, Chairman of the Board and CEO, ProCrewz; Nick Garvin, COO, Mobile TV Group; Glen Levine, President, NEP U.S. Broadcast Services; and Pat Sullivan, President, Game Creek Video

Topic One: The state of the remote production business

Mary Ellen Carlyle, Dome Productions, SVP and GM: The work has come back like a tidal wave, but resources have not come back. So, we’re into training new people, new engineers, and I always use the analogy that the business is at the top of the mountain. We just got out of the chalet and people are starting to come back up the chairlifts. But there’s a lot of training going on and we have managed to get all our feeds on the air. We also managed COVID, keeping people healthy and safe.

Bob Carzoli, ProCrewz, Chairman of the Board and CEO: The business is back and we’re gonna probably be north of 25,000 events this year. And I think the good news is that, for the first time, our metrics are showing that our travel numbers — despite number of events going up — are actually plateauing a little bit. It’s only a month or two, so it’s more of a data point than a trend, but we’ve made huge investments in training platforms as we work with our union partners and clients.

Nick Garvin, Mobile TV Group, COO: The business is really healthy, and we added four vice presidents and four trailers including 51Flex, which is all IP and 1080p HDR. And then cloud control has been a continuous development for us as we completed our 25th cloud control room and those are spread out around the country, doing about five to 10 cloud-controlled events a day now. We also launched a new division called Edge, which is a softwaredefined, lightweight production system for smaller to mid-tier sized events. And then we also continue to build out our private data center and production hub to support those cloud control rooms and any other productions.

The supply chain issues have been real. We had a unit that was held up for one part. I mean, there’s however many thousand pieces and parts in a mobile unit, and we were waiting on one thing to launch it, and that hurts. And that’s tough.

Glen Levine, NEP U.S. Broadcast Services, President: As much as things changed, everything stayed the same. Everybody is so busy, and our industry is so fortunate that there’s so much work and we can keep going.

We did about 3,000 events traditional with trucks and trucks aren’t going away as we launched a number of them last year. But then we also did close to that number in remote workflows with NEP Vista.

Pat Sullivan, Game Creek Video, President: It’s been kind of a remarkable transition as we come out of the pandemic simultaneously building multiple trucks. We launched seven mobile