IBC 2018: Forbidden Technologies’ Blackbird highlights cloud capabilities and conversion to JavaScript
Forbidden Technologies (1.C27), the developer and seller of Blackbird, will be working with Microsoft at IBC 2018 to showcase Blackbird’s workstation experience in the cloud. In addition, the company has launched its editing platforms, Ascent and Forte in JavaScript.
Forbidden showcases Blackbird’s cloud experience on Microsoft’s Azure IBC 2018 stand
Production teams use Blackbird running on Azure Media Services to turn live video into edited and enriched stories. These are published through Blackbird and hosted on Azure. The service is accessed using any browser on any device from anywhere in the world.
Blackbird is the only solution on the market that provides such responsive frame-accurate navigation in the cloud. It plays edited media directly without any need for pre-render, and its integrated Blackbird Waveform supports jog and shuttle, as well as any playback speed and direction.
Deltatre, a leading supplier of digital and broadcast services in the sports sector, is an extensive user of Blackbird through Azure Media Services. Deltatre uses Blackbird to extend its OTT offering of editing services for live and on-demand content for a wide range of sports including American football, athletics, golf, rugby, and cycling.
In one example, Blackbird Forte is used to edit live highlights for 256 games per season of a major US sport all using Azure.
“We are very happy to work with Microsoft Azure on their stand this year,” says Forbidden CEO Ian McDonough. “It’s a great opportunity for us to showcase our Blackbird Edge software operating in Azure and a ground-breaking workflow that has come as a result of our cooperation.”
“In today’s demanding news, media, and digital industry, our mutual customers depend on solutions such as Blackbird to increase speed to market,” says Tony Emerson, Managing Director, Worldwide Media & Entertainment Microsoft Corp. “We are pleased Forbidden Technologies plc will make the Blackbird cloud platform available to Microsoft Azure customers, further enhancing their ability to create and manage digital content, while reducing production costs and fostering workforce flexibility.”
Conversion to JavaScript frees the Blackbird
This development allows Blackbird’s intuitive cloud video editing to be used in browsers without additional configuration or installation of plugins or applications. The powerful features already available in the Java version of Blackbird, including ultra-quick logging, clipping, editing, publishing, and distribution of live and non-live video content in the cloud, are now implemented in the JavaScript version. The Blackbird editing platforms support editing resolutions of up to 540p and up to 60 frames per second, with publishing from original sources supported up to 4K.
This significant breakthrough in the development of Blackbird, which Forbidden first previewed in March this year, has been made possible by the company’s partnership with Leaning Technologies, a leading provider of web application tools. Forbidden Technologies used Leaning Technologies’ powerful CheerpJ compiler to convert Java byte code directly into its JavaScript web application.
Blackbird enables secure, ultra-fast, frame-accurate editing and distribution of video content by anyone, anytime, anywhere on web and mobile devices using bandwidth as low as 2Mb per second. Delivering a true incredibly responsive workstation-like experience in the cloud, Blackbird has worked on over 8m hours of professional video to date. This has been across multiple sectors globally including news, sports, eSports, events and broadcast post-production.
Since the start of the year, Forbidden Technologies has announced Blackbird contracts and partnerships with leading technology and media companies including TownNews.com, Veritone, Leaning Technologies, Our House Media, Dragon Touch Systems, Middlechild, Fanview, ESP Gaming, and Von Johnson Associates.
“We are thrilled to announce we now have our rich set of cloud-based Blackbird production tools translated into JavaScript while retaining all of our lightning quick performance,” says McDonough. “It is a boundary pushing technical feat that many people initially thought impossible. Our customers will now have access to our entire suite of digital production tools for use through a browser on any hardware that can be operated as low as a 2Mb/s bandwidth connection. This hugely increases the addressable audience and, as we move to mass take up through our OEM strategy, it increases the efficiency of new customer onboarding enormously.
Together with the Mac version of the Blackbird Edge, announced this week, the Blackbird proxy can also be created remotely on something as widely available as an Apple laptop which is then immediately available in the cloud to be edited, enriched or published.”