For Marty Sacks, executive VP of sales, marketing and strategy at Telos Alliance, innovation is critical because technology is changing so quickly.
RedTech: What drives your company’s innovation engine?
Marty Sacks: You might say blood, sweat, tears and a lot of cash! Innovation has been a way of life at Telos since before there was a Telos. Steve Church started developing our first product, the Telos 10, in the early 1980s while he was chief engineer at U.S. radio station WFBQ. Our co-founder Frank Foti began innovating with audio processing at Z-100 in New York City, ultimately leading to the Omnia family of products. It’s in our company’s DNA. Fast forward to today, and we’re still developing new solutions, updating existing ones to stay relevant, and imagining what’s next. We continue to grow our R&D team because technology is changing so quickly, and we know our partners and customers are counting on us to help them solve big problems, like creating more content with less effort and expense. Our culture plays an important role, too. Around here, the best ideas win, no matter who comes up with them.
RedTech: How do your innovations keep radio and audio competitive in today’s digital landscape?
Sacks: I’ve had the privilege to be in this industry for over 50 years, and the media landscape has never been more competitive than it is right now. As a result, our team wakes up every day looking for ways to give our customers better and more effective tools to serve their audiences and build their businesses. One of the areas in which our customers tell us we excel is providing virtualized workflows that allow them to create their content wherever it happens or wherever they want or need to be. To make that happen, we must ensure the virtual solution replicates the traditional hardware workflow or even improves upon it; it can’t be a functional compromise. It also has to be based on proven, reliable and accessible tech, which is why many of our virtual solutions run on COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware that can be run on-premises, in a private data center, or in a cloud-based environment that can be remotely accessed using a standard web browser. That said, dedicated studios built around traditional hardware are still relevant to most of our customers, so we continue to build the innovative features and functions modern workflows require into those familiar hardware components.
RedTech: What emerging technology will be crucial for the industry’s long-term success? Please explain.
Sacks: It would have to be virtualization, which we touched on briefly above. We believe that giving creators more tools to create compelling content is vital if our industry is to remain relevant. Critically, those tools must be available and accessible everywhere. That could mean in the field for news and sports coverage, across multiple dedicated studios, or from someone’s kitchen table. It might mean inviting a newsmaker or commentator to the conversation by sending them an email or a text with a link to a virtual codec or adding them to the conversation using common meeting and conferencing platforms. It will almost certainly include leveraging the power of AI to quickly and efficiently repurpose bits of long-form content in a format optimized for social platforms or to help build a podcast. It’s not just about the tech, though; building partnerships with like-minded companies whose products and solutions add value and utility to our offerings plays a very important role for us. The technology landscape is changing so quickly that it’s hard to predict exactly what things will look like in the long term. Still, I can say with confidence that it will be heavily based on IT infrastructure, and companies that lean into it will be best positioned to help creators maintain and grow their audiences.
RedTech: Beyond streaming and on-demand, what new audio experiences should broadcasters prepare for?
Sacks: Some of the most interesting and promising opportunities are coming from innovative AI-driven content engines like Super Hi-Fi and Radio.Cloud. These companies invite broadcasters to rethink how they’ve always done things, from music scheduling to voice-tracked production to live programming. Their offerings use AI to automate certain tasks so that talent can focus on what they do best — creating compelling content that engages their audience. Importantly, these are not “all or nothing” workflows; the fact that they are cloud-based doesn’t cut out live, local content. Instead, they ensure broadcasters can take advantage of the benefits of a centralized cloud-based approach without losing the ability to generate unique content from anywhere that makes sense.
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