The Gatekeeper of Success

It's quite possible that no one knows more about whether your business is producing and communicating efficiently than the person running your IT & vault department.

People in this role have the unique advantage of being smacked in the face everyday by the reality that things either work or not. In truth they are the gate-keepers of your success, without whom processes that are often taken for grant come to a grinding halt. This could be no more true than for Nick Stokes, the wizard behind the curtain who greases the machine of production and promotions for LA-based FM Rocks.

Like many Directors of IT, Nick is an early adopter of technology and isn't shy about trying something new. However, he also has a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to implementing new work-flow tools like Wiredrive and the ramifications they can have on people, business, and maybe most importantly, himself. When FTP became too unreliable, time-consuming and expensive to manage, Nick began exploring better online methods for managing productions and delivering work. Being a technical whiz, the first place he looked was at himself.

Buy vs. Build

" I started with building a PHP-based video reel manager for our website. This worked fine for our site but the interface was very technical and for that reason, I could not open it up to sales rep or their assistants. It also lacked a multi-user capability where different users could have unique logins or individual reel playlists.

Building this type of Digital Asset Management System doesn't make sense unless you have your own software development division within your company. It not only take months of development and testing, but would cost a lot more than signing up for the basic account service and using the system month to month.

Me, being one person - I could not do this alone. Once I discovered Wiredrive existed already, I stopped trying to make my own system. I looked at the cost of adding more servers, purchasing a higher bandwidth allotment at a CO-location facility, increasing the amount of technical administrative overhead, compared that to what WireDrive would cost and it was a no brainer. I looked at [other systems] but found that Wiredrive was far ahead of anything out there."

Unlocking The Door To Productivity

"Before Wiredrive, my company used FTP primarily," says Nick. "FTP was great for technical users, but not very easy to use for non-technical users. FTP also takes a very long time to administer 100 different users accessing 100 different projects. We needed something secure. Something that would be easy to use for basic computer users. We also needed something fast. I needed something that had a low administrative overhead and that was easy enough to train other users to administer. Wiredrive eliminated all of these problems for me."

With Wiredrive, FM Rocks is now able to send director reels and upload materials for review and approval in virtual real-time. This is a drastic improvement on previous methods:

"We had an email based DVD reel request system which caused a lot of confusion. Sales Reps misspelled spot names or didn't provide enough clear information to create the reel. Wiredrive has let our sales reps preview spots before they send a request and alleviate any of this confusion.

In addition, any reel request made by our sales reps had to be received by 1:00 PM for us get a DVD into FedEx by the 4:00 PM cut-off. So a lot of the time we were forced to ship DVDs reels via courier, which costs about $90 to get a package delivered first thing in the morning to New York. Multiply that times 15 directors and 240 business days a year. It's a lot of wasted time and money.

All of our DVDs where encoded using the Sonic SD-1000 MPEG-2 encoder card and authored in DVD Studio Pro. From start to finish, creating the first reel took about 25 minutes. Then, factor in making disc to disc DVD duplication, printing the DVD Amery cases, thermal printing on each DVD face, and hand inserting them one at a time. That adds about an additional hour to make 25 copies. So we're talking about 1.5 hours to create 25 reels versus 15 minutes max if I did it using the Wiredrive."

Changing The Culture

The effect Wiredrive has had on FM Rocks' production and sales has been more than just benefiting the process or saving time and money. It's been a cultural change as well. Company employees no longer depend on technical support staff for posting work and now have the power to do it themselves. Its ease of use has made it such a habit that FM Rocks executives will no longer use any other internet system or FTP, and demand that all work goes through Wiredrive.

The effect has also extended to clients, as Nick explains, "I rarely take any support calls when our clients are using Wiredrive. Just about everyone who uses it for the first time always inquires about setting up their own account."

Future Proof

As Nick continues to look into the future of production and promotion technology, he is already working with Wiredrive in ways he never considered. The ability to use Wiredrive to podcast video introduces yet another new method for delivering video. " A few of our directors are podcasting," explains Nick. "Right now they mainly use it for reference. They subscribe once to a Wiredrive feed, and when I get a request to send them a link to another video/commercial, I update their Wiredrive reel which in turn updates the podcast subscription link from within their iTunes player." From iTunes, directors are able to drop the videos onto an iPod and take their work with them.

Asked if he ever misses the old way of doing things, Nick says "I would never ever consider going back again. Wiredrive assures me that my clients will have very easy and secure access to any work we present them."

For more information on FM Rocks visit:
www.fmrocks.com

Spotlights

Featured Story

Gatekeeper of Success

It’s quite possible that no one knows more about whether your business is producing and communicating effectively than the person running your IT & vault department. Nick Stokes, Director of Technology at FM Rocks, is no exception.

Other Spotlights

The Big Picture

Exploring the issues that creative companies face in online production & promotion, and the streamlining effect of Wiredrive.

Smiling Approval

Young productions gets major approval from its millions of young fans. However, the first order of business is getting the approval of their clients. That’s where Wiredrive comes in.