ShowMgr.com's latest interface for the iPad is proving to be a huge hit with on-location production managers and post supervisors moving in and out of facility suites

Wouldn’t it be nice to clock your TDs, editors, and VFX artists in and out during location work, schedule resources and equipment, or spot check an edit suite to see if all are on deadline—and on budget—without making a sound or having to run back to your desk to log in your updates? 

With ShowMgr.com’s new interface for iPad, it’s as easy as Wi-Fi.

ShowMgr.com has been making Web-based enterprise resource (ERP) management tools to streamline and, in many cases, automate every aspect of a production’s planning, operations and financials with the goal of keeping costs lean and improving productivity. Started at Fox Sports about 12 years ago as “Event Manager,” the tool is now used by such entertainment, broadcast and digital content creation clients as CBS Sports, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Time Warner Cable, MLB Network and Sony Colorworks. In the hands of a post supervisor or production manager, it connects resources, assets, facilities and services through a secure browser and generates notifications, alerts, schedules and work orders. The company went public in 2003.

Now, with its iPad interface and Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, ShowMgr.com can bring all those things to a supervisor’s fingertips in the field or in the studio, without tethering him or her to a desktop computer.


Kevin Rosen

The idea, says ShowMgr.com founder and CEO Kevin Rosen, was to give each facility department, increasingly disjointed by satellite offices and multiple locations, a better way to interact with each other while letting production managers essentially eliminate the time between a location or suite meeting and updating ShowMgr.com when they returned to their own office. “There was a lot of user interest in an iPad app, since more than 40% of them are Apple users,” says Rosen. “We answered the call for Safari- and Mac-compatibility many years ago and we really like the iPad form factor. We think that the iPad—and every other device that will soon follow, such as Slate from HP—is a really powerful  tool in particular for television and film production. It just opens a lot of doors in terms of possible uses and we really wanted to go after that.”

Though Rosen says the company “cut its teeth in sports live events,” notoriously one of the most difficult types of live productions to manage efficiently, it has seen a faster and wider initial adoption among its post-production users. “Strangely enough, we are seeing our post customers and studio operations customers run with it first,” he says. “As they navigate the hallways of their offices, conference and screening rooms, they are using it for more of the mobility and portability aspect, rather than for the advantages it brings to the field. We honestly thought the field users would adopt it more quickly, and instead, it’s been really popular at DI facilities and some pretty high-profile post and VFX customers (whom I can’t name but are household names). When one facility put in its order, in fact, they also ordered about a dozen iPads for their PMs.”

Rosen attributes this uptick, in part, to the iPad’s ability to be as silent as its user needs to be when moving on and off sets and into edit and finishing suites. "The iPad goes silent in a snap—much more easily than a laptop does," he says. "And it’s so much lighter to travel around with. But even during planning sessions, when PMs or mid-level managers have to go in and out of meetings and supply facility assets and resources, they are able to get access to the information, make reservations, schedule equipment and do all of that right there on the iPad. Before, they had to take all these notes and hope they got it right. Now, they can act on the information immediately."

ShowMgr.com uses SSL, the same proxy used for online banking, to connect its users wirelessly or from a network to their interactive databases. Rosen notes that users will also be able to grab the barcodes on invoices, work orders or tapes, with a ShowMgr.com-enabled Tag Reader app, coming sometime this fall, on their iPhones. "Since we know that many of the same iPad users have iPhones, they’ll be able to use their iPhone as a barcode reader and the iPad for everything else," he says.

As the new PC-compatible pads start to hit the marketplace, says Rosen, ShowMgr.com will be ready with new interfaces for those devices. "It’s a very exciting time for us. We know the demand is there, and we think the PC-based tablets will be adopted just as quickly as the iPad was in production and post. All these tablets have the potential to make so many people’s jobs that much easier and better."