VENN launches next gen channel primed to scale with Blackbird

Live internet video was already rocketing at an annual rate of 73% before Covid-19, according to Cisco, but there’s no question that global quarantine has supersized the industry. The phenomenal appetite for esports, combined with digital delivery and compelling community-building content has seen Twitch, YouTube and Facebook secure huge Gen Z and millennial audiences and tap into the U$150 billion gaming industry.

Into this exciting but highly competitive sector comes the Videogame Entertainment and News Network (VENN). Co-founders Ariel Horn, a four-time Emmy-winning producer at Riot Games and Blizzard Entertainment, and Ben Kusin, former Global Director of New Media at Vivendi Games, weren’t going to let a global pandemic steer them off course.

Their ambition is to reach as wide an audience as possible with carriage on as many platforms as possible. This ranges from social giants Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and Facebook as well as its own website, VENN.TV and smart TV platforms including Vizio, Xumo and Stirr alongside free ad-supported deals with traditional cable companies.

“Launching in this era of COVID and social distancing is presenting unique production challenges. With Blackbird, we have a new level of flexibility and it allows us to reimagine how productions should work. We can operate remotely and rapidly create and deliver highly engaging video content for gaming fans to enjoy whenever and wherever they wish. Blackbird is simply awesome and we’re super excited about utilizing this game-changing cloud video editing technology.”
Scott Gillies, CTO, VENN

Needing to hit the ground running, the team partnered with Blackbird for ultra-fast and efficient remote video production. The multi-year deal sees VENN’s production team use Blackbird to remotely and frame-accurately edit, enrich and publish a wide variety of engaging video content. This includes more than 30 hours of original programming produced out of VENN’s LA and New York studios. The content itself spans multiple categories of entertainment produced both in-house and with some of the biggest creators in gaming, entertainment, streaming and esports.

Blackbird is the perfect fit for a hungry start-up at the cutting edge of production. Blackbird’s fully-featured, highly-responsive professional editing suite has re-written the rules of what is possible in a standard web browser. With 18 video tracks, 36 audio tracks, complex transitions, colour correction, voice over – and much much more – all available to VENN’s remote distributed production team by simply logging in to the Blackbird platform from anywhere.

With an extremely light footprint, requiring no dedicated hardware, cloud-based Blackbird enables VENN to scale at will as their business grows. As the world’s fastest, most powerful professional cloud video editing and publishing platform, Blackbird delivers significant efficiency benefits to any enterprise-level organization working with video.

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