The Acquisition Stream

Posted: 22/01/2016

First Periscope, then Twitch, now UStream. It seems that live streaming acquisitions are now in vogue.
In 1998, the Internet arrived in the small, Lancashire village where I grew up and I had my first live streaming experience. After the buzzing of the dial up tone, I clicked on Netscape (remember that?) and searched: “Live Feed Times Square”. I’d never been to New York and I dreamed about seeing what was happening at Times Square at any given moment. And there it was on my screen in all its juddery glory: a live stream of Times Square. I watched intently for 15 minutes and nothing happened. Nothing. People walked by and cars moved around. But nothing actually happened. Why? Because live is life. And in life, only the best bits are interesting.
I think of video content in two very simplistic forms. Live video is spontaneous, immediate, and – when it’s managed – exciting. It’s why we love watching sport live. The second type of video is staged. It’s organised, managed, perfected, and edited into ‘all the best bits’. Why does Twitch work? Because gaming is a sport where anything could happen. But with millions of live streams around the world, consumers only want to see the best bits. My Times Square experience demonstrated that. As the world’s live video content expands so does its need to highlight the best bits and to get those highlights into a broadcast quality edit, quickly and easily. And these edits must be able to be done by anyone and everyone, not just professional editors. That’s the only way there’s enough man power to manage that volume of content.
Forbidden Technologies is at the sharp edge of this frontier. Forscene is currently used to rapidly create live highlights in sports and news, moving from live to fully edited in under 90 seconds. I’m not aware of another system in the world combining that speed with the power of broadcast quality, frame accurate editing. Captevate – also frame accurate – is (according to our research) 2 times faster than any other professional video editor at highlighting the best bits. Critically, the learning curve is almost completely flat. Where a novice may take 20 minutes learning to curate the best bits of some video content in a professional editor, it takes less than 15 seconds for the same person to learn that skill in Captevate. Only with this power, can we create the army of editors required to curate the masses of content being created today.
As the quantity of the global video content explodes, Forbidden Technologies is there to help the world curate the best bits.
Aziz Musa
CEO Forbidden Technologies