Russell Fleming - Technical Director

Why do you think it is important to build a link between Universities & industry?

It's critical to engage with emerging talent. It promotes awareness, raises interest, and ensures the sustainability and diversity of the talent pool available to the industry. Also, it allows industry to feedback to the education sector on what skills the industry is missing and needing enabling Universities to adapt their courses accordingly. It's symbiotic in many respects.

Why did you want to get involved?

It's an opportunity to give back, but also to work with other industry leaders to really showcase what the Media & Entertainment industry is all about. 

What are you most excited about?

A 26 hour broadcast? Internationally dispersed contributors? Live?! I mean, what seasoned broadcast professional wouldn't get excited about On Air...?

What do you think the biggest skills challenges & changes are going to be over the next couple of years?

There's so many but I think the two that stand out for me are Cloud-native, and data driven processes. Over the last 5 years there has been a huge surge in Public Cloud being utilised in production stacks. Understanding what Cloud-native means, and how it needs to be applied to industry problems will only increase in significance as technology changes and budgets tighten.

There's a big push to be more data driven, both for the consumer and in the production process. For example, enabling a producer to see all the different camera angles of a goal scored, or how many times a term was used in a political speech, using a simple search. Understanding data, how it can be used and associated to video will drive new ways of storytelling, identifying audience reaction and ultimately monetising those decades old archives!

What do students have to look forward to?

There's nothing more thrilling than being a in a live broadcast scenario to really test your mettle. Things go wrong, so much goes right, but at the end it's the sense of achievement. Otherwise, it's an opportunity to collaborate with other international students, work with industry leaders, and promote your skills to industry.

What do you think the industry will gain from being involved in On Air?

Direct access to an international pool of emerging talent and skills to help build their business, products or services for future success.