A professional video editor in a browser, Blackbird is used by Bloomberg Media, Eleven Sports the US Department of State and others to rapidly clip, edit and publish news broadcast live. See it at NAB 2020.

Blackbird will be at NAB 2020 to show its solution for organisations working with video on a large scale  that need to be able to rapidly and easily access, view, edit and publish their content to all platforms and devices for audiences to consume. With cloud-based video editing and publishing platform Blackbird running on AWS, companies can drive productivity efficiencies across their operations, says the company.

Blackbird is a professional video editor in a browser. Providing rapid access to live and non-live content, it enables the fast creation of video clips and highlights to multiple devices and platforms including web, broadcast, OTT and social. Easy to learn and use, the video editor is available to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world, even with low bandwidth. Blackbird drives awareness, engagement, reach and monetization opportunities for brands in the sports, esports, news, entertainment and enterprise sectors.

A story that started in 1990

Although you may not have heard the name before, this is not a new solution just arrived to the market, as it is a development from an editing system made by Eidos Interactive in the 1990s. Its history starts from the first public showing of this product, at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Europe in 1990.

Formerly named FORscene, it is an integrated internet video platform, video editing software, covering non linear editing and publishing for broadcast, web and mobile. The system is implemented as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices, a Java applet and a pure JavaScript web application as part of its user interface. The latter runs on platforms without application installation, codec installation, or machine configuration and has Web 2.0 features.

Blackbird won the Royal Television Society’s award for Technology in the post-production process in December 2005, and on March 2018, MSG Networks received an Emmy Nomination by The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) New York Chapter for their work using the Blackbird technology.

Users include Bloomberg and the US Department of State

The current Blackbird video codec is called Blackbird 9. It is designed for both editing and video streaming over variable speed broadband Internet connections. By varying the frame rate, it can provide consistent picture quality even on slow connections. The software is provided as a service (SAAS) which is charged by usage.

Blackbird’s cloud production and distribution system was chosen by Bloomberg Media. Eleven Sports adopted Blackbird for rapid editing and publishing of sports content to fans online,  as did Peloton, IMG, Deltatre, NRL and others. The US Department of State and its production teams use it to rapidly clip, edit and publish news broadcast live to its social channels including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and to own website and other digital news outlets across the United States. TownNews extended the use of the video editor to 39 TV stations in 2019.

Blackbird runs on Amazon AWS

Now you’ve a chance to see Blackbird in action at NAB 2020, running on AWS. The video editor runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud – and ingests content through AWS Elemental MediaLive, a broadcast-grade live video processing service that lets users create high-quality video streams for delivery to broadcast televisions and internet-connected multiscreen devices, like connected TVs, tablets, smart phones, and set-top boxes.

Blackbird CEO, Ian McDonough, said: “Blackbird is delighted to showcase its solution at the AWS booth at NAB for the first time this year. We are now leveraging AWS for a number of live customers in the of global sports, entertainment and news verticals and this is a great opportunity to showcase the unique benefits of our combined workflow.”

A green technology, Blackbird supports the sustainability goals of the media production industry. Users do not have to travel to use the video editor, no new equipment is needed and with content remaining in situ, large energy savings are made.

Blackbird will exhibit on the AWS booth (#SU2202) at NAB 2020 from the 19 to 22 April.