Sohonet
With the pandemic changing the way we work, remote collaboration has never been more important. By combining innovative technologies with world-class services, Sohonet helps professionals working across film, TV and advertising to collaborate with teams and deliver content with solutions built for the media community.
Since the beginning of the shutdown, Sohonet has tailored solutions to work even harder for users collaborating remotely. The sole aim of their team of technical experts is to remove the obstacles that get in the way of your creative process, by enabling users to move, manage and store content securely and easily throughout the production workflow.
“Keeping all parties aligned on creative vision is paramount to the success of your project and having the right tools to execute that shared vision, regardless of location, is key,” says Parker.
Sohonet’s real-time ClearView collaborative tools have been built to bring remote teams together through a secure ecosystem, offering workflow collabs across production and post from editorial, sound mixing, color grading and visual effects reviews.
With ClearView Flex, teams have tools to stream live encrypted content in real-time from any source to collaborators that’s viewable on any tablet, phone, computer or Apple TV. It’s designed to make “over the shoulder” viewing, discussion and approval between creatives and clients easy. The low-latency streaming service doesn’t even require content to be uploaded before sharing either.
As more creatives started working from home, Parker spearheaded a move to support ClearView Flex streaming options to match slower consumer internet connections. “We immediately deployed ‘super low’ bit rates for those in extremely challenged environments. We also scaled out the infrastructure to support 15 viewers as the norm and allow up to 30 viewers in a multi-hour session to meet the changing work habits of crea-tives working from home during the lockdown.”
ClearView Flex has already been recognized with an Emmy Engineering Award and is used by every major distributor, including Netflix, HBO, Disney, NBC Universal, Amazon Studios, Warner Bros. and Sony.
— Daron James
Special.tv
The state of Montana is generally not considered a hotbed for tech or entertainment, but Lucas and Burton could help change that perception with their Boze-man-based startup Special.tv, which provides a platform for creators to launch their own subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) channels with no fees other than a 10% cut of their subscription revenue.
“There’s no exclusivity contracts or licensing agreement,” Lucas says. “Creators own and control 100% of their content, so you’re free to premiere a film on your channel and keep it there forever as you develop your catalog, move it to another platform or keep it on both.”
Burton and Lucas, both in their mid-20s, met through Launch-Pad, an entrepreneurial accelerator for students and alumni at Montana State University in Bozeman, where they were studying software engineering and marketing, respectively.
“We recognized that everyone wanted to build a mobile app and no one knew how to, and I knew all the people who wanted to build software and he knew how to build it, so we linked up,” Lucas says.
While still students, they launched Triple Tree Software, a company that designed mobile and web apps, and backend APIs for startups. After two clients paid them to develop custom VOD platforms, and more followed asking them to do the exact same thing, they decided they’d be better off launching their own service.
The idea was a hit with investors, attracting $2.26 million in funding from Bozeman-based New Frontier Capital, 30West in Los Angeles, former NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke and film producer and venture capitalist David Fialkow of General Catalyst, among others.
No matter what happens going forward, Lucas and Burton have no plans of moving their headquarters to Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
“We’re proud of not being bred from the traditional media space,” says Lucas. “It enables us to approach new problems with new thinking and new solutions.”
—Todd Longwell
Teresa Phillips, CEO and co-founder
Spherex
Phillips offers a cutting-edge solution for an increasingly global entertainment biz, hyper-conscious about offending viewers’ cultural sensibilities. Using a combination of AI, machine learning and old-fashioned human curation, her company analyzes movies and TV series to ensure they are relevant and appropriate for 240 different territories around the globe, assessing everything from legal compliance and appropriate audience range to religious references and cultural taboos.
“We’ve really created a cultural playbook for how content providers and platforms should operate in a regulated international environment, and that has never existed before,” says Phillips, who launched Spherex three years ago.
Phillips took a circuitous route to Silicon Valley moguldom. She grew up on a farm in Kansas, then did a seven-year hitch in the army, serving as an executive assistant to four-star generals and diplomats at the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters in Belgium. Following stints at companies including CyberCash, Time Warner Cable and Yahoo, she made her first foray into tech entrepreneurship in 2006 with Graspr, a social network for user-generated instructional videos that attracted $2.5 million in Series A funding. Unfortunately, her thunder was stolen by another video sharing startup, YouTube, which was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock the same year.
“I actually was talking to [YouTube] about joining them and I said ‘No, I’m gonna do my own thing,’” she says. “That’s one of those things where you say, ‘What was I thinking?’ [Graspr] got off the ground, but I didn’t have the runway to scale it.”
Today, Spherex counts Google/YouTube as one its clients, along with Paramount, Lionsgate, Comcast/NBCUnversal, HBO, AMC, Starz, PBS and Samsung, and the business continues to grow.
“I just got an email this morning from one of our clients and they said, ‘We’ve got 100,000 titles that need ratings for these 25 markets,” she says.
—Todd Longwell
On April 28 at 9:30 AM PT PvNew’s10 Innovators to Watch conversation will highlight emerging talents and technologies in communications, entertainment and technology. Register at vsrford10innovatorstowatch.splashthat/social
