CDSA

As news coverage of the impact and severity of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) unfolds, and reverberates in context to our industry, we will continue to provide updates to our readership and constituencies.

First, rather than the NAB Show being “canceled,” it is important for us to communicate that we are working with NAB as our partner to ensure CDSA’s Cybersecurity & Content Protection Summit is either hosted virtually during the same week in April or moved to a later date. Our partnership with NAB has only strengthened over the past few years and we look forward to continuing our work with them as CDSA or any of our MESA technology communities.

Still relating to NAB, and those mid-April dates, our “Take the DAM(n) Tour” will proceed as a virtual event and MESA members will receive a communication next week on how to apply and participate. This is no longer predicated on having a booth on the NAB Show floor so I look forward to producing a thought leadership event that gives companies insight into the innovations in Digital Asset Management, metadata, data-driven and cloud-based workflows that our members are creating to assist their customers.

Our MESA Las Vegas member networking reception is, obviously, outright canceled and we look forward when we can gather again to celebrate our achievements as an industry.

Similarly, with the cancelation of E3, we will now virtualize our May 27 HITS: Spring event and proceed accordingly. Should the COVID-19 situation evolve to a point where we feel comfortable with the safety of our employees, members and content owners we will, of course, have an in-person element to the event, but I do not expect it to be the normal 500-plus in attendance, and rather a smaller gathering that takes us back to the early days of HITS when we hosted at Pepperdine. We are already making preparations to adapt and adopt to the changing event landscape that emerges once we’ve moved through the pandemic.

Additionally, at our most recent Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH) Board meeting, it was decided to postpone the WiTH Leadership Awards (usually co-located with HITS: Spring) to our Oct. 7 SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit. The Awards will anchor a full-day event featuring thought leadership panels and presentation from the WiTH community that will highlight the collaboration across technology leaders throughout the L.A. area.

Also, beginning next week, we are offering our MESA members the opportunity to submit their own webinars or virtual events through MESA to provide coordination to the various offerings we already are seeing from the membership. We will host a bespoke “event” calendar and provide a submission process to ensure our readers are aware of the many online efforts, across multiple service providers, as we migrate into a remote-based, e-learning environment.

As always, we welcome your participation, input and support. As this crisis grows and our response becomes more informed and appropriate, our hope is to provide the M&E industry a collaborative path forward, together.

Stay safe and stay healthy.

— Guy Finley, President, MESA

(Click here to read MESA’s previous COVID-19 message to its communities)