Complete Coverage: 2012 NAB Show
Following an additional $7 million venture capital investment, London-based Aframe is expanding its cloud video production platform into North America. As part of the expansion, the company has launched a U.S. headquarters in Boston and operations in New York and Los Angeles.
Aframe also named Mark Overington, who was part of the founding team at Avid Technology and its former head of marketing, as president of Aframe North America.
The new Aframe US network will debut on April 16 at the start of NAB 2012, where the company will be showcasing the solution.
The expansion of its cloud production infrastructure was made possible by a new $7 million Series A round of venture capital funding, provided by Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures, with participation by existing investor, Northstar Ventures.
Aframe started operations in the U.K. in November 2010, and has since worked with over 50 customers including the BBC, MTV, Giant Film & Television, Thumbs Up, Zig Zag Productions, Shine Group and others, notes David Peto, the firm's founder and CEO, in an interview.
"From day one, about 40% of our clients were from the U.S. and we had always aimed at expanding into the U.S.," which was made possible by the recent venture capital investments Peto explains.
Its cloud-based video production infrastructure was designed to help companies better collaborate and streamline the production process.
The system allows for broadcast-quality video formats in any length to be uploaded either over the Internet or at Aframe's network of drop off points into Aframe's private cloud storage infrastructure. This includes uncompressed raw footage, which had been difficult in the past, given the typical cloud computing constraints.
Peto also stresses that they offer private cloud service that overcomes the security concerns some companies have had about sending their material over the public internet. "Security is a big concern and if they chose, everything can go over our own network," he notes.
The cloud based solutions are also extremely helpful in streamlining workflows large projects, Peto argues.
In recent months, for example, Veria Living, a producer of such wellness programming such as "The Incurables" and "Rock Your Yoga," has uploaded over 600 hours of video to Aframe in the past several months, using it to make promo versions of its shows and share content among, collaborators in New York, Singapore and India.
"Aframe costs us one-tenth of the purchase of a typical media asset management system, and lets our project teams easily access and create content from anywhere and everywhere in the world -- something typical MAM systems can't do, " added said Unmesh Khadlikar, head of information technology at Veria in a statement. "It's one of the smartest technology decisions we've made."
