Final Program Set for May 27 Hollywood Innovation and Transformation (HITS) Live

A world-class team-building keynoter, a collection of industry experts on the impact of COVID-19 on the entertainment industry, a dozen of Hollywood’s vendors on how they’ve adapted during the pandemic, and more are set on the program for the May 27 Hollywood Innovation and Transformation (HITS) Live event.

HITS Live is the industry’s annual gathering of CIOs and top technology minds, and will tackle the quickly shifting IT needs of studios, networks and media service providers, along with how M&E vendors are stepping up to meet those needs. The all-live, virtual, global conference will allow for real-time Q&A, one-on-one chats with other attendees, and more.

Here’s a look at what to expect:

• Following opening remarks from Guy Finley, president of CDSA and MESA, and Devendra Mishra, chief strategist for MESA, best-selling author Robyn Benincasa will deliver the keynote address “Adapt, Overcome, and Win as ONE.”

Based on her “New York Times” best-selling book, her keynote — which has been widely praised by Fortune 500 companies, from Starbucks to Walmart, Boeing to Johnson & Johnson, Napster to Hewlett Packard — offers ideas around how you can transform the mindset of your team, fuel long-lasting connections, and build a culture of “We Thinkers” … and her HITS Live keynote will show how to do it in our work-from-home reality.

Her interactive presentation will show how to make your them rise to any challenging finish line, get rid of any “win-lose” mentality with any project, switch from a “conquering” to “collaborating mentality, and how to eliminate self-defeating siloed mindsets.

For more on her presentation, click here.

• The discussion “Now What? The HITS Community Responds” will see Christina Aguilera, head of creative engineering for Amazon Studios and president of the Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH) Foundation, along with Renee McGinnis, SVP of solutions and IT for Lionsgate, looking at the major changes the industry has undergone in the last two months, where adoption and implementation of technologies have moved from “nice to have” to “need to have.” And the next six months will prove an even bigger challenge, with tremendous opportunity for transformation as we get everyone back to work as safely and quickly as possible.

• Finley and Hanno Basse, CTO of media and entertainment for Microsoft Azure, will take part in the fireside chat “Evolution of Production in the Cloud,” a casual conversation that dives into the latest innovations in secure, remote-production workflows in cloud-based environments. Whether you are cutting, visualizing or rendering VFX, this session discusses back-to-work solutions that are virtualizing critical post-production workflows.

• “COVID-19 Entertainment Economic Outlook and How We Can Respond” has experts from the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School — Dr. Nelson Granados, Alicia Jessop and Dr. David M. Smith — along with Eric Iverson, CTO and CIO with Iverson Consulting, providing an overview of the state of the media and entertainment economy and the impact of COVID-19. Topics covered will be a macroeconomic picture, including a prospect for the SoCal labor market; impact on media and entertainment revenues and employment; and the present and future of live sports.

Beginning at 12:30 p.m. PT, HITS Live attendees will have the choice of four breakout sessions, covering the latest innovations from the vendor community:

• Production, Collaboration and Cloud will see speakers from Microsoft and MediaKind, Eluvio and Avanade.

• Cloud, Work-From-Home and Security will have speakers from Tape Ark, Signiant, 5th Kind and CDSA and the Trusted Partner Network (TPN).

• Consumers, Data, AI, and ML will see presentations from Whip Media Group, RSG Media and IBM, Tamr, EIDR and Premiere Digital.

• CX, Scale and Supply Chain will have Zendesk, Sony New Media Solutions, MovieLabs and DPP, and IYUNO Media Group and SDI Media on the docket.

HITS Live is presented by Microsoft Azure, with sponsorship by RSG Media, Signiant, Tape Ark, Whip Media Group, Zendesk, Eluvio, Sony, Avanade, 5th Kind, Tamr, EIDR and the Trusted Partner Network (TPN). The event is produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council.

For more information, click here. To Register, click here. To participate in the event, contact Evie Silvers at [email protected].