Justin Lachovsky, Telecine

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I first heard the longtime digital signage solutions company Telecine was getting into subscription content for screens, my first reaction was "Hmmm ... pretty crowded and established market to shoehorn into ..." Then I got the details, and the logic and applicability were a lot more apparent. The Montreal company has set up three very customizable sets of pre-packaged feeds that would run in parallel with the products already out there, as opposed to being alternatives. There's a weather feed that's all about context, like one letting runners know if this a good day to put in some mileage. There's a banking industry feed that solves a big pain point of developing messaging that is fully compliant with finance regulations. And there's an interesting air quality feed that marries on-screen content with a small, included device that does real-time air monitoring in buildings. I spoke with Justin Lachovsky, Telecine's Director of Sales & Marketing, about the new services. We also talk at the start about how the company has adjusted to the sudden loss last year of its much-loved and respected founder, James Fine. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Justin, thank you for joining me. Let's get something out of the way right away, because you guys, and the digital signage world in general, had a big shock last year when your founder, James Fein unexpectedly passed away. How have you guys adjusted to that? What have you done and how are things? Justin Lachovsky: Yeah. Definitely a huge shock and something that we're still battling through, of course, something that shocking doesn't go away easily. But we've luckily had the opportunity to really just continue focusing on what we do best and that's helping our clients with producing excellent digital signage content for their networks, and frankly, that's I think something that James really would've wanted us to do. So we're all really holding onto his memory in that regard of just doing everything that we can to continue pushing forward his vision, obviously, it was a shock. It's a tough loss, but he's really laid the groundwork for our management team to step up now and help just continue pushing forward all the great stuff that we do here at Telecine.  Yeah. One of the new things I learned is that he set you guys up with a succession plan so the shift wasn't that difficult. Justin Lachovsky: No, and you know that's something that some folks might not know, but for the last, I'd say six plus years just before I joined Telecine, James had been doing about six months sailing sabbaticals across the world and some management oversight in that regard, but most of the day-to-day operations and client management stuff was handled by our management team so while it's a deep loss and obviously we're still deeply upset by the loss of James, he put this company in a perfect position for us to continue going forward, and I'm very grateful for that. Yeah. It was fun to hear how he would be in the south Pacific with Chantal sailing and he would get on a sat phone and call in. Justin Lachovsky: Yes. I can't tell you how many conference calls I've had with James, where he's like, “I'm in the middle of the water. There's no land in sight, but somehow I'm able to jump on a phone and talk to you all the way back in Montreal.” It's very cool to see how far technology has come.  So we've done a podcast in the past, it was with James, miss him a lot, but for those people who don't know what Telecine is about, could you just give a kind of a quick rundown of what you guys do? What's your focus on?  Justin Lachovsky: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, Telecine is a 35 year old media and software company. We've been doing digital signage, I think since before digital signage was even really an industry and really our main focus is to help our clients solve their communications challenges and using digital