It was great to be back at NAB Show among 65,000 peers and to experience an industry that is both invigorating and innovating. 

The show floor and conference was dominated by a whole host of exciting tech advances from AI-driven tools and Virtual Production to the widespread acceptance of cloud for every type of operation – but cutting across everything was the twin desire to further content creation efficiencies and to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.

Cost savings, delivering greater production output and value and a focus on sustainability are not mutually exclusive asks. Blackbird’s entire product design is built around the significant speed, cost and carbon efficiencies and benefits of our cloud native, browser-based video editing and distribution platform – all of which we were delighted to demonstrate in Las Vegas.

It was a very productive show for Blackbird. We enjoyed a packed schedule of informative meetings with customers, prospects and partners on our booth.

Blackbird running on Azure  

We also had space on Microsoft’s booth alongside their other chosen partners and were busy every day demonstrating Blackbird running on Azure.

Our companies share the same vision of providing organizations with significant cost and carbon efficient tools that accelerate content creation and distribution.

EVS in collaboration with Blackbird

EVS, another Blackbird partner, was proudly promoting IPD-VIA Create for the first time publicly at a trade show. IPD-VIA Create affords end users with a full editing suite embedded at its heart – offering all the same speed, efficiency and carbon reduction benefits that Blackbird customers enjoy.

This is a prime example of a leading third-party developer licensing our core Blackbird video technology to extend ultra-fast browser-based workflows and unbeatable benefits  to customers.

It is also one of many reasons that Blackbird won a TV Tech Best of Show Award at NAB 2023.

Blackbird embraces the creator

We’re now focused on the development and launch of the next major evolution of Blackbird; a self-service collaborative video content creation and distribution platform for the global creator community and economy.

As our Chief Product Officer Sumit Rai explained recently, one of the seismic changes we’ve witnessed in recent years – supercharged during the pandemic – is the desire of people to collaborate seamlessly. 

The experience of most users today is that they work on desktop tools in a very isolated manner then use different platforms to link projects with colleagues. The process of moving data and projects around is time consuming and convoluted. 

We are taking all of our engineering and industry know-how combined with our IP to solve that with an affordable SaaS platform that is accessible to all content creators and organizations working with video. 

We look forward to sharing more details when we can.

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2022 was another huge year for Blackbird and 2023 promises to be even more significant as we build on momentum by growing our existing market and debuting a new version of Blackbird for the creator economy.

As a company, Blackbird enjoyed a record 78% growth in revenue in the first half of the financial year, as strong an indication as any of market adoption and the health of the market for our product. Overseas sales grew 314% over the past three years, a strong return that helped us collect a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade in April. We were also proud to be named Best Tech Company by SportsPro in December, winning Silver to our partner Delatre’s Gold.

Blackbird was pivotal to the creation and distribution of major international sports events including the FIFA World Cup, the Winter Olympics, Super Bowl and Champions League football. Plenty more of the world’s most prestigious content from major Tennis Opens to The Open Golf Championship will reach fans first in 2023 thanks to our platform.

Global Partnership with EVS

Our partnership with EVS was not only our biggest deal of the year but notable for being the first Powered By Blackbird licensing deal. Since the edit-while-capture concept is at the heart of everything EVS does, Blackbird’s browser-based solution was recognised as uniquely capable of delivering the  speed efficiencies and fluidity of media management demanded by EVS clients. 

The first deployment of IPD-VIA Create Powered By Blackbird is happening right now and at scale across all EVS installs at a major US broadcaster. Look out for further exciting details around NAB.  

Blackbird’s proven and unrivalled low carbon credentials were another priority for EVS which followed Blackbird by winning the IABM Environmental Sustainability Award in 2022.

Leading the industry’s sustainability charge

On that note, our 2022 paper – ‘Decarbonizing Video Production’ – set new industry benchmarks for environmental impact. Supported by EVS, LiveU and Sky News Arabia the independent research demonstrated that using Blackbird generates up to  91% less carbon – while being up to 75% lower for infrastructure costs – than cloud-based and on-premise alternatives. 

A separate study published in September – ‘Speed Testing Video Editing Platforms’ – rated Blackbird four times faster than on premise platforms for creating and distributing content in a variety of industry standard workflows. 

We hope there are further game-changing Powered By Blackbird announcements going forward. That’s not to say we aren’t delighted to land new contracts with broadcasters and  media organizations – a case in point being with SBS Belgium which last year deployed Blackbird to drive major video production workflow efficiencies. 

Expanding the market opportunity

Blackbird is evolving into bigger and more strategic areas of the industry which will see our core and patented video technology reaching further and deeper into potentially millions of workflows.

The year ahead will see the first fruits of our ambition to evolve Blackbird into new markets. This project was initiated by fresh funding announced in December 2021 and supported by the arrival of key talent in senior positions. 

Talent with a plan

We are delighted to welcome Sumit Rai as Chief Product Officer, Morgan Henry as VP Engineering and Mo Volans our new SVP Product Marketing to lead our technology strategy as we aim to reach content creators with a true Software-as-a-Service professional video creation model – more details of which will be announced during the course of 2023.

The headwinds of economic recession are galvanising the industry as never before to deliver returns on investment and implement more efficient technology architectures. Designed from inception to be the leanest, fastest, most carbon and cost efficient editing platform on the planet, Blackbird’s day has come. 

From the fastest of near live FAST channels, to the biggest global live events and from the most creative social media influencers to breaking news round the clock, we are proud that our technology continues to meet the needs of the market today and tomorrow.

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To paraphrase the old saying ‘you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ it was great to be back at IBC again.

There’s been much industry soul searching about the value of trade shows since attendance was abruptly curtailed in 2020. Criticism too of the cost of exhibiting and whether there weren’t better and more productive means of targeting customers and communicating the corporate message. 

Face to face is always valuable

Some of these points remain valid. Many live events are returning with a strong hybrid element of live streaming and IBC was no exception. The entire industry will be far more judicious about which events they go to going forward, not least to cut back on the carbon footprint. Video conferencing and remote workflows are now engrained in everything the media and entertainment industry does.

But you could feel it in the build up to the show itself. There is an excitement about meeting face to face that can’t be replicated online, and that played out with a genuine buzz in Amsterdam.

I’m sure anyone who went to IBC felt this too. It was great to be back at a show that meant business. The haphazard Brownian motion of serendipitous networking is a business benefit that only physical presence can bring. Plus, there was a delightful humour to connections and conversation that is lacking in the more straitjacketed schedules of a Zoom meeting.

It helped that there was a lot to talk about too.

The big Clouds innovating

Clearly the major theme trending in the conference and on the showfloor was that of the tremendous gains made to deliver end to end production workflows in the Cloud. All three major public Cloud providers were at the RAI in force to showcase their support for the broadcast and media community. 

Google Cloud Platform was urging the industry to use data leveraging AI and ML to hyper tailor the streaming experience down to the individual level.

Amazon Web Services claimed to be the first Cloud provider to have achieved five of the goals of the MovieLabs’ 2030 Vision to move all Hollywood production to the Cloud.

Strengthening partnerships

Meanwhile, Microsoft was focussed on live and the results are stunning. Blackbird was excited to partner with Microsoft on its IBC booth and to work with Evertz and MediaKind in demonstrating a live end to end production of an NBA match running on Azure.

Blackbird also enjoys a close working relationship with EVS which was demonstrating Blackbird’s lightning fast browser-based editing integrated with their end-to-end live production asset management platform, MediaCeption.

We partnered with our friends at LiveU to demonstrate how production teams can send high-quality video from anywhere and remotely edit, enrich and publish their live and VOD content to any destination in an instant.

Cross-vendor collaborations like these show that live production in the Cloud is robust, super efficient and reliable today for any size and scale of production. What’s more, when it comes to putting together the tool sets that work best in the open IP-based environment of Cloud, then the best-of-breed choice for professional editing is Blackbird.

Exciting times as we explore new markets

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank every member of the Blackbird team on site and back home who helped make it such a successful show for us. I know that Sumit Rai, our new Chief Product Officer, was impressed by what he saw and we achieved at IBC – not least in being nominated for the Best Stand of the Show Award! Well done everyone.

As you may know, part of Sumit’s role with us is to lead the strategic development of our product portfolio into fast growing video markets. One of those is the Creator Economy of social media influencers and independent artists which is already estimated to be worth over $100bn and which remains under served not just by IBC but by pretty much all trade shows. It’s a market primed for our cloud-native ultra-efficient tools and one we will be reaching out to further.

The post IBC 2022: The value of live is richer than ever appeared first on Blackbird.

As Netflix, Disney, Amazon and SVOD rivals expand into all quarters of the globe, the reversioning effort is one of sheer scale and staggering complexity.

It requires adapting the content for different languages and cultural compliance as well as the business of tailored packaging, cover art and marketing. Studio content is also destined for a multitude of platform and sales options such as SVOD, TVOD, AVOD/FAST.

Ideally the entire process would be automated. Today, for instance, a transcoder or AI engine goes some way to automating the chopping, packaging and redistributing of files.

But the workflow is not that simple.

The need to reduce time and cost when reversioning high volumes of content

There are regions where compliance requires the removal or altering of scenes to comply with local laws, regions where you have to change voiceover, captions and subtitles, regions where different advertising needs inserts or removed altogether.

This is specialist, complex and time-consuming to do. Important work too because failure to comply can result in breach of contract and termination from supplying a platform. Playing back a bad dub or poor-quality translation or an error in a subtitle can ruin hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in production.

Current AI engines cannot be relied on to complete the entire process end-to-end. Versioning will be reliant on human operators to make and confirm changes to content for years to come.

There are plenty of tools that can perform mass file creation. Transcoders will knock out files all day long. There are also craft editing systems to perform intricate file manipulation – but that is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Do you really want to buy, install and maintain hardware in a suite then tie that asset up on essential but ultimately repetitive work by paying a craft editor? That makes no sense where there is a far better option at your fingertips.

Finally, a solution for simplifying and speeding up the process

Blackbird is the world’s fastest, most powerful professional browser-based video editor. Fully featured for craft edits, Blackbird also provides rapid access to video content for the easy manipulation of files for publication to multiple devices and platforms.

You can remove nudity or swearing, change the marketing materials over, alter the credits, swap out subtitles, exchange the dub, trim for ad removal and markup for ad insertion. Blackbird has all the functionality you need at exactly the level you need them.

Instead of having to buy, install and maintain a big hardware-based suite you just open your web browser and everything you need to do to serve hundreds of services is available right in front of you on a basic machine.

The ability to execute the final file is not the only Blackbird benefit.

Blackbird will also provide a slice of code for every file. This code can be pushed downstream to transcode engines. Blackbird’s open API connects into all your existing systems to streamline the digital supply chain and utilise the AI and metadata that already exists.

What’s more, you can enable your operators to work from home. That’s crucial for your ability to scale and flex with demand. Remote from home cloud native workflows powered by Blackbird streamline operational costs, require zero specialized equipment and contribute significantly to CSG targets.

With Blackbird you are not locking staff on site or in cramped quality control rooms. It is an ideal platform for editing, fabulous for creativity and it’s also great for people who just need the right tools to get reversioning jobs done really efficiently.

The post Simplifying and speeding up the global digital supply chain appeared first on Blackbird.

To hear some of the news reports coming out of recent trade shows, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the industry has suddenly cottoned onto the idea of producing content in a browser.

The advantages of doing so certainly have a Wow factor! The cost efficiencies alone of not having to buy any dedicated hardware should make the decision to move to the cloud a no-brainer. Factor in the unrivalled flexibility of ramping up seats of specialist talent located anywhere and the ability to produce broadcast quality content using all the financial flex of Software-as-a-Service and creators everywhere have a right to be excited.

Fully featured edit suite in a browser

This is not new. Blackbird has been providing professional editing in a browser since 2018 and we’ve been packing on the functionality ever since. Blackbird can do things in a browser that others didn’t think possible.

With Blackbird you have instant precision access to your video with frame accurate editing within AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. With support for up to 12 video tracks and 36 audio tracks, the  toolset is highly responsive and, to quote one of our bigger customers, ‘just glides’.

The sophisticated functionality is mature and stable and includes alpha channel overlays, pan and zoom and multi-cam capability, realtime transitions, colour correction and effects. Blackbird supports full multichannel audio workflows. The platform’s subtitles and closed captions comply with international standards and powerful logging and review capabilities harmonise with integration to any MAM, CMS and CDN.

This barely scratches the surface of its postproduction powers and doesn’t even mention Blackbird’s rapid publishing prowess.

What we’ve achieved is not easy. We have heard that directly from much larger companies attempting the same thing. Everything we have done to make the user experience of Blackbird supremely friction-free required elite engineers ‘polishing the pebble’ over a sustained decades long period of R&D, as well as the strategic and financial commitment that goes with that. . 

Cloud Native is your Cloud upgrade

Blackbird has not become the industry standard for professional grade editing in the browser without ruffling a few feathers. We will not shy from challenging the industry to change-up what it means to move to the cloud.

One popular version of cloud is’ virtualized’ or ‘remote production’ using cloud based tools. These solutions are indeed superior to traditional Outside Broadcast (OB) technology since they slash shipping and transportation requirements of kit and crew. However, they still require dedicated hardware – it is simply stored somewhere and controlled remotely over the Internet. 

Cloud native solutions like Blackbird do not use or require dedicated hardware or infrastructure.  This is the only way the industry can unlock the real benefits of cloud – namely scalability, flexibility, and sustainability. 

We can prove this. Using Blackbird generates up to 91% less CO2 than on premise and cloud based workflows. At the same time, you can save up to 75% on infrastructure costs. 

Cloud native solutions are essential to achieving effective remote working, global collaboration and to driving more sustainable working practices. 

The industry is finally waking up to the realization we made a long time ago. The onus is on companies to leapfrog to a browser-based future.

Download the white paper – ‘How Blackbird Works’.

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After two years of cancelled shows, NAB provided the perfect tonic for the industry to reunite. It was fantastic to be back in Las Vegas and meet many customers face to face for the first time since 2019. And, despite concerns that  the number of visitors may be minimized, especially from outside the States, the show was busy and buzzy with a truly global audience in attendance.

I’ve been in my role at Blackbird for over 4 years and for over half that time we’ve not been able to meet customers, partners and prospects in person! I didn’t know I missed it so much until we could do it again.

In that time the industry has gone through seismic changes and it was incredibly good to be back In real life, as they say, having conversations both introductory and strategic.

Work faster, fitter, happier

In terms of trends, conversations about the cloud absolutely dominated and that’s no surprise. The mood going from ‘cloud acceptance to cloud adoption’ in the words of one industry leader. The last couple of years have proven the cloud to be capable of delivering performance far in excess of what many on-premise facilities are able to offer. 

The operational and financial benefits of cloud video and remote editing workflows are just too important to ignore. Top of the list is the ability to work faster: freed from the constraints of being in a particular facility, users are able to work flexibly are more productive. This translates to cost efficiencies and more-resilient operations, avoiding dependency on physical locations and on premise infrastructure.

Editing in the cloud has firmly transcended the level of being a purely technical discussion.  A survey carried out by Caretta Research and Blackbird, suggests 90% of video professionals have adopted cloud production and remote editing in their workflows, with collaborative working and client review and approval as the top use cases.

Crucially, the report identified a distinct shift from cloud enabled to cloud native workflows – and this was reflected in our meetings at NAB.

The limiting factor is often how the cloud is integrated into the overall workflow or pipeline and that’s where Blackbird has a very strong story.

Most remote editing is still implemented using ‘old-school’ workflows in which users move original high-res media files around the internet. With Blackbird – the only browser-based, professional video editing platform in the world – there is simply no requirement to move large, cumbersome media assets around saving significant time, energy and cost – a true game changer.

Users of cloud native tools are far more likely to fire up fast-turnaround workflows for digital platforms and social media, and managing real-time editing of live content like sports.

Lean, mean, cutting-edge machine

The drive to speed and efficiency was threaded throughout the conference. We’re very proud that Blackbird was one of only four companies invited by Microsoft to share its NAB booth because of the cutting-edge tech innovation we provide.

We had the opportunity to demonstrate how easy it is for Blackbird to integrate and exchange media with any third-party system for lean, hyper efficient workflows.

For example, users of EVS’s IPDirector content management suite can now seamlessly access Blackbird for live media content access, editing and manipulation – fuelling the fastest turnaround live workflows possible.

As all content workflows move to the cloud, a key message we picked up from Microsoft and AWS was the aim to standardize workflows in the cloud and render production islands a thing of the past. While allowing that each cloud provider has its own set of specialties for media such as AI tools, the goal is for workflows to be interchangeable across multi-clouds. This will finally free productions to scale internationally without fear of cloud vendor lock-in while gaining operational redundancy.

Blackbird, cloud-native and cloud agnostic, stands ready for the industry to catch up.

Greening of streaming

Conversations with customers, pressure from investors and customers has pushed sustainability rapidly up the list of priorities for video services. Consumer awareness about the impact of video production and streaming is increasing and broadcasters are more willing to choose environmentally friendly solutions. However, they also expect image quality to continue to rise. Squaring that circle is a conundrum which browser-based tools like Blackbird exist to solve.

A theatre presentation I made on the AWS stand about decarbonizing video production in the cloud was extremely well received. The narrative about the environment has changed in the US, even among audiences previously more closed to that kind of thinking.

We can expect regulators to set CO2 requirements for streaming providers with quotas for the use of renewables and SLAs that cap energy to follow.  A vendor’s sustainability credentials are becoming a critical point of competitive differentiation. Indeed our white paper ‘Video shouldn’t cost the Earth’ evidenced that Blackbird’s efficient cloud native architecture reduced carbon emissions by up to 91% compared to cloud based and on-premise editing workflows.

The urgency of change is what struck us most at NAB. The video business has always been fast-paced but it has never been more dynamic or disruptive as it is now. Customers want supreme quality, hyper-efficiency, unlimited flexibility, rich media tool sets, continually faster speed to market and all this without a price tag on cost or carbon.

Blackbird delivers on this and so much more. Roll on IBC 2022!

The post It’s a wrap: All the excitement of NAB 2022 plus the urgency of change appeared first on Blackbird.

The technology industry has casually used the phrase “next generation” for years without ever spelling out what it actually means. “Next generation” is lazy marketing phraseology that has come to simply mean an upgrade, the latest version, the newest iteration. If it’s not groundbreaking or innovative, no big deal. But in the age of Covid, “next generation” is yesterday’s news.

The crushing blow to business caused by the pandemic means companies must return stronger. There’s a pressing need to catch up on lost revenue but without investing heavily. In the media industry, the pandemic has also exposed the means to do this.

It needs leapfrog tech. Let’s define what that is.

What Is Leapfrog Technology?

Leapfrogging is when an actor starts from an inferior position and overcomes the competition in one bound. It stands in contrast to conventional modes of development that tend to be incremental, gradual and evolutionary. It is typically a breakthrough event — an invention or application of a new technology that creates the conditions for the leap to occur. The idea has been studied as an economic model in which countries or businesses can bypass key stages and hurdle past the opposition into the lead.

The main use case is the widespread penetration of cell phones throughout parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. Adoption of mobile devices and mobile broadband took off rapidly in certain societies there without having to take the intermediate steps of investment in infrastructure like underground coaxial cabling. The introduction of wireless technology did not depend on legacy hardware, allowing certain countries to catch up in the field of digital communications.

According to Forbes contributor Francois Botha, “By 2020, sub-Saharan Africa will have more than half a billion unique mobile subscribers, making the continent the fastest growing area for mobile technology, and establishing Africa as an emerging platform for social and commercial innovation.”

Similarly, thanks to leapfrog technology, the conditions are now primed for the media and entertainment industry to vault out of the past.

The Status Quo Has Changed

Coronavirus has accelerated digital behaviors. In its Q3 2020 State of Streaming report (via TV Tech), Conviva estimates that streaming video viewing time rose 57% globally, year-over-year.

Media owners from Walt Disney on down are restructuring their entire output around direct-to-consumer services over the internet. Watching people play video games has emerged as one of the biggest drivers of online bandwidth. Overall viewing to Twitch has soared over 100%, year-over-year.

With all this comes demanding expectations from consumers for better than broadcast quality. That means no delay, no glitches, superb video and audio quality and, increasingly, the ability to personalize the content.

Nor does it stop there. In short order, content owners and network operators will look to monetize investment in 5G mobile networks by offering real-time interactive experiences such as sports betting, multiple choice of angles to watch a live event and ultra-high-definition virtual reality.

Yet any such endeavour is critically undermined when reliant on legacy production technology. Any setup based on hardware locked into traditional facilities is fatally encumbered by inflexible and time-consuming workflows. Remote collaboration — in which production crews can be located separately from the event and even from each other to gain huge time and cost efficiencies — is a non-starter with legacy gear.

If media has to be routed between production applications over anything other than the internet, the outcome will be deleteriously expensive.

The competition is waiting to pounce.

Producing exponentially more content and better content at the speed which consumers demand is hard — if you don’t have leapfrog tech.

Leapfrog tech for the video production industry is software tools and services that can be accessed in the cloud from literally any desktop via a web browser. Leapfrog tech barely leaves a footprint in energy consumption or processing power but delivers rich media to the user lightning fast and at scale.

Writing On The Wall

There’s no magic here. There’s no secret recipe reserved for an elite few. The answer lies in plain sight and uses the protocols and open standards of the web.

Elaborating on the concept of leapfrogging, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz co-authored a paper illustrating how a firm with an “arbitrarily small headstart can pre-empt its rivals” by using R&D to jump ahead. Stiglitz suggested that any company behind the play can use information to their advantage. They can use the failures and successes exhibited in the market, see what works and what doesn’t and skip the deployment of intermediate stages by adopting winning solutions to catch up and overtake.

The biggest impact on the media industry’s survival in 2021 will not be Covid-19. Even as we emerge from the pandemic, crowds return to live events and work resumes to a degree of normality, the global and individual response to saving the planet should move front and center.

That’s leapfrog tech.

The post Pandemic Paves Path To Leapfrog Ahead appeared first on Blackbird.

The TV industry’s effort to make production sustainable may be fatally undermined if the full cost of carbon from camera to consumer is not taken into account.

Watching online videos is not a passive activity when it comes to saving the planet. In fact, the total energy that goes into powering the internet’s data centers, servers and networks that stream video content generates 300 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — equivalent to 1% of global emissions, according to The Shift Project.

Another calculation noted by supply chain consultancy Ramprate estimated that the carbon cost of viewing linear TV in the old-fashioned manner in 2018 was 62 million tons. Meanwhile, TV streaming accounted for 19% of TV viewing yet was responsible for 31.6 million tons of CO2 in 2020—essentially doubling the emissions caused by linear TV.

The Cost Of Streaming TV

The carbon cost figures are for the U.S. only and are based on the 119 million households identified by Nielsen with homes with TVs in the country.

Alarmingly, if that trend is extrapolated to the most affluent half of the world’s population (3.8 billion consumers), then this would equate to 3.6% of global emissions. That is nearly double the annual CO2 output of the global aviation industry.

The Shift Project arrived at similar conclusions. It found that the share of digital technologies (servers, networks, terminals) in global greenhouse gas emissions increased from 2.5% to 3.7% between 2013 and 2019, and this footprint is predicted to double again by 2025.

What can be done?

Consider the carbon cost of a single email. It could be as minuscule as 0.3g of CO2, but if you sent just one fewer email a day, it could save over 16,433 metric tons of carbon in a year.

Imagine, then, the cost of transporting high bitrate video around. It is unnecessary, it is inefficient, and it is unsustainable. When we realize that every little bit counts, no matter how fractional, then awareness of the issue becomes part of the solution.

The industry is beginning to act. Amazon has committed to being net carbon zero by 2040. Google aims to be carbon-free by 2030, ensuring that its data centers are powered by renewable energy. Netflix says it purchases renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets to compensate for any energy that comes from fossil fuel sources. Content delivery network Akamai has pledged to power all of its global operations with renewable energy by 2030.

Another key is in production. AT&T-owned European pay-TV broadcast group Sky aims to achieve net carbon neutrality in all of its production activity by 2030. Dozens of broadcasters and production companies — including BBC, ITV, Endemol Shine Group and Warner Bros. — are members of Albert, an initiative set up by BAFTA to help reduce the amount of CO2 and to raise awareness of the environmental impact of program-making.

Every Little Byte Counts

A primary carbon cost of making live programming lies in transporting kit and crew to a venue. Traditionally, this involves dozens to hundreds of technicians, producers and on-air talent — which, at the largest events, involves significant air travel, road freight and hotel accommodation.

The broadcast industry has been gradually pivoting to a model that enables more of the production to be done remotely and where crew remain in a single central location or even in their own homes.

It is a movement that has been accelerated by the necessity to keep live sports on the air during the pandemic. While remote production approaches make immediate savings in budget and carbon footprint, even more can be done. This involves taking steps to reduce the amount of data — the bits and bytes of the signal that travels from venue to production hub for a program to be made.

We collaborated with Green Element on a report on how new technologies can reduce the carbon impact of routine video editing and post-production activity, and we believe browser-based workflows that function at lower bandwidths come out on top.

Move Less Data And People Around

In conventional production, including most current remote productions, all raw video feeds are transferred to the production center to be touched (such as adding graphics) before being transmitted. The vast majority of video acquired from multiple cameras at the event is transported over networks to the production center but does not form part of the final program. This is clearly wasteful.

By contrast, being able to work on high-quality “proxy” (copies) of the original video means less data is moved around. You just move the high bitrate content needed for publishing the final product — and you only need to do that once.

There is no need to constantly upload and download video every time the program is manipulated prior to going to air. It is extremely carbon-efficient, so much so that the report suggests that for a live event lasting two weeks — such as the Olympics — a browser-based solution using lower power can be six times more carbon efficient than other methods.

The transition to a browser-based solution starts by planning to make content accessible from anywhere. When content is freely available to certified team members from any internet-connected device, workflows and processes can be transformed.

Workflows for the production of content for delivery to different outlets — social, digital and broadcast — will converge. Processes such as corporate branding and subtitling are automated in parallel. Greater efficiency reduces the transport of data and enables producers to create more content at less cost.  

TV is responding. In its latest report, Albert shows that one hour of TV contributes the equivalent of 9.2 tCO2e/hr, which is a 10% drop from 10.2 tCO2e/hr in 2017. While the impact of many production activities has reduced significantly, the report also says carbon emissions from travel and transport have risen consistently between 2017 and 2019.

The media industry has a responsibility to communicate and to take a lead. We are already seeing a response to the challenge, but we can all do more.

The post Making Video More Sustainable appeared first on Blackbird.

Ian McDonough brings considerable knowledge and experience of delivering growth and value in the global media sector. His core expertise is in building high-value and commercially innovative partnerships. During his five years at BBC Worldwide, he rose to become Executive Vice President and General Manager for one of seven global regions. More recently, Ian covered the UK, Ireland, Nordic and Baltic countries as Senior Vice President and Managing Director for Turner (formerly Turner Broadcasting). He previously held senior commercial posts at A+E Europe and Viacom Asia. 

The COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent need for media companies to move to the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about how you worked with customers during the pandemic?

Ian McDonough: For us, it’s very simple. Over the pandemic, there were obviously safety concerns, keeping the lights on, and making sure that content reached screens. We were there to help people right at the start. The first example we had at the beginning was A+E Networks, who had to evacuate their Manhattan, Stanford, Connecticut, and Los Angeles premises. And they already had Blackbird installed. So they were able to make those moves seamlessly and keep everybody safe. And then there were numerous other examples of that, including Premier League football teams like Liverpool and Arsenal, who had no live content going on obviously, but they were able to move all their workflows to the safey of their homes using Blackbird.

So there was a moment then where companies started to experiment a little bit more with what a cloud workflow was. They probably wouldn’t have had the burning necessity to before. And that was a good thing for us.

Beyond the necessity the pandemic created, what are the biggest factors bringing people to cloud-native production?

Ian McDonough: I don’t always want to quote Elon Musk, but he has said he wasn’t trying to build a better electric car, he was trying to build a better car. With cloud-native, you’re getting a better workflow. First, there’s cost. That could be cost of moving people around, having big buildings that are heated and cooled, heavy duty equipment, or big bandwidth connections. With Blackbird, you don’t need any of that.

There’s also the speed element. Blackbird is recognized by users as being the fastest video editor in the world for creating and publishing content. It’s the platform’s cloud native architecture that enables this.

Of course, the benefit of Blackbird that trumps everything is convenience. Over and above the lower cost and faster speed of the platform, it’s just more convenient than any other professional video editing platform on the market. Being able to professionally edit content in a browser on any standard laptop with bandwidth from just 2Mb/s is revolutionary in this space. People can have a great work-life balance, people are not having to jump on a plane to go to Tokyo or to Portugal or to wherever they have to go to cover an event. And for companies and individualsit’s very beneficial.

Another big benefit is sustainability, and you’ve talked a lot about that. What are the biggest benefits, sustainability-wise?

Ian McDonough: We started the discussion about sustainability a few years ago, because we wanted to look at how efficient we were in terms of lower cost and energy usage and zero travel requirements. We commissioned a white paper written by the independent environmental consultancy, Green Element, and were pleased to be on the vanguard, far ahead of any of the competition.

They found that producing video content is generally very demanding in terms of resources. And it’s very heavy in terms of the negative impact of carbon emissions into the environment. Let me give you an example. BAFTA now has an online carbon calculator called Albert, which estimates the amount of greenhouse gases emitted and other environmental impact per hour of television created. In one calculation, Albert determined that 27 metres of sea ice were lost per hour of TV. That’s a huge number, and obviously, there are many, many hours of television being produced.

We started looking at the video editing portion of the entire TV supply chain. Since we’re a Wimbledon-based company, we looked at a two-week tennis event and compared cloud-native, cloud-based, and on-prem video editing. The on-prem system emitted 176 tonnes of carbon over that two-week period. In one test, cloud-native Blackbird was 91% more carbon efficient than on-prem editing systems and 85% more efficient than cloud-based platforms.

Many traditional NLEs have lifted and shifted their operations from on-prem to the cloud, but these are third-party cloud connections, which means they are moving huge amounts of high bitrate content. Cloud-native is different. It means that we transcode high-res files on the fly into this very high quality, but very low powered, low bit rate codec that is then able to be viewed instantaneously, frame accurately by anyone in the world on very low bandwidth, on very low power laptops. The highly efficient Blackbird way of accessing, editing and publishing content means the tech is very sustainable – an issue we’re very passionate about.

When I first joined the company and was asking our founder about this, he said our competition had basically just put wings on a train and stuck it in the sky. And we’ve built a helicopter. These days, I like to call it a glider.

Blackbird also enables “storycentric” production. How and why is that approach taking hold?

Ian McDonough: One of our customers once said to me that Blackbird is like carrying an edit suite around in your backpack. We want to make telling a video story as easy as it is to write a story on a piece of paper. The best person to tell that story is the person that’s there on the scene and putting it together and has the creative flair and mind to produce that onsite. And the tools shouldn’t get in the way.

With Blackbird, you can have instant access to your content from wherever you are. It delivers unmatched flexibility and agility. A good example of this is A+E Networks, who have more than 40,000 hours of content stored in Blackbird. It can be accessed instantaneously from anywhere by multiple teams such as production, marketing and  PR and then turned it into a story for publishing to multiple channels and destinations – very fast and simply.

Following on that, in addition to the move towards the cloud, there’s been an increased move toward remote production. I’ve heard people in the video industry say that workflows have advanced the equivalent of 5 years in the last 18 months, out of necessity. Blackbird is working with major broadcasters like BT with their remote production capabilities. How do you see remote production fitting into a world where producers are able to return onsite?

Ian McDonough: It is a hybrid workflow, and it’s got to be seamless. We just announced a partnership with Cheddar News, another company that is very much at the cutting edge. Cheddar will use that remote aspect of our toolsets for the journalists in the field, but also for the journalists and producers working from home, as well as the ones in their offices. And it’s as simple as being able to access that cloud through the browser. It couldn’t be any simpler. You log in like you’re logging into Instagram or Facebook. And you’re in your environment, you’ve got all your libraries there at your fingertips, and you’re able to work on everything you need instantly.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting in an edit bay with four walls, or you’re sitting in a coffee shop, or in the field somewhere next to the story, or at home. It’s completely seamless, because it’s not happening on the laptop, it’s happening in that cloud that’s easily accessible by everybody.

We have also recently brought Univision on as a customer and they are using Google Cloud which is a first deployment on that infrastructure. However, we can deploy on many clouds. You’re pulling content from everywhere. You’re looking into a file structure and just pulling what you need from it, so it’s totally seamless. There’s not one system for the office, a different one for the field, and yet another one for working from home. And that’s what we pride ourselves on.

Let’s close by talking about the role that machine learning is playing in what Blackbird is doing.

Ian McDonough: We’re a ways away, but we’re prepared for the time when a craft edit is done by a bot, or by an AI program, or an algorithm. What we’re all about is helping an editor search for and prep all the right material for the machine to take over. We’re about making this as efficient and as clean and as quick as possible to get more content out.

We ran a webinar with A+E recently, and their SVP of Production Operations Ed Russo put it very well. He said, “We’ve replaced Premiere seats and Avid seats because we’ve brought in Blackbird, but it’s more than that. It’s the fact that so many more people have been able to do so much more, and our video creation capabilities have gone through the roof.”

We want to improve and increase the capabilities of companies, and AI and ML is a great way of doing that. We’ve got APIs that will take in ML data from wherever they need to, whether it’s manually assembled data or whether it’s AI-created data. And I think it’s all about improving the output and increasing the volume of the output.

Simply put, Blackbird enables our clients to leapfrog their competition.

The post An Interview with Ian McDonough, CEO, Blackbird appeared first on Blackbird.

LiveU and Blackbird have teamed up to deliver an industry leading end-to-end cloud-based solution that caters to the evolving needs of broadcasters and production companies. The LiveU Matrix cloud distribution and video management platform and Blackbird’s cloud editing application are now fully integrated providing a truly end-to-end solution, including distribution, recording and clipping.

Can a cloud-based workflow power a major news event?

There are few more testing challenges to demonstrate the capability of any production workflow than supporting a major news event incorporating a pool of major broadcasters.

With the federal election and two state elections taking place on the same day, September 26th, 2021, was a historic day for Germany. Media stations and news agencies were required to simultaneously report from a great number of electoral hotspots across the country, including the party headquarters and the Federal Chancellery – without compromising on video quality. National and international viewers were closely watching the news on the big day.

Several prestigious broadcasters contributed and exchanged numerous live election feeds via the LiveU Matrix video management and distribution cloud platform. Pre-integrated with Blackbird’s cloud editing application, participating broadcasters were able to edit live signals in near real-time. During the entire election day, LiveU provided proactive monitoring and support, ensuring a reliable and premium-quality cloud production.

Working remotely, from safe and convenient locations, distributed teams of editors were able to rapidly and collaboratively clip, edit, enrich and publish highlights of the many events. Blackbird then delivered both short and long form high definition digital assets of the LiveU feeds to multiple digital channels simultaneously including social and web as well as to broadcast media partners for repurposing. While the cloud powered a multi-faceted delivery of digital video assets, the primary on-air feeds used by the participating broadcasters were also distributed via Blackbird.

How did the broadcasters adapt to a cloud-based workflow?

Speaking about the project, Susanne Kothe, Head of Production at WELT, one of the broadcasters benefitting from the integrated solution, said “This very special election day was a big challenge involving handling many more news signals than ever before. For us, it was a successful cooperation with all other participating broadcasters together with great support from LiveU. This unique news event gave us valuable experience in learning about a new way of exchanging video content.”

Jens Schilder, Project Manager at CBC, referring to the state election coverage that CBC managed on behalf of Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, said “We were looking for a quick and versatile solution that could integrate all the assets and components of election coverage, including the live feeds, recording and clippings, into a seamless viewer experience. This year is the first time that we did this kind of project and it was important for us to work with trusted partners who could provide an integrated end-to-end solution, with real-time support.”

Can you benefit from the flexibility and scalability of a cloud-based workflow?

The pandemic has seen an acceleration in both the technologies behind, and the adoption of cloud-based workflows. Today broadcasters and production companies have all the tools required to support a full live broadcast contribution and production workflow.

Irrespective of where your production team is located, how many feeds you are producing or where you are distributing the content, a fully integrated cloud-based solution can flex and scale to deliver a rich live production of unrivalled quality.

To find out more about the LiveU and Blackbird integration, watch our webinar.

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