Film Studio Offers VoIP, Wi-Fi

Albuquerque Studios recently opened with voice-over-IP and wireless communications to smooth the hectic turnarounds needed to equip its movie and TV-making tenants who rent the state-of-the-art soundstages.

The US$74 million studio, located in Mesa del Sol, N.M., includes a $7 million data and voice infrastructure, including VOIP phones that operate with security and unified communications software from Cisco Systems Inc., said Nick Smerigan, the studio's chief operating officer.

After two months of operation, Smerigan is sure it was a good investment, based on comments he's heard from movie and TV executives who have leased the six enormous soundstages for their productions.

"They seem to think we walk on water," Smerigan said in an interview at Cisco's Networkers Conference here. The tenants are happy because Smerigan, Executive Director Jerry Hariton and their team have been able to use VOIP to swiftly reconfigure phones and data communications for quick changes in movie-making crews, some of whom arrive for only a few days of work before turning over the space to the next crew.

"If we can reconfigure quickly, it's important to clients because it gives them flexibility," Hariton said.

Moves, additions and changes to phones and computers for new workers used to be "exhausting work" with analog phones in prior locations, Smerigan said, and it sometimes took days to complete the job. With a recent team of 60 who needed 14 work areas reconfigured, the work took less than a day, he said.

The studio's tenants have benefited as well by being able to use voice over wireless phones through the Wi-Fi network, giving them the ability to move freely over the studio's 28 acres, Hariton said.

One convention that Hariton said the studio might embrace eventually is a dual-mode phone that a user can carry from the Wi-Fi to the cellular network. "When it's available, we'll definitely take a look at it," he said.

Albuquerque Studios announced in June that it christened its studio operations with the filming of In Plain Sight, a Universal Media Studios television series about the witness protection program.