18 TVBEurope Cloud for Broadcast
“EVERYONE has to go tapeless, because there are no tape cameras anymore,” says David Peto. “The cost of cameras is going down so people buy more cameras. They shoot more, with less craft in what is shot. They end up with a ton of data but very little metadata apart from the time of day. “So they come to a post house with a pile of disks, and sit for days to view everything. Then they find that something is missing,” he continues. “And at the end of the job they take the data away on a pile of disks and put them in a cupboard.” Peto ran a London post house
and recognised that these problems needed solving. There had to be a better way of keeping on top of content, of viewing it away from the expensive edit suite, and of preserving the archive. It also had to be powerful enough to deal with multiple codecs, simple enough for a layman to use, secure enough for premium content – and affordable. “I went from a Soho post house where a runner would bring me sushi to one room above a strip club,” he said. “I went out to raise some seed capital which gave me the time to develop the concept, then another round to bring in someone else to refine it.” At this stage the angel funding came largely from contacts in the industry. “We kept it quiet for 18 months while we developed it,” according to Peto. Aframe was launched in November 2010.
Overcoming resistance The first battle was to get over the huge inherent resistance to the cloud within the broadcast industry – “a promo video was not going to cut it”. So Peto used his contacts to go out and win a major project: a BBC
www.tvbeurope.com February 2013
For BBC’s The Manor Reborn, 620 hours of mixed format content came into Aframe
Head in the clouds
While a lot of people talk about the cloud and its potential for broadcast production, Aframe has done something about it. Dick Hobbs talked to founder David Peto about his business genesis and the cloud benefits of today
Blink Films used Aframe during the production ofClassic Car Rescue
popular documentary series The Manor Reborn. “They shot 620 hours of
mixed format content on location, which all came into Aframe,” he explained. “We had 50 people working on it simultaneously, with a metadata team tagging every frame. Then we did The World’s Toughest Truckers for Discovery and Channel 5, with 6500 hours of location footage for eight hours of television. So yes, it works.”
“I’ve been waiting for this type of solution for a decade, and to me Aframe is simply genius” Dean Winkler, post supervisor on The Birder’s Guide to Everything What, then, is the Aframe
proposition? At the simple level, it is a secure, project-based
MEDIASILO RAISES $2.25M FOR SAAS VIDEO PLATFORM
Cloud media management service MediaSilo last month closed a $2.25 Million Series A round led by Boston- based Schooner Capital. MediaSilo will use the funds to accelerate growth in new markets and strengthen its position in video management,
collaboration, and distribution. MediaSilo's software-as-a-service
(SaaS) platform makes it easy to work with video from anywhere. The platform provides an online media library, with collaboration and delivery tools for any video workflow. Users
can set up branded microsites for sharing video securely. MediaSilo currently manages
millions of videos, graphics, audio files and documents for more than 400 companies, including media enterprises, production companies,
retail brands, pro-sports teams, hospitals, and colleges. "This new funding will
provide additional resources to grow the company and continue to evolve our platform offering," said Kai Pradel, CEO, MediaSilo. "Our
customers will see immediate changes to our product line as we address new workflows and work closely with partners and integrators to make working with video easier."
www.mediasilo.com
limited to content: you can publish scripts or call sheets through Aframe, or manage prop hire contracts and clearances. If it is data, then you can associate it with your project. Which makes it sound
cloud store. Producers book space, upload raw footage and access it from anywhere. It is not
unremarkable. There are plenty of ways of storing files, of any size, in the cloud. There are even other companies offering broadcast services, although Peto dismisses these. “If you go
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