Business TV: Bringing CTI’s Broadcast Expertise To Your Office

Business TV: Bringing CTI’s Broadcast Expertise To Your Office

Broadcast quality production and upgrading the outbound communications at your organization don’t have to be painful.

CTI’s Broadcast Team has decades of experience, most recently upgrading the broadcast facilities in the University of Michigan’s Michigan Stadium and the Houston Rockets. However, some of the most significant growth CTI’s broadcast team has seen in recent years is in business TV, upgrading outbound corporate communications.

“The biggest question,” says CTI’s VP of Media & Entertainment, Jim Wile, “is what are you trying to do?”

For corporate clients, that covers anything from upgrading a meeting space and improving the quality of what they can stream to full production studios where they can record training videos for their customers or product videos for the sales team and social media.

“We call that Business TV,” notes Wile, adding, “Traditional corporate AV is an internal endeavor, and broadcast, or Business TV, is external. AT CTI, we’re fortunate to have a tremendous depth of experience and expertise in both.”

With minimal effort, the CEO can use that space to address investors, hold a town hall, or conduct a television interview. In all these settings, you’ll get audio and video vastly better than what you can get from a laptop and a set of AirPods.

Improving The Quality Of Communications
The pandemic accelerated the need, or desire, to improve the quality of a business’s video communications.  “I’m a TV guy with forty years in the TV industry,” notes Wile, “and I can remember seeing a stream early in the pandemic, and there’s a CEO sitting at the end of a conference room table. There’s a laptop and camera pointing at him. It was this far away from a damp, dripping basement room with a bare light bulb with the CEO holding up a newspaper. I swear, it looked like a hostage video. And this was the most important guy at the company talking.”

It’s a look that many companies shared then, and none wish to repeat.

Fortunately, cameras, mics, lights, and other broadcast equipment are affordable and accessible to purchase. Unfortunately, as Wile notes, many organizations discover “there’s a little art and science that goes into taking a bunch of expensive hardware and not looking bad. And it needs to work reliably. I think that is a very important part of our business that gets overlooked.”

“Television people understand that it has to work every time because it’s connected to the cash register,” says Wile, adding, “If you blow up a 60-second commercial on the five o’clock news, it’s going to cost the station $100,000. Everything you do there has to work right. That’s not a conversation I need to have because television people understand that.”

Reliability Is Key
It’s a lesson many Business TV customers are learning the hard way. CTI’s experts have been called to sort out issues in poorly integrated Business TV solutions. As Wile puts it,

“You know, here’s a fancy camera. And here’s a super duper microphone. And here’s some cool lighting. But if it’s connected up so that it doesn’t work reliably, it doesn’t matter because the thing doesn’t work when you need it. It could be picking the wrong equipment. It can be poorly installed equipment. It might be poorly configured equipment or equipment that’s difficult to operate, but all of those things add up to the fact that I have an appointment with you at 10:45, and I pushed the button, and my stuff isn’t working.”

“What we sell is not equipment; to some extent, it’s not even solutions. It’s confidence,”  from the broadcast experience – and standard of performance – that CTI routinely delivers.

“What are you trying to do?” is the first question for any client who reaches out to CTI looking to improve their outbound communications. A bigger monitor and a better video bar might improve the Microsoft Teams meetings in your conference room. But suppose you’re trying to deliver video that looks as good as one of your major competitors, and they’ve built out a broadcast-quality room with quality lighting and cameras. A video bar is not going to compete with that. At CTI, we discuss your goals, and we have the experience to create a solution that will deliver on your budget.

Ease Of Use
More importantly, it will be a solution that your team can use. CTI has recently been called out to locations where traditional corporate AV integrators assembled broadcast gear as part of the AV system. In one case, says Wile, “It was nearly impossible to operate because the people that put it in didn’t know how to operate broadcast equipment. We came in and reconfigured it and fixed their problem for a small amount of money. They were thrilled!”

At a time when equipment is more affordable than ever, and some tools, such as OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) are free, Wile observes, “there’s a giant vacuum of how to configure and use them. Just because you bought a hammer doesn’t make you a carpenter.”

You can bring those skills to the people in your company. “What makes CTI unique,” notes Wile, “is our ability to merge traditional AV and broadcast and turn it into  Business TV solutions that no other integrator can deliver.” Affordable, high quality, easy to manage. CTI is ready when you are.