Plotting a Course Post Pandemic

The Atlantic Audio Ltd of June 2021 is very different to the Atlantic Audio Ltd of March 12 2020 when the live events industry in Ireland was effectively shuttered for what was then “next two weeks” and is now going on almost 500 days. 

We spent the initial lockdown of 2020 developing our live-streaming services in conjunction with Brandt Studios who had provided our streaming services heretofore. We had a bit of luck along the way. In conjunction with Brandt Studios, we delivered a ‘digital festival’ for the Cuirt International Festival of Literature which lead to other work in the digital space for other festivals moving to online. We had a 1gb fibre connection already and were in a healthy financial position on the back of an unusually very busy January and February with the Galway 2020 European City of Culture project.

Investment

In early summer 2020, we developed a purpose-built acoustically treated studio space on the back of this and made some technological improvements in terms of computer hardware. Since then we haven’t really had to look back. There has been some investment in more computing and network capacity as well as camera equipment.

Changes

We’ve lost some freelancers along the way to other industries and jobs, most of whom won’t come back full-time to events. Others have re-skilled and look after some of the streaming and webinar technical support services. We’ve engaged freelance video editors, captioners and camera-operators.

You’ll be reading this on our new website, built for us by Digitaledge recently. This process has led to a re-think of how I look at the business. Atlantic Audio Ltd pre-2020 was very much an “audio-first” company with a narrow focus on audio for live corporate and performing arts events.

“Audio-first” Communications

The Atlantic Audio Ltd of 2021 is now striving to be a more complete “communications” company. If all communication begins with sound, then an “audio-first” focus on communication makes sense. I heard someone say that, in broadcast, you can ignore the picture but not the sound. Therefore we’ll continue to improve and develop our live-streaming, remote production and podcast services but we’ll also add some elements of location and broadcast sound equipment to the rental stock over the next few months. We’ve found some neat wearable and concealer solutions for our wireless lavs. I’m excited to see what the new M1 chip in the Apple Mac can do for the editing workflow and I’ll be integrating DANTE into the remote production facility and our mobile streaming set-up.

Best to look forward, I think.

AF