DigitalGlue has announced that its creative.space shared storage solution was selected by the Ryan Seacrest Foundation (RSF) to house, organize and provide remote access to the rapidly growing content library curated by RSF and distributed to their 14 Seacrest Studios located within children’s hospitals across the US. The Seacrest Studio, located in Cohen Children’s Medical Center (CCMC), in New Hyde Park, NY, is the most recent location to deploy creative.space.
RSF has been building Seacrest Studios within children’s hospitals since 2010, bringing hands-on broadcasting and entertainment activities to distract young patients from the realities of hospital life. RSF recently opened four Seacrest Studios within 18 months, bringing the total to 14 studios all outfitted with broadcast quality equipment where kids can participate in celebrity interviews, learn production skills, and escape to a ‘no poke’ zone for fun and learning. The hospitals also use closed-circuit TV to send programming directly to patients’ rooms, and several hospitals broadcast content to satellite campuses, providing diversions to kids whose daily routines otherwise revolve around invasive medical procedures.
“The goal of the studios is twofold. One, they aid in the healing process for patients, and their families as well. And two, they serve as havens where patients and their families can escape. We refer to them as ‘no poke’ zones, but they are really places where patients can explore with their imaginations, learn how to use the equipment, host their own shows, be part of celebrity interviews, just have fun and get to be a kid when hospital life doesn’t allow them to feel that way,” explains Nicole Mead, SVP, operations, RSF.
As new studios opened, RSF was faced with the challenge of storing, organizing and making its growing content library accessible to the teams across their locations. RSF moved from using Dropbox as their platform to installing DigitalGlue’s creative.space.
According to Katie Klochany, Creative Manager, RSF partners with organizations across numerous disciplines to provide pre-recorded virtual field trips, exciting behind-the-scenes tours, live music, story time, mindfulness exercises, tutorials and more to hospital partners 24/7/365. creative.space stores assets from all the different partners in one place allowing a stress-free download and subsequent upload into the team’s scheduling software. “creative.space provides a place where I can organize all our content,” said Klochany. “The platform houses all required assets in one space that is accessible to Seacrest Studios teams for programming, and Ryan’s team when projects require collaboration. The most valuable feature is just getting files quickly and easily to our team in a streamlined process so they’re always current, and they have access to timely content they can schedule to air on their channel. It’s convenient and a huge time-saver for us.”
Going forward, RSF will be implementing creative.spaces tagging capabilities to address the varying needs of different teams so they can quickly search through 1000s of files and find exactly what they need for their specific patient population. They also intend to tap into the platform’s automated export feature that delivers files in the recipient’s time zone and/or with subtitles appropriate for that specific region, and the cross-edit feature that invites different teams to work on the same project.
“The content transfer from our old system was wonderful, and the team has been incredible,” summarized Klochany. “All questions have been answered quickly and DigitalGlue have been diligent about ensuring we are getting the support we need, which is instrumental as creative.space is embraced by our studio teams. It’s also important, because we are growing so fast, that we can upgrade and add to our storage at anytime”
Added Mead, “Being on the operational side of the foundation I have found the investment from the leadership of DigitalGlue incredible. We are not a typical installation; hospital networks must deal with extreme firewalls, cyber security teams, and permissions, but DigitalGlue has come in and helped troubleshoot issues that are specific to us. They always say that we’re going to partner on this together and make us comfortable with moving forward. Having tech partners that are so willing to provide continuing education and support and not nickel and dime us is a big deal. Their willingness to be nimble and good partners means a lot to us.”
