“Framing” Up the Big Video Tools Opportunity
Video is one of the most pervasive, highest engaging units of content on the web. Globally, companies are taking advantage of our growing diet of online video atop rapidly-improving delivery infrastructure to push video across channels. It’s no surprise that many of Accel’s fastest-growing and best-monetizing consumer companies (lynda.com, Vox Media, to name a few) use video as a core part of their product experience. These are the early innings of a big shift in attention, spend, and economic value away from traditional media — and towards a new world order of elite, digital media startups.
Fostering this means re-thinking how companies think of content as a product. Most are creating for new channels like Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Youtube and Snapchat — cutting long-form video for the web, and short-form “snackable” versions for mobile. They’re ingesting raw footage from widely distributed teams who otherwise fumble around with laggy FTPs or file shares. And they’re doing this while collaborating across an increasing number of stakeholders, from content to engineering, sales to marketing. Adobe and Apple will be mainstays of the video tools “stack” as it relates to the core bits, but there’s still a lot of pain to be solved between the point of capture and the final product. That’s especially true in context of the explosion in video we’re witnessing.
Today we’re announcing our seed investment in Frame.io, a powerful workflow platform based in NYC that’s setting a new standard for content collaboration. Frame.io is building the model for how teams create, injecting some much needed order to the chaos. Progressive content platforms like Buzzfeed, lynda.com, Facebook, Refinery29 are pushing content at faster and faster rates; they’ve already discovered how Frame.io streamlines their video, audio and content production, bringing the process in line with the realities of today’s publishing realities.
Frame’s founders Emery Wells and John Traver are no strangers to the category, having run their own video production agency in NYC for many years. Put simply, they have a deep grasp of the ins and outs of pushing content through the production pipeline. While the platform is feature-full already, Emery and John have an ambitious but densely rich product roadmap of features forthcoming. It’s an exciting time to be joining!
Frame.io follows a long lineage of video related bets for us at Accel, beginning with our investments in publishing and management platform Brightcove (BCOV), edge-caching and delivery infrastructure Qwilt, video conferencing platform Blue Jeans, and video-forward media companies like lynda.com, Vox Media and Joyus. Not to mention Facebook, now the 2nd largest video site in the U.S. (and a Frame.io customer!)
We’re excited to be joined by some terrific angels and seed investors: Jon Dahl, founder of Zencoder; Clark Valberg, founder at InVision; and the tremendous teams at SignalFire and FundersGuild. Add to that a few great angels around the table: Jared Leto, Walter Kortshak, and Thomas Hesse (former president of Sony Music and co-founder of Vevo). All the ingredients to frame up the big opportunity in this space.
Vas
