Frame.io: Video Collaboration Simplified

With video on track to account for 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2020, as per the report from Cisco, the medium is playing an increasingly important role in business activities across all industries. However, with video production comes a new workflow which requires creation, collaboration, editing, and publishing. Frame.io is a company that has emerged to streamline the process.

CEO of Frame.io, Emery Wells, previously had a post-production company in New York City that made television commercials like SNL digital shorts and commercial parodies. However, he ran into some pain points in the process. His company was having trouble collaborating with vendors, clients, and each other on the videos they were creating. One of the biggest problems was large video files had to be shared and file sharing services like Dropbox or video sharing sites like YouTube or Vimeo were the best options. These can take a long time to upload large video files and don’t offer integrated collaboration tools. For example, prior to Frame.io, you might upload a video to Dropbox and share the link with others so they can review it. The conversation about the video would be back and forth through email, referencing timestamps to share feedback. As you can probably imagine, this is highly inefficient and makes it hard to keep track of what is going on.

In response, Wells began developing software that could solve their workflow problems internally. This was the seed that led to Frame.io.

He sums up the tool in the following words, “Frame.io is built for the business of creating video. It brings all stakeholders together and gives them one cohesive platform where all the things they’re working on, and communication around those things, can live in one place.”

Wells’s company wasn’t the only one looking for a solution. The software launched about a year ago and quickly gained traction. After the first 90 days, Frame.io received 2.2 million in seed funding from Accel which helped them grow and launch their iPhone mobile app. The mobile app offers all of the functionality of the web app and won a 2016 Apple Design Award. Now they are the largest in the industry and have about 250,000 users. Also, most recently Frame.io raised a $10 million round of financing from industry elites like Jared Leto and Kevin Spacey that will help them further propel their growth.

Who are the users rapidly adopting this solution? While Wells’s original company produced digital shorts and commercial parodies, the users of the app reach far beyond traditional media companies. There are a wide range of sub-segments including online education, traditional universities, entertainment/advertising, progressive new media companies, and tech companies. Industry leaders such as BuzzFeed, PayPal, Tesla, and Harvard (just to name a few) quickly integrated Frame.io into their workflow.

As Wells says, “We solve the challenges that people have when they are working on video.” The Frame.io tool is a combination of different services for different tasks. It enables large accelerated file sharing, work in progress review, and all the conversation that goes on around it. If you have a video, you can invite all collaborators to come join a private and secure environment. Then, you can leave time-stamped comments, place annotations on the actual video, and leave comments about specific topics using hashtags. Version control keeps videos neatly stacked in one place and allows you to compare versions side by side. Wells comments about the product, “We aren’t building what we think people need. We’re building what we know they need, because we are them,” he concludes.