In Broadcast - October 2020 - 24

24

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 10 - Issue 10 | October 2020

InReply

Remote Working Sees
Blackbird Soar Higher
Adrian Pennington in conversation with Ian McDonough, CEO,
Blackbird, on the key developments that led him to join Blackbird...
Adrian
Pennington:
You've
worked at the top of some of the
biggest media companies in the
world including Viacom and BBC
Worldwide. Why did you join
Blackbird?
Ian McDonough: I enjoyed the
corporate world for many years. I was
running a US$150 million P&L which
sounds big but was tiny in the bluechip media landscape. Over time it
became a little too bureaucratic and
had lost its edge for me. I was really
keen to back myself in a business
where I could make many more of the
key decisions without swathes of board
approvals. I looked at private equity
but Blackbird was one step better.
Here was a listed UK company with
a proven world leading technology
gem at its core at a time when the
industry was moving to the cloud. They
required a reboot. A focused strategy,
clear branding and a strong front
office team to take it forward. I was
confident I could deliver on that.
AP: What were the 'gems' as you
saw them?
IMcD: The company had developed
an incredible web-based video codec
from scratch and built a fully-featured
sophisticated editing toolset around
it. I didn't know quite how special it
was until I took it to the biggest tech
giants companies on the West Coast.
At Google, Apple and Microsoft, the
universal response was 'Wow! We've
not seen that before!'

That told me that instead of being a
strong, niche company, this could be
a world beater. That was when I was
persuaded to invest in the business
directly and persuaded my family to.
AP: That was in 2017. What key
developments
have
happened
since?
IMcD: The main goal for us was
moving from being an artisan product
in Soho servicing a small part of the

post industry to being a much more
industrial product under new brand
and company name.
A big breakthrough was striking a
major deal with A+E Networks over
three years which demonstrated how
hundreds of users every single day
were accessing and adding value to
their archive and publishing content
directly from Blackbird.
Another five-year deal with a
major New York-based global news

organisation closed in November 2019
took us to the next stage. This was for
production and delivery of live news,
daily, to a worldwide audience.
In the background we were also
winning multiple smaller deals with a
number of OEM operations - Deltatre,
IMG, TownNews - across a wide variety
sports and 50 US TV news stations.
This gave us an insight into how the
business side of things was going to
take off by working through third
parties, so integration of Blackbird into
other systems became a priority.
AP: What has been the impact
of COVID on Blackbird and its
customers?
IMcD: Ironically, one of the things
we didn't talk about much in the first
two years of Blackbird was remote
working. Our technology is incredibly
fast and efficient and we're able to
scale easily because anyone can use
us in any browser on any laptop over
bandwidth as restricted as 2 MB/s. But
culturally, remote working was not
high on the agenda. Since COVID-19,
the most important aspect is remote.
Our competitors in this area are
traditional
on-premise
solutions
who have virtualised cloud offerings.
To operate such a system in virtual
instances requires 30-50 MB/s
bandwidth, local and cloud storage
and a very fast GPU on the ground.
Blackbird's footprint is insignificant
in comparison. This allows people to
work from home or anywhere.
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In Broadcast - October 2020

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