Small Cap Awards Nominee Profiles: Blackbird
As we approach the Small Cap Awards, due to take place on 25th June, Master Investor profiles some of the companies shortlisted. Blackbird has been shortlisted for the Technology Company of the Year award.
- Please provide a brief description of the business
Blackbird is a software platform that operates in the fast-growing SaaS professional cloud video editing market.
At its heart, Blackbird is all about freedom for professional video production teams. Freedom from being in a fixed location, freedom from bespoke hardware and proprietary systems, freedom to work on live or file-based media and freedom to have a cloud, on-prem or a hybrid workflow. All decisions are left up to the user – a revolution in video content creation. We allow our customers to edit and publish high quality video from any laptop at low bandwidth.
Blackbird is the world’s fastest, most powerful professional cloud video editing and publishing platform and provides rapid access to video content for the easy creation of video content to multiple devices and platforms. We hold fourteen patents for the technology.
Blackbird is used around the world by rights holders, broadcasters, sports and news video specialists, esports, live events and content owners, post-production houses, other mass market digital video channels and corporations.
A fully-featured editor accessed through any browser, easy to learn and needing only limited bandwidth to use, Blackbird powers significant productivity and efficiency benefits for any enterprise organisation working with video at scale. An ultra-green technology, Blackbird supports the sustainability goals of the media production industry.
- 2019/20 was clearly a strong year for the company, to what do you attribute your success?
Blackbird’s success is down to a combination of factors both internal and external.
Externally there is a macro trend of the acceptance of moving media workflows
to the cloud. Strategically we have pivoted from selling an artisan rough cut editing solution to the Soho post-production world to selling an industrialised, professional infrastructure tool to major international sports leagues and US broadcasters and news organisations.
Internally this was due to a combination of factors stemming from a change of leadership with the recently appointed CEO bringing in new leaders in Finance, Operations, Marketing and Sales. In addition, the entire platform was translated to be able to operate scalably in a browser in JavaScript. We rebranded the company to Blackbird 12 months ago, brought a sharp focus to acquiring high profile sports and news customers, articulated our unique selling points clearly and brought about significant improvement in global profile through highly strategic and targeted marketing and by impressing tech giants such as Google and Microsoft whom we have partnered with at major trade shows.
- How would you characterise the long-term drivers for your business?
There are three significant drivers of our business:
The first is that video media is proliferating at an enormous rate and that every piece of media needs to be edited multiple times for various markets, media outlets and other purposes and so editing is very much in demand.
The second is the inexorable movement of all things digital to the cloud. Complex workflows like video editing have been previously slow to move to the cloud because of the absence of a tool like Blackbird but the raising of our profile is addressing that.
Thirdly and this is a newer one, the onset of Covid-19 has brought about both a necessity and desire for flexible, remote working. As the Blackbird workflow means you can work from any laptop at low bandwidth, it’s an ideal solution for home working. Additionally, it can do this using very few of the Earth’s resources making it a very green and sustainable technology.
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