content production
Australian Channel
the leak
Management had committed the business to four hours of fresh content a week with no proof of concept. Separately, IT had bought cameras that shot in the wrong codec, with no production input. Two decisions made without testing, both landing on the same department. Every clip had to be transcoded, so Final Cut render times blew out and the servers filled up, and the department kept spending on more storage while eight video journalists still delivered one hour a week against a promise of four.
the fix
Early in my career I was Head of Promos there, then Head of TV, so it was my own department and my own number to carry. Three moves. First, the proof of concept nobody had run: I shot a story myself under the constraints I was about to propose, before asking anyone else to work that way. Then I replaced the cameras with Sony bodies that shot a codec Final Cut could edit natively, which killed render time and freed about a terabyte of storage. Then I tightened how the work was made: each shoot blocked like a scene and planned with the talent before the camera rolled, and producers given 12-minute cards to make six-minute stories. The constraint forced sharper decisions in the field, the way newsreel crews once worked with only a few feet of film. Restriction lifted the creativity.
the result
Then I took the evidence back to the broadcast partners and reset the commitment to what was genuinely deliverable, and I took the team from eight to four, to the people who backed the new direction. One hour a week off eight people became three hours a week off four. The reset quota was met, render time was gone, roughly a terabyte came back and the storage spend stopped climbing. No extra budget and no extra people.