How the 49ers keep content moving on game day

The following is a lightly edited transcript from the video.

Josh Conner, 49ers Studios: CineSys, LucidLink and Iconik have really allowed us to modernize our workflow. In the past couple years, we've gone from living in the early 2000s in terms of content management to now living in 2026 and, in some ways, living in 2030.

Modernizing the 49ers content workflow

Hi, I'm Josh Conner, Head of Content Management, part of 49ers Studios. We oversee all of the footage ingestion, tagging, logging and distribution within the company.

One of the things that's been great about working with CineSys is that they are a communication channel between us and our IT team. There's almost a different language that people in production speak versus people in IT. The nice thing is that CineSys speaks both those languages and can marry those together and really get the production workflows that we need.

Cutting hours of manual tagging

Before working with CineSys, we were experiencing issues with basically the large volume of content we had coming in. A big thing that CineSys helped us with was the ability to tag and search that content, as well as the ability to find that content remotely. 

Through CineSys, we have started to use Spotter, which is automatic tagging of our practice footage and our game footage. Before, that was hours — probably four to five hours — for a shooter to come in and tag all of their footage and tag it with what the play was. Now, it's a matter of minutes. We're saving tens of hours every week of manual labor in tagging and making sure all of that footage is properly logged.

There are multiple ways Iconik has improved our workflow, one of them being access across any location, being able to view all our footage, being able to transfer that footage from our on-prem servers or our LucidLink servers to separate cloud servers. We can transfer back and forth from our on-prem NetApp servers to LucidLink and vice versa.

Collaborating from anywhere with LucidLink

Prior to LucidLink, our team was working off hard drives. We had to get back to our offices to be able to get footage onto the servers, to be able to collaborate, and whenever we were on road trips, whenever we were on away games, it was really hard for that collaboration across the team. Even with the people that were in the hotel together, they were all working off separate hard drives, so sharing that footage was much more of a pain point. 

Now with LucidLink, it has been massive for our collaboration. It has allowed us to have editors back here at home while we're on a road game, editors back here while we're doing event coverage. 

From Melbourne to San Francisco in hours

For example, recently we just had our trip to Melbourne, Australia, where we played the Rams in week one of the season. 

We were able to capture a massive amount of footage across the week of events, of practices, of sponsor events, of foundation events, and we were able to capture all that and share it back with those of us here at home in a matter of hours instead of a matter of waiting for the entire week to finish for everyone to get back from Australia. 

I think we captured over 50 hours of footage across 5,000 clips just that week alone that previously would never have gotten back to us.

->?<.? Building the right workflow together

Matt Tape, CineSys: CineSys partnering with the 49ers has been fantastic. I think the different business units we've talked to, from Josh to Danny, from Laura to Cody, the whole team has been such a pleasure to work with. 

And I think their achievement of excellence and wanting to be best in class no matter what they do — whether it's on the field, or whether it's entertainment, or whether it's technology or media management — it truly shows how much they care about the product they're putting out.

Josh Conner: Our experience with our vendors, with CineSys, with LucidLink, has been incredible. The capabilities that these programs have allowed us to achieve has been amazingly efficient.