iconik enables SXSW Festival 2021 to go fully virtual
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Faye Sutton
| 26 August 2021
Smart media management solution iconik has been used to securely gather, organise and quality control all media assets for the return of flagship indie music and cultural festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in its traditional home of Austin, Texas.

iconikThe annual film, music and technology festival was cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic and this year, organisers were able to remotely manage and collaboratively review media using iconik, enabling them to move the festival online, with closed captioning added so that hearing-impaired attendees could be fully involved.

iconik was used to collate and organise the 80 feature films, 92 short films, 70 music showcases and 541 conference sessions that made up the full showcase of SXSW content.

Gabe Van Amburgh, film exhibition manager, SXSW, commented: “When we explained what iconik would allow us to do, you could sense the team’s relief. The feedback I continued to get was ‘Wow, this actually works better than anything else we’ve tested for online events.’”

Due to the volume of media that had to be processed in the lead-up to the event, SXSW needed to automate workflows wherever possible. The iconik API made it easy to integrate with third-party video transcoders that would process 100s of videos at time, to create various versions with different intros, end cards, and sponsor messages.

SXSW partner Garrett Sergeant, CTO, Simple DCP, commented: “You never know what will be valuable later. Managing everything in one place keeps the legacy of events in view. Organisers can see the history, find big moments that shaped the event at the time and then became a catalyst for the future.”