Recorded live from IBC, Philippe Brodeur speaks on the future of video streaming.

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Transcription:

The program about innovation in media and startups. Broadcasting live from iBC 2017.

My name is Bert Cork.

And my co host today is as always as always Rick Van Dyke.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Our first guest today is from Ireland.

His name is Philip Brodeur.

He is the Ceo and founder of Overcast.

Good morning Phillip.

Good morning.

How are you today? Great.

It’s great to be here.

It’s, you know, we’re day three of iBc and it’s uh

it’s only getting better.

Okay, Do you still have some energy left? Yeah, yeah.

You know, it’s it’s this conference is always a great conference.

There’s there’s a lot of walking space in there.

So we got special walking shoes on this here.

But apart from that, not your dancing, you didn’t bring your dancing shoes.

No, I didn’t bring my dancing shoes.

No, I’m a I’m I’m quiet after the event.

So I mean I’m here for a bit of work.

Yeah, of course, of course.

Um I like I said, you’re the Ceo and founder of Overcast.

Um and can you tell our listeners what overcast is and what you do? Sure.

So overcast is a video collaboration review and approval platform for teams.

So we work with business teams, not on the editor side, but on the business side.

Some people call us a video dama video, digital asset management platform.

So we so we support all formats, but we are really good at trans coding.

Uh so we we say to our clients who are mostly enterprise,

any format in any format out, you don’t need to be technical,

we’ll take all of the creative sending you all crazy formats and we’ll and we’ll help

you manage those.

So it’s all around the collaboration, you know, during that production process from really from brief

to a finished file and we work at any point in time during that workflow period.

Is that a conscious conscious choice to focus on B2B and not really so much on

media companies? Yeah, so we, we partner with media companies, uh definitely a conscious choice.

So we had built a video on demand platform, like a netflix for North Africa about

three years ago, uh and when we did that, we were bringing in content from Hollywood,

we were bringing in content from North Africa and we were creating content and the biggest

issue we had was all these different formats and the technical guys that we had hired,

they spent their whole time just trans coding and it was all on premise.

So we said, well sure, the other people have these problems and we went out and

we talked to universities, we talked to media agencies and then we started talking to very

large enterprises as well.

And uh and you know, the funny thing is

is that even within broadcasters, the marketing and comms department have never been part of the workflow,

so we’re into broadcasters as well, you know, helping them move the assets around because at

the end of the day, you don’t really want a sales guy tapping into your head

in now, do you? He told me you were yesterday at the startup forum,

um, did you make some interesting startups over there? Sure.

There are, you know, there are a lot of really good startups.

Um, I think the, the overwhelming theme is that there were all cloud based,

we’re all looking at AI and machine learning to help make that cloud experience that much

better and, and the and the delivery O T T that much better.

So, I think we’re, you know, we’re finally getting to a space where where broadcasters and

large media companies can start to deliver O T T in in an efficient way and

actually make some money doing it.

But um, I read that you worked for for the BBC um,

as a reporter, really, I was a producer.

Producer.

Yeah, Well, and that you got the idea for your platform really,

when you were out in the field for the BBC, can you tell me a little

bit more about that? Sure, Sure.

So I was back in the Mid 90s, I did a lot of work for the

BBC on outside broadcast, just like this.

I’m not quite such a fancy truck, but, but, but we had,

we had, we had resources, we had resources and I think the,

um, the the thing that, that I tried to do with the BBC when we were

there was try to get some movement into the outside broadcast as I broadcasts tended to

be very flat, you know, studio based, you sit there and nothing would happen.

So what we did was was we started to orchestrate doing things in the field.

So you’d start at point A and you’d move to point B and C and D.

Now.

It’s pretty natural that people are doing that all the time.

But there was still the challenges of of of getting that orchestration to do uh

to work, to practice it and then to actually get it live as well and and do

it in that single take.

So, you know, one of the, one of the, one of the challenges that at that

point in time was actually just,

I mean, there was no internet, so everything had to go over satellite.

Um, and now and now when you wanted to change scripts and things like that,

it was very, very complicated.

So now, you know, building on that, I think we’ve, we’ve, we’ve ended up where we

are today.

Okay.

And what’s next for overcast? Well, we’re, we, we launched a partner program here,

so uh we’re talking to a lot of vendors who have traditionally not played in the,

in that workflow space.

Um, I one of the one person said to me, you know,

your necessary, but you’re not necessarily sexy.

I think it’s a really good way of looking at us.

So when we get a little bit of time talking to these guys,

they go, yeah, you can actually save a ton of time by reducing those workflow issues.

And you know, we’ve done we’ve done a lot of work with publishers like uh like

the Daily Mail.

Um And and we saved them a 75% of their time during that,

during that workflow process.

And they’re publishing by the way, Daily Mail#

five on Facebook right there, huge.

So you know, it’s not just broadcasters who are having a lot of success today,

it’s publishers and and lots of other types of businesses.

We had a startup in the in the show yesterday.

I thought the name was collaborate from Sweden, did you meet them? They have kind of

also a workflow management too to get all the people on the editorial team together to

work on the same on the same project for for different media outlets.

Sure.

So there is the way we, the way we look at workflow is a man or

a damn okay man’s generally come in through an editor, somebody technical when you open up

a client a lot of buttons to push, right, it’s going to scare off everybody in

the sales department and everybody in the marketing department.

We come in from a dam or a business point of view.

So when you open up our client, there’s really only one thing you can do

and thats collaborate and make some comments.

You say, I like it here, I like it there.

Um so collaborate.

And all those guys, they’re all coming in from a far more of a worker point

of view.

Uh, and and they’re completely justified in what they’re doing.

We’re just offering that, that, that different direction and that’s not your direction then correct,

correct.

And we and we and we definitely make that

differentiation when we’re talking to our clients.

Um, if there’s no point in going in and talking to the editor,

because the editors got his solution, it’s the business guys who don’t have a solution.

Those are the guys who just want to see the video, right,

and make a comment.

I love it.

I don’t like it.

Can you move my logo around a bit Philip you’ve probably been coming to iBC for

quite a while.

Um what have you seen change here during the years? Well, the first thing is that

whole 14 was hall 14 and then it was a connected hall and then everyone went connected.

And so we no longer have a connected whole.

That’s an interesting uh, growth.

Um, and I think that the rest of the broadcasters have finally started to embrace cloud.

They’ve learned how to spell cloud first of all.

Um, and and it took a long time to get there.

It’s it’s taken a long, long time to get there.

Now.

There’s a lot of legacy technology which is, you know, broadcast has to be on premise.

I understand that completely.

I I come from a producer’s point of view.

Um but the cloud can really offer enhanced um workflows and and enhanced ways of of

accessing new new new audiences.

And we all know that.

I mean I was working with a an education company this summer.

They’re making 1500 four K videos four minutes each per month.

I mean that kind of volume for an enterprise is huge and they’re spending a lot

of money and they’re having success doing it

Philip, I’m afraid we’re out of time.

Thank you very much for coming to the studio from Hippo, started

their community nationals detained.

Pop up new business Radio.

Mhm.