The pandemic has forced us to bring our technology plans forward by several years. It is the same in all cultural media, especially in classical music.
Fiber optics go through Magog, but not through Orford at the moment. We had to undertake additional initiatives to bring dedicated fiber optics to us. It is a major issue for us: we absolutely must have a very good Internet connection for our activities.
At the start of the pandemic, our management meetings on Zoom were quite the headache. Our employees live around the region, in Sherbrooke, in Eastman or in Hatley. Personally, I am in Magog. We all had to pray to God that there would be no wind, because if there was, our faces froze on the screen hilariously.
For virtual meetings, we designed webinars with our artists for our loyal supporters. We quickly learned that it was risky to broadcast them on our sites because our Internet connection was not stable. We had to appeal to the generosity of Kezber, an IT company in Magog. We moved to their offices temporarily so that we could broadcast quality webinars.
If audiences in our region want to see our broadcasts but if reception is bad because of a poor connection, they certainly will not like our content, unfortunately. We are working very hard to find solutions at our end, but, if people don't have a proper connection that allows them to consume our content in the regions, it is very difficult to reach them.