Cloud video editing platform Blackbird represents some of the hottest property in video software on the market right now. The UK vendor has been thrust onto our radar in recent months – just as major networks and media outfits have been forced into acknowledging Blackbird’s new-age take on what we now know are indispensable tools to keep TV ticking in remote environments.
But can Blackbird – and various other vendors benefiting greatly from the pandemic such as Zixi – sustain this trajectory once lockdowns are eased?
Donning a team of just 23 people, Blackbird has pivoted away from being an artisan tool for edgy Soho outfits to an industrialized piece of infrastructure powering post and live production in this new remote-reliant industry. Faultline is not generally fond of crediting individual executives for exceptional achievement awards, but it’s hard to see past the crucial steps taken by current CEO Ian McDonough, which were executed ahead of the curve.
“The pandemic has raised the profile of flexible working and also disaster recovery. That said, this was already part of a movement. The shift to the cloud and articulation of the cloud has been accelerated,” said McDonough, speaking to Faultline this week.
Arriving at Blackbird two and a half years ago, he dropped the former name Forbidden Technologies in favor of Blackbird, the existing name of the cloud-based workstation and underlying video codec patents. A clear path to the cloud was formed with dedicated infrastructure and the company’s business model was shifted to annual subscriptions only, a crucial change in Blackbird’s newfound success.
Had Blackbird been sent blind into handling the surge in business the vendor is currently experiencing, then there is a question of whether it might have fumbled the opportunity.
There are a couple of unique technical facets behind Blackbird taking flight, for which it holds 14 patents. The company’s founder Dr Stephen Streater, who remains at the company as R&D Director, built a video codec from the ground up called – you guessed it – Blackbird. Tailor-made for the cloud, Blackbird is described as an ultra-efficient codec enabling a high quality proxy version of video content to be created rapidly at lower costs than rivals. Its big claim is being the only professional browser-based video editor with professional standard tools available even on low bandwidth connections.
Blackbird has used a combination of the cloud and its patented technology to identify a gap in the market for browser-based production and editing tools, enabling it to undercut the cumbersome standalone platforms provided by the competition.
“Others adapted around H.264, while we built our own codec, and our Blackbird Forte professional cloud editing suite around Javascript, which can be accessed on a 2Mbps connection via 2 interfaces. It’s less complex and makes us very scalable, green and sustainable,” said McDonough.
Blackbird prides itself on rewriting the rulebook for what a standard web browser can achieve in professional video editing. It means anywhere in the world subscribers can access 18 video tracks, 36 audio tracks, complex transitions, color correction, voice over and more. It has its own cloud infrastructure and supports AWS, Google and Azure clouds, which McDonough described as a vital business move.
As for customers, Blackbird first came to our attention in early December 2019, when media company Eleven Sports elected for a new editing and publishing platform from Blackbird, in a two-year contract designed to rapidly get sports content online for fans. Blackbird’s clipping and editing suite is integrated into Eleven’s video infrastructure to prepare content for social media channels and OTT platforms in Belgium and Portugal.
But this is nothing compared to what came a few months later, when A+E Networks – the Disney and Hearst joint broadcasting venture – decided in March to double the volume of content edited through the Blackbird cloud video editing platform to expand its remote production capabilities, while facilitating more effective working from home environments. Production teams use Blackbird technology to ingest, view, edit and publish content through a choice of hybrid workflows – either on-premise via the Blackbird cloud or on AWS. This marked a major expansion for Blackbird, which was first selected by A+E Networks in June 2019 for delivering cloud video production workflows.
TownNews is another notable Blackbird customer, using its suite for 49 news stations across the country. Blackbird currently has no pay TV platform customers to speak of, but McDonough was confident that Blackbird will soon be powering production behind some big OTT video names. It would certainly fit perfectly with both the Blackbird flightpath and the Faultline mantra, that disruption should come from a corner of the market that has been thrust in front of us – and the companies we cover on a weekly basis – by the pandemic.
“No one has a codec like Blackbird,” said McDonough, backing up his boast with a recent conversation with Google team members, who apparently expressed disbelief in seeing Blackbird in action for this time. So much in fact, that these Google representatives joked about building a time machine to go back and develop the Blackbird codec before Blackbird did.
Quite the compliment, so naturally we suggested Google might just go ahead and buy Blackbird. “We’re not for sale,” said McDonough.