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On Wednesday 17 November 2010, we welcomed the glitterati of Soho's production and post-production community to the Future Gallery in London for the public launch of Aframe. We had a lot of fun and we had so many people attend that someone fainted in the middle of the squeeze. First box ticked!
We screened full resolution footage of the event being uploaded, as the event went on, then had it tagged by our metadata team and then, by the end of my speech, we started finding footage of guests live in the system. Where's Simon Harper? is still apocryphal.
We got great press (and not just for people fainting) and picked up our first customers. The first of which, a distribution company that shares out its catalogue via Aframe, is still happily with us. This makes me extremely proud.
Four months after we produced what we believe is the first truly cloud powered TV series The Manor Reborn for the BBC we had our first large US customer. Five months after that we closed our Series A round, then went live in the US with a team in Boston and datacentres in New York and Los Angeles. I look back on our excitement as the first signups started landing, the first share links being sent and the very first uploads coming in.
The first invoice we ever sent is signed by the entire team and framed behind my desk. It was for £1,468.75. I have it there to remind me that although today we may handle huge quantities of video across the globe, we must never forget that it wasn't always like that.
There were ten of us for the launch day and the night before I think we broke records for the consumption of Monster energy drink! One of our lead developers was found in desperation hugging a giant cuddly rabbit.
There's a somewhat overused description of building a startup it's like throwing yourself of a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down. It seems ridiculous, but when you are attempting to do something this new, there's often no other way.
At times during the last three years we've been offered an easy way forward we could have limited ourselves to low resolution content, we could have just used Amazon, we could have licensed an asset management system to sit underneath Aframe, we could have purchased specialist video storage, we could have used existing transcoding technology and so on.
Not taking the easy route sometimes seems crazy, and at times I'm certain the team here has thought we were, but if you need to build something that's truly global, taking shortcuts isn't an option.
And don't just listen to me when one of the largest US Networks signed a deal with us recently, we were told by the SVP Technology that Aframe was truly groundbreaking in its architecture and that's why they chose us.
As we go into another year of refusing to take the easy road, it's things like this that make it all worthwhile. Those of us in the room furiously coding and prepping the night before the launch had only a dream that we'd get this kind of thing said about us, but that's the point we believed it might happen one day.
Related posts:
Aframe will be in BAMMA's corner
BAMMA 6 benefits from Aframe live footage logging
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