When COVID-19 forced WW International to pause every in-person workshop on Monday, March 16, 2020, a global broadcast platform had to ship by Thursday. We built it.
WW (formerly Weight Watchers) ran 30,000 in-person workshops a week in 12 countries. The company’s service-delivery model had been refined over five decades, and every minute of it depended on members and coaches being in the same room. On Saturday, March 7, 2020, CEO Mindy Grossman closed Oprah’s 2020 Vision Tour in front of 15,000 people in Denver. Three days later, the world shut down.
WW gave us six days. Pause every in-person workshop on Monday, March 16. Ship a global broadcast platform that could host 30,000 weekly workshops simultaneously, in 12 countries, by Thursday, March 19.
Our COVID-19 rapid-response team architected and shipped WW Connect Virtual Studios, a unified VTC platform spanning 4,000 virtual studios. We scaled WW’s video-conferencing capacity by 400%. We trained 14,000 coaches. We migrated 30,000 workshops. All in six days.
The technical stack ran across Blackmagic, Analog Way, Yamaha, Allen & Heath, Panasonic, Shure, Sennheiser, and Evertz, layered onto Cisco / Lifesize / Zoom / RingCentral / Vidyo codecs with Crestron and AMX in-room control and ETC lighting. Scala drove IP-based digital signage. Everything had to be operable by a coach who had never seen the inside of a TV studio — while still meeting WW’s broadcast quality bar for live streams to its app.
On top of that platform we delivered WW NOW — the interview show with CEO Mindy Grossman and celebrity guests, broadcast on the WW Connect app. WW Virtual Town Halls on Zoom and Workplace by Facebook with Mindy and CFO Nick Hotchkin. The WW NOW streaming concert series — including America’s Got Talent finalists Sons of Serendip broadcast to 20,000+ employees. And the Oprah show launch — onboarding teams to Zoom for live broadcast.
Day one: 87% access rate, 97% CSAT, fewer than 100 issues across the global rollout. By the end of the first week: zero issues.
First-party PR distributions and trade-press coverage of the WW pivot — same six-day timeline that’s on this page.
Blackmagic ATEM · Analog Way Aquilon · Yamaha CL/QL · Allen & Heath dLive · Panasonic PTZ · Shure / Sennheiser RF · Evertz routing
Cisco Webex · Lifesize cloud + on-prem · Zoom Rooms · RingCentral · Vidyo · Microsoft Teams
Crestron NVX · AMX · Polycom · Cisco endpoints · Shure ceiling mics · ETC lighting + Crestron lighting control
Scala Enterprise · IP digital signage · WW Connect app live broadcast · Workplace by Facebook integration
Direct contract with WW International. Senior Engineer AV, Collaboration & Unified Communications, Global Service Delivery and Technology. February–May 2020.