Dublin-based tech firm Overcast HQ has announced a $1.2 million bridging round to help the world’s largest brands and broadcasters manage terabytes of video content with AI and a suite of cloud solutions.
The company focuses on full-stack video management. It was founded by CEO Philippe Brodeur, who has first-hand experience in the need for video content management.
I spoke to Brodeur to find out more.
He’s a former video news producer at the BBC when it was normal to send five people (a producer, reporter, camera person, sound technician and lighting person) to get a 30 second clip from a politician.
He told me “We couldn’t even get everyone in the same car.”
And the efficiencies weren’t limited to transport. It was cheaper and faster to fly from London to Hollywood to pick up hard drives than it was to upload a video to the Cloud – and this was only in 2015. His career is peppered by work on award-winning factual programmes and series at the BBC that won awards, but he believes he would have done more if the tech wasn’t so restrictive.
Even today, despite 80 per cent of content being video as opposed to stills, the technology to manage this bulkier file was practically non-existent. He started Overcast HQ to make video management a lot easier.
The company recently announced the launch of new generative AI capabilities. Brodeur explained, “we’ve been working with AI for 7 years. We wanted to know, how can we use Gen AI to not create content, but manage content?"
It enables customers to automate metadata tagging, find content with conversational search functionality —the AI ‘reads’ the video as it would a text file — and increase speed to market.
He explained:
“The more content that's created, the more content needs to be managed. Compliance is becoming a massive issue. Your content has to be compliant with your brand.
It has to be compliant with the fonts you use and the local countries into which you're pushing the content.
But you can’t just push a ton of content in and not know where it's come from and where it's going. You still have to manage it. You have to manage it and understand how it performs.”
Now performance data doesn’t have to exist in a silo.
“Performance is always something delivered to the marketing company. And the creators have no idea what was performing well and not performing well.”
Overcast HQ makes it possible for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. It works with brands including Diageo, Royal Opera House, Vodafone and Yeti.
Brodeur shared:
“Brands and broadcasters want adverts and other video assets that are personalised for different geographies, but it is often simpler to reshoot than find what they need from the terabytes or petabytes of content they already have.
We want to help set them free and deliver tailored content at speed and at scale.”
The company also works with the police and public services who need an effective way to manage video data. He recalled their cumbersome problem of dealing with data:
“How do they share it? They literally put it onto a hard drive and then send it to someone which is exactly what broadcasters do, which is a really bad idea.
If you send it to somebody, that content can end up anywhere.”
Overcast HQ also provides valuable business intelligence for all kinds of enterprises. Brodeur asserts that “AI is nothing unless you can use it to attain business intelligence and through that personalisation.
“In the past, access management was just sort of a blunt instrument. I can put my content on a server, either on-premise or in the cloud.
And it sat there and that's about it. With AI we now add new data to that.
We can identify various costing data. Users can really understand efficacy on a campaign-by-campaign basis, a program-by-program basis, or even an asset-by-asset basis.”
Personalisation is the ultimate goal because that's where you can differentiate yourself in the marketplace.”
The round brings together a series of heavyweight angel investors including Paddy Flynn, VP of Maps for Google, Professor Anil Kokaram, Chair of Electronic Engineering at Trinity College Dublin and former lead of the Media Algorithms team at YouTube, David Shackleton, who sold Openback to X (formerly Twitter), as well as George Kilpatrick, Overcast HQ’s Chief Revenue Officer.
The company is currently building towards a Series A funding round this summer. The funds will be used to grow the team further and continue product development as the company expands its client footprint worldwide.
Lead image: Overcast HQ. Photo: uncredited.
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