Very nice to see the redoubtable David Peto today at the launch of his new project – Aframe.
David founded and sold a Mac only production house in Soho before taking some time out to think about next move. Turns out he decided there was an opportunity to streamline the highly fragmented world of production and has spent the last 18 months not saying very much about his project whose backers include David Wheldon, (Vodafone), David Abbott, (AMV) and other luminaries from right across the advertising and video production industry.
Aframe - on a Mac
“Keep it all together”. Aframe is a cloud-based collaboration and production platform for the video production industry letting disparate teams collaborate across the production value chain. It wants to change the way the video production industry works by streamlining the production process and also taking content and pushing it to third party channels. It promises, ‘the best of the web and the best of video’, and was founded on the premise that the industry has got so fragmented and so out of synch with the enabling power of the web that there was a unique opportunity to make video production far more streamlined and efficient.
What does Aframe do?
There are three pieces to the puzzle.
1 Essentially it is an online video production project management system that allows organisations to:
- Manage and plan projects collaboratively across multiple teams and geographies.
2 Perhaps more importantly from the perspective of users:
- Aframe aims to make user’s video searchable by embedding video content with useful information thus making it more discoverable by third parties. In other words, it tags video content as it is uploaded, automatically. This offers users the potential to make their content discoverable by third parties immediately.
3 Storage and management of existing content is managed through Aframe’s two secure data centres so users:
- Don’t need to manage and store their own content, Aframe takes user’s content and stores and shares it online without owners needing to worry about looking after it.
At first glance, it seems to be extraordinary that an industry as obsessed with technology as TV production has not really embraced the internet as an enabling platform. This is not that unusual. TV production has been obsessed with the technology in its own hardware – video cameras, production equipment etc but only recently have the typically huge files that are produced and moved around in the video production process been moved via the web. So perhaps the time is ripe for a bit of innovation in the industry?
Success will require Aframe to (1) have hit the market at the right time in the technology adoption cycle – which it may well have done; (2) create a beautiful user experience for customers and; (3) to ensure the tagging technology really does help create new sources of revenue for customers as their work becomes more discoverable. It is very early days for Aframe but if the video production industry embraces the platform with as much enthusiasm as the early beta users I spoke to, they will have a busy future.
- Our next BLN media discussion dinner is held on 24th November in London. Details.