Blackbird the engine as Whisper drive world class content

As one of the standout breakthrough broadcast production agencies of the last twenty years, Whisper are changing the landscape of sports, live and branded entertainment. Co-founded by David Coulthard, Jake Humphrey and Sunil Patel, Whisper understands how to harness the power of entertainment to transform the relationship between a global audience and its content partners.

Whisper’s global network of production, post-production and broadcast specialists have the depth and drive to take on the biggest and best projects. Aside from Formula One, its portfolio of partners includes the England and Wales Cricket Board, the Women’s Six Nations, the Paralympics, W Series racing, the NFL and SailGP.

Targeting the twin goals of driving major video production efficiencies across its output whilst complying with rigorous Covid-safety orders for sports’ behind-closed-doors resumption, Whisper chose Blackbird to power its workflow.

Whisper’s production team are using Blackbird’s elite toolset to remotely clip, edit and enrich live feeds and publish content immediately to TV, OTT and social media channels. World class documentaries, interviews and behind-the-scenes long form content are being produced in Blackbird. The team are also using the Blackbird Player to rapidly view, comment on and approve content from anywhere — dramatically speeding up content review.

“Enabling our teams to work safely and efficiently to create world class content is a big priority for Whisper. Blackbird’s state of the art, accessible solution allows us to achieve this with the highest production values.”
Sunil Patel, CEO, Whisper

Developed specifically for the browser and fully supporting remote production, Blackbird drives massive productivity efficiencies for Whisper and creates added value by opening up new workflows. The ability to edit frame-accurately anywhere — in a browser — is unrivalled.

Formula One is one of the biggest brands in international sport. Whisper’s production coverage for Channel 4, helped global audience figures grow across both TV and digital platforms for three seasons in a row. The total global TV cumulative audience stood at 1.922bn in 2019, the highest since 2012, while engagement on F1’s social media channels saw impressions up by nearly half (15.5bn) and video views up by 60.9% (3.1bn) in 2019.

Covid-19 initially threatened the entire F1 calendar but it was one of the first sports to resume without spectators in part by dramatically reducing the number of on-site broadcast personnel and calling for rights holders to devise a remote production model.

Among Whisper’s initiatives was to switch all track feeds in the UK, increase studio-based production values and use Blackbird to remotely edit interviews and finish behind-the-scenes long form content.

Whisper’s editorial team can maintain and enhance the highest of production values for clients like F1 with extensive professional features such as realtime video and audio transitions, colour correction and subtitles to comply with international standards. Multi-platform monetization options include the ability to insert branding, advertising and sponsored content and speedy addition of bumpers and lower-third graphics for promo messaging.

With issues of sustainability rising up the broadcast and sports agenda, Whisper have taken it upon themselves to assess the environmental impact of every decision it makes.

It’s another key reason why Whisper and Blackbird is a perfect partnership. Above and beyond facilitating seamless remote distributed workflows, all power, storage, compute and transport energy inefficiencies are shrunk from a production’s footprint overnight thanks to the ultra-efficient cloud-based Blackbird codec. These credentials alone set the standard for all other nonlinear editing production applications to follow.

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