InBroadcast
Ian McDonough, CEO, Blackbird
http://europe.nxtbook.com/nxteu/lesommet/inbroadcast_202010/index.php?startid=24#/p/24
You’ve worked at the top of some of the biggest media companies in the world including Viacom and BBC Worldwide. Why did you join Blackbird?
I enjoyed the the corporate world for many years. I was running a $150m P&L which sounds big but was tiny in the blue-chip media landscape. Over time it became a little too bureaucratic and had lost its edge for me. I was really keen to back myself in a business where I could make many more of the key decisions without swathes of board approvals. I looked at private equity but Blackbird was one step better. Here was a listed UK company with a proven world leading technology gem at its core at a time when ten industry was moving to the cloud. They required a reboot. A focussed strategy, clear branding and a strong front office team to take it forward. I was confident I could deliver on that.
What were the ‘gems’ as you saw them?
The company had developed an incredible web-based video codec from scratch and built a fully featured sophisticated editing toolset around. I didn’t know quite how special it was until I took it to the biggest tech giants companies on the West Coast. At Google, Apple and Microsoft, the universal response was ‘Wow! We’ve not seen that before!’. That told me that instead of being a strong, niche company, this could be a world beater. That was when I was persuaded to invest in the business directly and persuaded my family to.
That was in 2017. What key developments have happened since?
The main goal for us was moving from being an artisan product in Soho servicing a small part of the post industry to being a much more industrial product under new brand and company name.
A big breakthrough was striking a major deal with A&E Networks over three years which demonstrated how hundreds of users every single day were accessing and adding value their archive and publishing content directly from Blackbird.
Another five-year deal with a major New York-based global news organisation closed in November 2019 took us to the next stage. This was for production and delivery of live news, daily, to a worldwide audience.
In the background we were also winning multiple smaller deals with a number of OEM operations – Deltatre, IMG, TownNews – across a wide variety sports and 50 US TV news stations. This gave us an insight into how business side of things was going to take off by working through third parties, so integration of Blackbird into other systems became a priority.
What has been the impact of COVID on Blackbird and its customers?
Ironically, one of the things we didn’t talk about much in the first two years of Blackbird was remote working. Our technology is incredibly fast and efficient and we’re able to scale easily because anyone can use us in any browser on any laptop over bandwidth as restricted as 2 MB/s. But culturally, remote working was not high on the agenda.Since COVID-19, the most important aspect is remote.
The competitors in this area are traditional on-premise solutions who have virtualised cloud offerings. To operate such a system in virtual instances requires 30-50 MB/s bandwidth, local and cloud storage and a very fast GPU on the ground. Blackbird’s footprint is insignificant in comparison. This allows people to work from home. Any home.
The longer term move toward cloud has been on the cards for a number of years but a dramatic cultural shift needed to happen and that has been COVID. People don’t want to go back to five days a week, many would prefer a hybrid model and it all means tools like ours which are cloud-native will be increasingly in demand.
The Genii is out of the bottle on flexible working. As a CEO and someone who has run large teams, I admit to being skeptical about working from home but now we’ve seen how productive teams can be when individuals are handed responsibility with the right tools and left to their own devices. In future we will all see a better work-life balance.
How important is sustainability to Blackbird?
Sustainability manifests in three ways. Users of Blackbird, such as editors, don’t need to travel to location, they don’t need to get on a plane. Secondly, we don’t need any specific hardware which means the carbon emission in manufacturing, distributing and ultimately disposing of equipment is very low. But really what is key is that we can move high bit rate content around at a fraction of the energy and power consumption of competitors. For example, if you just want to publish 7-minutes of highlights from a 90-minute match, with Blackbird you can edit from anywhere and just that 7 minutes needs to move and the rest of the media can reside where it is required. Given that we are a very powerful software means we can be a part of the sustainability program for our customers and our investors.
Can you tell us about Blackbird’s latest wins?
We have built on the idea of third parties selling Blackbird and built a significant partnership with TATA Communications, one of the largest telcos in the world.
In the last month we have also secured direct deals with Sky News Arabia and esports customers Riot Games and VENN TV. a win with a live event company in New York which will see Blackbird used on fast turnaround live coverage and social media publication of the Democratic National Convention and the US Open Golf in August.
What is on your product roadmap?
The key areas to work on are data in and out, which includes AI such as speech-to-text metadata, as well as video sources; and systems integration into OEMs. We are always improving the sophistication of our tools and pushing the codec and technology forward but we know that there is a sweet spot where we are a fantastic. Interoperable, web-based tool for super-efficient, rapid turnaround, high quality production. No-one else does what we do.
How do you view the new normal?
Optimistically. Our tool is very versatile and well designed for numerous use cases. For example, the National Rugby League in Australia was one of the first contact sports to return to action after lockdown and we were able to help their team execute production and, crucially, to do more work with fewer people all working safely and remotely. We have had several other sports clients go live since then including a deployment by the National Hockey League to assist with the NHL’s ‘return to play’ plan. Blackbird’s vital use in remote production not only conveys all the thrill of the action on the field but keeps the production team physically distanced and working safely from home. This will not only become the new normal for living with the virus but become a permanent fixture because of the productivity and efficiency gains it delivers.
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