How COVID Changed TV Production Forever

variety.com:

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Five years ago this week, the television industry rose to the challenge of keeping news, daytime and late-night talk shows and other topical series on the air during the harsh early months of the COVID pandemic.

We didn’t know it then, but March 2020 marked a huge inflection point for the television business. Stay-at-home orders, masks and antigen tests — it seems distant and not so distant all at once.

The story of how COVID helped supercharge the streaming business — and the streaming wars — has been well documented in recent years.

But another big TV story unfolded during the early months of lockdown that hasn’t gotten as much attention. The first few weeks of the pandemic spurred more seat-of-the-pants innovation to broadcast operations and engineering than had been done since the days of Sid Caesar and Milton Berle in the early 1950s.