Blackbird is setting its sights on global domination through its patented, ultra-fast cloud video editing and publishing platform.

The proposition promised by Blackbird is simple enough – to provide a workstation experience in the cloud – yet it’s an objective almost impossibly complex to achieve.

It means matching the capability and functionality of a powerful hardware-based editing workstation and transitioning it into something you can access anywhere through no more than a web browser. Which is no easy task.

Fortunately, Blackbird has an ace up its sleeve – its self-developed, patented, super low-latency video codec (also named Blackbird), which does all sorts of magic behind the scenes. After years of development, the codec is now at the point where it empowers Blackbird users with lightning-fast, frame-accurate editing and publishing of video content by anyone, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

“The past few years has seen the large scale acceptance and shift to the cloud.”

For live events, Blackbird makes it possible to frame-accurately view and edit content just five seconds after the action happens. What’s more, it can do this with very mundane levels of connectivity and bandwidths as low as 2Mb per second.

Blackbird CEO Ian McDonough (pictured) told Broadcast: “The Blackbird codec is the foundation of our business. It’s now on the ninth iteration and is quicker, lighter and higher quality than it’s ever been before. We have a unique set of attributes that are all in the codec. We developed it from scratch to allow video to be worked on and manipulated in the cloud, whereas all our competitors are working on derivatives of existing codecs.”

“Since I joined the company two years ago, we’ve really been focussing hard on speed,” he adds. “There’s a lot of time-specific content being made, where there’s a limited shelf-life – sports and news in particular – and getting that out hours faster than it could be done before has a huge amount of value. Especially if that can be done using a suite of professional tools that enables short and long form broadcast quality video content.”

“We’ve reduced a 48-minute process into a three-minute process.”

He points to some of the specific benefits of using Blackbird for some of its clients. Eleven Sports uses it for the rapid editing and publishing of sports content online. Blackbird is integrated into Eleven Sports’ video infrastructure to enable quick turnaround clipping, editing and publishing of sports content ‘seconds after live’ to Eleven’s social channels and OTT platforms.

Meanwhile, MSG Networks in New York uses Blackbird on hundreds of sports live events each year to create branded event highlights packages with closed captions, which are published to the company’s website and social media outlets.

“When a goal is scored in Madison Square Garden, it’s ready to be worked on and edited in Blackbird seconds later. For the highlights it creates, we’ve reduced a 48-minute process into a three-minute process,” says McDonough.

For Australia’s National Rugby League, Blackbird enables a 30-second turnaround time for getting clips out on Twitter and other social platforms, complete with custom graphics.

Another of Blackbird’s sports clients – global fitness tech leader Peloton – uses Blackbird to edit daily live cycling classes that are broadcast from Peloton’s studio facilities in New York and London. Using Blackbird, the live classes are quickly turned into professionally finished on-demand content for Peloton’s millions of customers globally.

Sports giant IMG used Blackbird during The Open to enable it to regularly tweet clips of key moments during the tournament. “They didn’t need a huge OB truck and instead just had a few guys with laptops getting content out seconds after it happened,” explains McDonough.

A+E Networks, meanwhile, opted for Blackbird to enhance its post-production workflows. Amongst multiple uses, its enormously popular series Live PD follows police units overnight and Blackbird is used to log and assemble the content captured each night, ready for editing the following day, as well as publishing highlights to its social media channels.

“They have 4,000 hours of content in Blackbird format that seamlessly links back into their traditional on-premise system,” says McDonough. “It’s a complementary tool – Blackbird is used for logging, annotation and fast turnaround clipping to social and OTT, while the on-premise system is used for a final craft edit where required.”

Blackbird has historically been used extensively in post-production and the company has moved to capitalise on this over the last year through the creation of a formal programme with post houses called BP3 (Blackbird Productions Partnership Program).

The idea of BP3 is to enable post-production facilities to build a business around Blackbird. “We train tech personnel at the post houses and they wholesale Blackbird for us,” says McDonough. “We have 25 facilities signed up to BP3 now, including a number of new customers.”

“Content creators are gravitating towards us.”

Blackbird’s unmatched speed and its democratisation of the workstation has seen it pick up an impressive roster of clients in recent years. Its customers include IMG, Deltatre, Eleven Sports, Peloton, NRL, Buffalo Bills, US Department of State, A+E Networks, and Meredith Corporation through its OEM partner, TownNews. There is also long list of the leading post-production houses including Halo, ENVY and True North. Top tier partnerships with major public cloud companies, Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure also add to Blackbird’s reputation as growing force in fast, ultra-efficient cloud video production.

“The past few years has seen the large scale acceptance and shift to the cloud. As the cloud moves beyond storage and compute functions and in to applications and workflows, content creators are gravitating towards us,” says McDonough. “We’re building a global brand and are continually enriching our product set, codec and workflow solutions to address the rapidly evolving video landscape. The future for Blackbird shines very brightly.”

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A digital media company that has evolved markedly this past year, in ways that highlight major trends occurring in media production, processing and delivery, is Blackbird cloud video platform. Blackbird’s CEO Ian McDonough spoke to Digital Media World about the company’s recent evolution, based as much on partnerships and client relationships as on internal R&D.

Blackbird’s platform consists largely of cloud-based video editing tools and an extremely fast, high quality video codec. Ian said, “Over the past year, Blackbird has expanded the applications of its platform as a kind of OEM component within 3rd party systems and services by forming partnerships with public cloud vendors. Google, Microsoft and Amazon can offer Blackbird’s tools and services to their clients as a part of their own cloud services. Blackbird’s cloud and software tools live inside the public cloud, giving the user the advantage of massive scalability.”

Cloud Within a Cloud

Integration of Blackbird into a public cloud means video content producers in any market – sports, news, entertainment and so on – can use Blackbird to produce highlights packages very rapidly and publish to social media, VOD or broadcast. The source content can be file-based and reside in an AWS, Google or Microsoft Azure cloud, or come directly from a live feed.

The most recent version of Blackbird can be deployed on Microsoft Azure in a few minutes. Blackbird can also now support the use of Azure Blob Storage for video, which supports transparent operation between traditional and cloud workflows for content creation and delivery.

Editing remotely and using the cloud to access tools and data is not a new idea. “Some of the mainstream NLEs and newsroom computer systems include cloud functionality,” said Ian. “But, on a large scale or for sustained periods, combining traditional NLEs with cloud deployment often involves too much latency to make the effort of working through the cloud worthwhile. Blackbird’s tools, however, are cloud native, built to be accessed and used in the cloud.”

Data can stay wherever the owner wants it to be – on premises, in a private or, as described above, public cloud – which makes Blackbird cost-effective and secure for content owners. Blackbird’s Edge ingest server is installed at the location where the content resides. Selected content is placed on the server where the codec compresses and transcodes it into proxies that are uploaded to the platform, as needed. All associated users can then see the content and work on it with Blackbird’s editing tools.

When an editor selects frames to work on, Blackbird automatically downloads only the proxies for those frames and those immediately surrounding it. Completing all image processing tasks locally in the browser avoids latency encountered while waiting for commands to reach the media, functions to complete in the cloud and results to be downloaded and displayed. The original content is only involved at the point of publishing.

Blackbird Codec

Ian noted that the efficiency of Blackbird’s service is mainly due to the company’s proprietary codec – its single most important factor – which is very fast and able to preserve the quality of the original video. “Because of this codec, organisations using the Blackbird platform gain enough speed and agility to clip, edit and publish highlights for viewers in real-time, as events are being aired live if necessary,” he said. “In-game clips, for example, can be ready to push to social media in 30 seconds.”

As well as its codec, several other aspects of the Blackbird platform make it sustainable and scalable, and can help users control costs. The tools are relatively easy to learn and use, saving on training. They are also available to anyone with a browser, anywhere in the world, which means an office is not always required even if bandwidth is restricted, as low as 2 MB per second.

Post Production Program

Another somewhat different use of the company’s OEM model is the Blackbird Post Production Program, BP3. Launched at the beginning of 2019, the program now has about 20 member companies. “Participating post facilities are not only using Blackbird as a way for teams to simultaneously work on the same workflows in real time, viewing, editing and logging the same pool of content,” said Ian. “Through this program, they are also pre-buying licenses to resell to clients and partners as part of their services, instead of Blackbird selling directly.”

ENVY Post in London are a BP3 facility. They originally started to use Blackbird in-house nine years ago because they liked its cloud deployment and lack of infrastructure to maintain. They have about 80 concurrent users who, for example, use Blackbird to log and add transcription metadata to video, which can then be used to search through huge amounts of television project data. They have found uses for it outside the facility as well – on set to check looks, or when working overseas to get processing workflows started on the spot, even where connections are poor, if staff cannot return immediately.  

Ian said, “The companies that Blackbird is now working with are much more diverse and much larger, on a different scale altogether. One new client is the US Department of State who are using it to clip, edit and publish news broadcasts just a few seconds after live to its social channels, and also deliver longer form content to its own website and other digital news outlets.”

Production teams working across several US based sites can instantly access video kept in Blackbird format from the Department’s archive and repurpose the content across its online channels. In this case, Blackbird replaces SnappyTV and traditional on-premise editing systems.

Democratising Digital Rights

Sports organisations remain a key group of Blackbird users. Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL) has signed a two-year partnership agreement with Blackbird to produce short highlight clips during live NRL matches. Through the use of Blackbird’s software, the NRL’s digital team is able to rapidly clip, edit and publish short highlights during live matches. The result will be more direct operations and shorter time to publish match highlights to multiple destinations at once – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and NRL.com.

For clients like NRL, Ian is especially aware that Blackbird is contributing to a democratisation of content rights ownership. He said, “Earlier on, sports organisations like the NRL needed to sell broadcast and publishing rights to broadcasters such as FOX, as they had no equipment or expertise in editing, other post and delivery. But a service like Blackbird can begin changing that and contribute to a fragmentation of sports rights. Custom rights packages could be available that keep some destinations or forms of publishing under the team’s direct control.”

Deltatre, a digital and broadcast services provider within the sports sector, is using Blackbird in a way that is related to this trend. Deltatre works with rights owners and rights holders to grow the popularity of sports brands – leagues, franchises and TV networks – by developing exciting, immersive fan experiences.

Deltatre runs Blackbird on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform where users edit, manage and distribute content, while working collaboratively from North America and Europe, through a browser using available bandwidth.  Deltatre uses Blackbird tools to produce long and short-form game highlights and clips. Once clipped, edited and enriched, game highlights can be distributed very quickly to social, mobile, web, OTT and on-demand platforms.

The post Making the Cloud Work Harder for Video Producers, Distributors and Consumers appeared first on Blackbird.

The cloud has made it possible for audiences to find the content they love anywhere, on any device, and as a result many broadcasters are looking to the cloud to help them grow and meet customer needs. Broadcasters are using the cloud to streamline content management workflows, modernize their video delivery infrastructure, and develop deeper relationships with audiences through data.

We want to help broadcasters do exactly that, which is why we’ve worked with media and entertainment companies across the world to help them transform their workflows and bring their end users the best possible viewing experience across a multitude of devices. We’ve been incredibly inspired by all the ways Google Cloud customers like Sky, Viacom, Dish Network and many more are taking advantage of our globally reliable infrastructure, smart analytics capabilities, and ML and AI technology to better serve their audiences.

To support these broadcasters and more, we’re building a rich ecosystem of technology and system integration partners to help accelerate the industry’s adoption of the cloud across all parts of the media supply chain, including content creation, management, distribution and monetization.

Here’s a look at a few of the partners we’ve recently worked with and how we’re working with them to reach companies across the industry:

Blackbird: Blackbird provides sports, esports, news and broadcast companies with a very fast cloud-based clipping, editing and distribution platform. This allows production personnel to quickly create clips and highlights from anywhere for multiple devices and platforms including web, broadcast, OTT and social.

Harmonic: Harmonic’s VOS cloud-native live video platform is a SaaS-based solution that unifies the entire media processing chain, from ingest to playout, graphics, transcoding, encryption and delivery, enabling content and service providers to quickly launch broadcast-quality OTT channels and run leaner, more agile and scalable operations.

Make.TV: Specializing in live video, Make.TV simplifies signal acquisition from cameras and online sources, and routes and distributes these signals for playout to an unlimited number of social media, online and traditional broadcast endpoints. The latest joint efforts include Make.TV’s Live Video Cloud (LVC) running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). LVC enables the active monitoring, routing, recording and management of live video at scale, to address the time, resource and reliability issues associated with live video, specifically for live news and sports production use cases.

Wowza: Wowza Streaming Cloud, which helps deliver enterprise grade live streaming experiences, is fully integrated with Google Cloud. Streaming Cloud will be available in the Google Cloud Marketplace, and we’re working with Wowza to integrate our Video Intelligence APIs into their services in the future.

IRIS.TV: IRIS.TV provides video personalization and contextual ad targeting solutions for media companies, allowing them to better engage, retain, and monetize audiences. IRIS.TV is integrated with Google Cloud, utilizing our machine learning capabilities to provide better recommendations for viewers.

These partner announcements are part of a growing set of solutions and services that will help content creators and distributors deliver more engaging content experiences. To learn more, join us at IBC 2019 (in Hall 14, Booth #E01) in Amsterdam from September 13-17, where we will showcase our solutions and services from 15 select partners, alongside the latest technology innovations from Google Cloud, Android TV, Widevine, YouTube, Chrome and other Google product areas.

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The post Cloud-based editing enables ‘edit & roam’ appeared first on Blackbird.

Blackbird’s existing integration for direct submission to the Twitter platform has been enhanced with the capability to include additional content controls for the use of media sent to the social media platform. This includes control of embedded playback and geo-restricted white list and black list functionality. These are available to existing Twitter users. Additional functionality is being included to expand the level of control for rights holders and content owners.

Blackbird Forte Sequence Markers

Blackbird Forte has long been used in workflows where logging data on source media adds crucial value to content. This has been extended to now also support the use of sequence markers. The workflow for using sequence markers is primarily led by production and post production workflows whereby frame based metadata can be used to catalog media. This permits for rapid navigation of key areas of media.

Blackbird Review

Blackbird has released an updated version of the Blackbird Review app for iOS. This enables Blackbird users to review edits on the go and provide comments and approval that integrate the workflow directly into the Blackbird platform. Please contact your commercial contact or commercial@blackbird.video for details on how to accelerate your workflow.

The post September 2019: Blackbird Product News appeared first on Blackbird.

Acquired by Twitter in 2014, SnappyTV allows live video producers to create highlight clips from their broadcasts and share them via tweets to boost audience engagement. A few months ago Twitter told the world about SnappyTV’s long anticipated successor, LiveCut.

With essentially the same functionality as SnappyTV, LiveCut has one major downside – it is not easy to publish clips to other popular platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. Using LiveCut means having to download the clip and manually upload it – an additional time-consuming step which is costly when getting content to consumers as fast as possible is vital.

We believe differently – that once you clip your content, you should be able to easily publish it everywhere, instantly. So if you’re looking for an alternative to SnappyTV and LiveCut, then take a look at Blackbird – the fastest video clipping, editing and distribution platform on the market. Blackbird provides easy and rapid access to live streams for the creation of clips and highlights to multiple devices and platforms including web, broadcast, OTT and social (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch).

Whether you work in sports, esports, news or any other sector, Blackbird will drive major awareness, engagement and reach for your brand – as well as deliver significant content monetization opportunities.

Find out why A+E Networks and the Australian National Rugby League have already replaced SnappyTV with Blackbird and why other major media companies including IMG, Deltatre, TownNews and Peloton use our marketing-leading technology.

Book your demonstration today by contacting us at commercial@blackbird.video

The post SnappyTV is ending soon appeared first on Blackbird.

The following is an article written by David Shapton for RedShark News about Blackbird in July 2019:

With a video editor in a browser that works with a 2MBit/s connection, Blackbird has some seriously impressive technology

The post This may be the fastest video editing technology anywhere appeared first on Blackbird.

Blackbird, a developer of cloud-native postproduction tools, is moving into video distribution. Blackbird Player is built around core compression technology originally devised three decades ago by R&D director Stephen Streater. The player is likely to debut in prototype at IBC in September.

“We know video streaming is challenged by latency with recent major sports events streamed live suffering from costly buffering,” says Blackbird chief executive Ian McDonough. “We also know that watching video currently is a very passive experience for people, because they can’t manipulate content. We have the technology to help solve these needs.”

McDonough adds, “Rights holders are frustrated by not being able to allow their fans to clip and share video of a sport. With Blackbird Player, users will have instant access to any part of the video and to be able to share it over social, instantly and securely.”

From Forbidden Technologies to Blackbird

Blackbird, which rebranded from Forbidden Technologies in March this year, has always been an outlier in video production tech, but you cannot deny the tenacity of Streater’s personal vision nor the longevity of the compression technology he patented.

“Speed, size of image, and quality of image is key to making video-over-the-web feasible for a mass consumer market, and we believe our software can deliver it all. The technology should provide a platform for a tide of new internet productions created for niche markets as well as the traditional broadcasting industry.”

Streater made that comment in 2000, a year after starting Forbidden, armed with the algorithms he first developed as a PhD researcher in image processing. The first applications for it were nonlinear editing and computer games at Eidos, the company Streater co-founded in 1990.

AIM-listed since 2000, Forbidden’s stock has never quite soared. Its fortune could be about to change under direction of McDonough, who joined the UK-based firm in 2017.

“Forbidden had struggled to commercialise the technology,” says McDonough, a former SVP and MD, UK and North Europe at Turner, an EVP and GM at BBC Worldwide, and commercial director for A&E Networks Europe.

“It had a misguided commercial strategy, specialising in the post sector mainly in London which, although high profile, is a small business. They were doing three to four figure deals which was not sustainable.”

The firm’s accounts for 2017 show revenues of £758,835 and a net loss for the year of £2.36 million. A year later losses had risen to £2.57 million, but signs of growth include higher revenue (£870,000) and invoiced sales. A fresh round of funding in 2018 has raised nearly £5.5 million, and the firm is debt free.

“What I saw was an incredible piece of technology at the core of the platform,” he continues. “It was something that could replace many of the content interchange stages of traditional workflow automation. Raw materials—video, audio, graphics, stills—are only supplied to the platform through a lightweight codec and could be used for so much more than editing.”

Receiving encouragement from networks in the U.S. in late 2017, McDonough felt confident to invest his own money in the firm’s future. He and his family bought a stake worth 5.5%. The chief shareholder is Streater, with other investors including asset managers Miton Multi-Cap (20%), Schroders (7%), and Harwood Hale.

“Even in 2017, companies were not entirely sure about cloud, but we could see that the general direction of travel was not going to get derailed. It was good timing, good technology, and the company was massively undervalued.”

McDonough set about targeting the fast turnaround high value news and sports markets, specifically exporting the company’s technology to North America. In 2018, sales from the U.S. doubled and now comprise 25% of revenue.

Proprietary Algorithms

Part of the pitch is that Blackbird’s proprietary algorithms (previously spun into a codec called Osprey and the backbone to cloud production platform ForScene) are the product of years of iteration, test and development.

“H.264 and H.265 are fantastic for streaming high-quality content, but generally in one direction. If you try and manipulate those codecs back and forth in an edit environment, they suffer latency and frame inaccuracy.”

By contrast, Blackbird’s codec doesn’t apply MPEG compression (typically Long GOP) standards and file formats to media, but works in software through JavaScript.

His analogy is that competitors that have tried to solve this cloud postproduction conundrum have put wings on a train to get it to fly, whereas “we created an aeroplane from the ground up.”

The translation of Blackbird’s platform into JavaScript last year means that it can be accessed and used directly from any browser at frame-accurate at speeds down to 2Mbps. It’s available for Linux and Mac. The move increased its addressable market enormously, McDonough says.

Either from a live feed or from video files, a local computer (Blackbird’s Edge Server installed on-prem where the original content resides) converts incoming video into the Blackbird format and immediately uploads it to the cloud.

“The cloud challenge has always been concerned with getting full-resolution video into the cloud and to work on it there,” says Streater. “For a company with only average resources, that is expensive and impractical.”

The Blackbird proxies are used both for playback (without pre-rendering) and for editing. The original content is only involved at the point of publishing—even then it does not hold up operations because publishing proceeds directly from the edge server where the content is being held, not the editor’s computer.

Blackbird markets two main interfaces. Forte is a fairly extensive editor featuring several keyboard shortcuts for media pros that mimic how they would use other software. Ascent is a scaled-down version for news reporters in the field, marketers, or social media publishers to clip in and clip out to send to social or to other parts of an organisation.

The current iteration is Blackbird 9, with v.10 in the works. It has partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure as well as operating its own cloud instance.

Speed is Key

“Because we don’t store original content, in the cloud, just the proxy files, and because Blackbird encoded versions can only be read by another Blackbird player or interface, the platform is highly secure,” McDonough says. “The codec allows content to be viewed from the same point all of the time. That means a rights holder can allow unlimited sharing of a clip from their content, but anyone would be accessing it from the same point. Should there come a point where a rights package is no longer valid, you can just delete it once and all those links around the world will delete also.”

Sports broadcast and digital services supplier Deltatre is using Blackbird through Azure to extend its OTT editing services for live and on-demand content for football, athletics, golf, rugby and cycling as well as an unnamed major US sports franchise.

IMG recently renewed a relationship with Blackbird, and MSG (Madison Square Gardens) Networks, where the media crew behind the Buffalo Sabres NHL ice hockey team in New York, are using the tech to access, edit, add closed captions and publish video highlights of the games to social media and TV.

Blackbird is claimed to be quicker at doing this than anyone else.

“MSG had taken 48 minutes using Adobe and they pushed us to be quicker. We do it in 3 minutes with Blackbird,” McDonough says.

Australasian international rugby union competition Rapid Rugby and live streaming provider Corrivium wanted it in less than a minute.

“We just pushed our software hard, so that from the moment a try is scored in Sydney to publishing that clip on Twitter is 30 seconds. Five seconds after it’s happened, the clip is live in Blackbird to be edited and pushed out to social.”

Auto clipping is in demand, he says, and Blackbird has a partnership with Veritone with which AI layers can be added.

Nor has Blackbird moved away from post. A recent deal with A&E Networks is a large-scale, predominantly postproduction workflow.

“For [behind-the-scenes NYPD series] Live PD production executives are using Blackbird for review and approval. They could be sitting in an Uber looking at rushes and approving or annotating those on the fly.”

He says the network plans to repurpose its content archive, and is in the process of encoding hundreds of hours into Blackbird, making the assets instantly available for production staff to clip and create new programming for digital channels.

“A few years ago, the commercial team of this company were chasing Avid and the toolsets were incredibly sophisticated. But it does not do everything Avid does. You’re not making Game of Thrones on Blackbird. But for 95-98% of content out there, we are a very accommodating tool.”

The company’s growth is dependent on large-scale rollout of cloud post and distribution, but Blackbird believes the “problem of visibility” is industry wide.

“We can solve this issue by rolling out our Player and content creation tools within large OEM systems,” says McDonough. “This is how I believe the demand for Blackbird will expand rapidly. There is a long way to go to achieve our goals, but there is an enormous potential market. We aim to build on our position in North America, especially among sports broadcasters and rights holders, OTT or SVOD customers, or any company dealing with large volumes of video and news media groups.

“The need for large companies to make video manipulatable and instantly visible across the whole organisation and its channels is at the very heart of what we offer.”

The post Blackbird Plans Launch into Video Distribution appeared first on Blackbird.

Listed video firm Blackbird has built a roster of high-profile international clients but CEO Ian McDonough says it remains a UK company at its core.

The post ‘WE’RE THE FASTEST IN THE WORLD – AND WE’RE NOT LEAVING THE UK’ appeared first on Blackbird.

The following is an article written by Jay Ankeney for The Broascast Bridge about Blackbird in June 2019:

Blackbird has developed new frame-accurate codecs and rendering technologies that are faster than real time. And it’s all done in the cloud.

This company that is riding the crest of some remarkable technology has changed its calling card, maybe not to many peoples’ surprise.

“What was known as Forbidden Technologies is henceforth to be called Blackbird,” Ian McDonough, CEO of Blackbird began our (for me) early morning interview direct from Wimbledon, in the south of London. “Not only is ‘Blackbird’ the name of our editing platform, it also evokes the image of a cloud, since the proper collective term for a flock of blackbirds is a ‘cloud’.”

If you’ve read my last article about these adventurous folk, “Forbidden Puts Frame Accurate Editing in the Cloud” (August 3, 2018), you will already know that the tiger they have by the tail is the ability to offer a codec and supporting software infrastructure that enables spot-on frame accurate editing in cloud-based projects.

With Blackbird you can edit on any platform that has access to the Internet and cloud-based storage.

For those of us editors who have lived in the MPEG world of long GOP (Group of Pictures) compression in which individual frames may or may not actually exist, this can be a revelatory experience.

As McDonough explained to me, that is why in order to sign up 14 post-production companies into their new Blackbird Productions Partnership Program (“BP3”) over the last five months, it took a bit of educational explaining.

“Their customers are mostly in the London market so far, dealing with large scale documentary and reality shows,” he said, “because our codec and the browser-based tools behind it are all about efficiency and cost savings.”

This approach is all SaaS (Software as a Service), and BP3 has already made inroads into U. S. markets by licensing this approach to post houses.

But they have a second arm aimed at live sports and live news.

“We are in 20 local news markets that are part of the Meredith Corporation,” he said, “and we are making rapid inroads into sports.”

Besides being involved with Madison Square Garden sports production, BP3 is also providing services to the Buffalo Bills where it is being used to produce content for both broadcast and social media.

Then just on June 19th, Blackbird announced it had signed “a significant six-figure, multi-year deal with A+E Networks”.

You may never catch the guy pedaling down Machu Pichu in front of you on your spin bike, but you’ll be chasing him in frame accurate video!

Its technology will be used to “deliver major productivity enhancements across A+E Networks’ business” including creating content highlights to social media channels.

But the goal of this article is not just to establish BP3’s marketing bona fides (heck, I’m not even mentioning that all the video home Peloton stationary spin bikers race after is produced using Blackbird), I really wanted to find out how they make the magic of frame accurate editing in the cloud a reality.

Fortunately, Stephen Streater, founder of the company and its R&D director since he invented the software, was excellent at explaining it.

We know that MPEG is used to get video onto your TV, and for that it is pretty good,” Streater began, “but it was never designed to do the things like navigation (i.e. jog/shuttle), smooth bi-directional playback and frame accurate positioning that we need. And the standard used in a browser, HTML-5 also has its limitations when applied to these tasks.”

So to develop Blackbird, he turned to a multi-paradigm-programming language called Javascript. (Author’s note-not be confused with the Java programming language or the Java software platform).

“Javascript traditionally was just for little things like drop-down menus,” Streater said, “but in 2017 they came out with a new version called WebAssembly, a technology standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that could also do audio and video.”

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) works on all browsers. It is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine.

 

WebAssembly was originally geared for video gaming, which is why most modern browsers support it on desktop and mobile platforms.

But Streater designed his own codec for video that allowed him to play back 1080P imagery at very high frame rate in Javascript.

“That means up to 4 billion people already have browsers that can use our Blackbird codec to play back 1080P video with frame accuracy in Javascript,” Streater wound up. “That means they don’t need additional configuration, no installation, once they have a license they simply go to a Web page and run and edit their video.”

Once you have loaded the Blackbird editing application, it creates proxies of your video faster than real time so you don’t need to work on the hi rez version and you only store the material that will actually be used in the final version.

All rendering is done in the cloud, so you don’t have to pause the editing process to wait for it. Since the software is platform agnostic, you can monitor it from any platform be it desktop or mobile.

As a product that lives in the cloud, you know that collaboration is central to Blackbird’s workflow.

Some people are taking remote editing as an option.

Blackbird is raising cloud-based editing to the level of indispensable.

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