Vidispine turns ten!

So far, we have had great fun creating an outstandingly smart team, solving complex problems and working closely with many fantastic customers and partners. We have also pushed the tech frontier in areas such as Video APIs, Cloud, Metadata and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

An early and special memory is of course when we sat on Erik’s porch with post-it-notes and sorted all features we could think of in two piles; “Hard to achieve” & “Relevant for all customers”. We said that the few things that ended up in both piles were the things to focus on, for the rest we should use existing and commoditized solutions and software. This culture lives on still today, we ask ourselves, “is this new functionality both hard to achieve and relevant?”.

Another fun memory was when we were trying to sell the product with only a print-out of the upcoming API at IBC, which was a bit challenging.

The mindset “how hard can it be?” can get you to do crazy ideas. That together with “there must a be another way of doing that” is a powerful combination.

We founded Vidispine in 2009 because we believed (and still believe) in the power of software innovation and how it can transform industries. Our vision was to build a software platform to make it easier than ever before to build innovative, video-based solutions. We decided to use our background of 15 years of building software companies and changing the media industry to build the best platform for creating innovative media software solutions.

The API-based Media Asset Management Platform is still the core of our business. In September 2017, we released Vidinet, our cloud-based service platform. This enabled us to launch the Vidispine API as a service, which is extendable with scalable cloud media services.

Admittedly, back in the early years, you almost had to have a Master in Java EE to bring up a Vidispine system. Fortunately, this is much easier now with Vidinet. From the beginning, the design principles were: micro services, multi-site, on-prem. These days: micro services, multi-site, hybrid.

One thing that has not changed is the metadata focus. We did not really foresee that not locking the solution to a metadata model would make it possible to make the same solution work with everything from PIM to ML to IMF.

Ten years ago we had “cloud” on the slide decks, and most people (including ourselves) could only guess the impact it would have. Today cloud is no longer a technology decision, it is something you must take into consideration when doing your business strategy. A lot has happened during the last ten years on this front

Video has become the dominant story-telling medium, the power of APIs on software platforms reached a break-through and cloud is no longer an experiment. Even metadata is getting its well-deserved place as a value creator in any organization!

We will want to continue to have Vidispine as a company, as an employer and all our customers and partners to stay ahead of the curve. This is what makes it all worthwhile, looking into what comes next and address, real-world problems with these solutions, daily. Our industry is changing fast, the challenge is to think big enough and adapt.

For the tech side, we started with the thought; how large a system can be, and how small it can be. With cloud and containerization, that will almost certainly continue. Not long from now, we might have Vidispine systems with a billion assets. On the other hand, Vidispine can be quite stripped down. If anyone wants to have a hackathon on VS-on-a-chip, let us know!