PEOPLE OF THE MONTH
Kris Brown and Kristan Bullett
Brown and Bullett may sound like an ITV2 detective drama, but these two are the co-founders of Piksel – and the men behind video-ondemand services back when Netflix was sending DVDs in the mail.
It’s rare that anyone gets the opportunity to be one of the founding fathers of a new industry. The PC Pro staff turned up around 250 years too late to be at the birth of magazine publishing. (For some, that’s the closest they’ve come to meeting a deadline.)
Kris Brown and Kristan Bullett are one of those lucky few who can say “I was there”. Before Netflix, before Amazon, even before YouTube, they were building some of the first online video-on-demand services for companies such as Sky and Channel 4. They had no manuals to follow and no market leaders to mimic because they were the pioneers – the people doing this for the first time.
Now joint managing directors of British video solutions firm Pixsel, they can not only look back at 15 years of experience in the internet video market, but look forward to some of the more outlandish innovations that are on the way. You might not be watching the director’s cut of your favourite movie in a couple of years’ time, for instance, but an ending that’s been cut to meet your personal preferences. In between dreaming of a massacre scene at the end of
I caught up with Brown and Bullett to discuss where video-on-demand is headed.
Building the foundations
While Piksel itself has only been in business since 2013, the company’s past can be traced back more than 20 years. It has a history more colourful than some of the videos it delivers. The company started life as Infocom (UK) back in 1995 and later became Ioko. Ioko was purchased in 2011 by a company called KIT Digital, the eponymously named firm owned by Kaleil Isaza Tuzman. KIT Digital filed for bankruptcy in 2013, after the company announced that previous financial statements had been misstated. Tuzman and fellow executives were subsequently found guilty of inflating the company’s share price by buying shares with the company’s own money and were convicted of defrauding KIT’s investors.
Now distanced from its disgraced former owners, the company re-emerged as Piksel in 2013. It continues to work with some of the biggest names in broadcasting. “Piksel is – depending on your argument – anywhere between 20 and four years old,” Bullett told us. “There’s been quite a lot of history there,” he adds with commendable understatement.
Ioko, as it was back then, started working with companies such as Sky on its first video-on-demand products back in 2003. “That was the start of online video as we know it,” said Bullett. “Obviously, there was no Netflix then, I don’t even think there was a YouTube then.
“We built Sky Anytime – or Now TV or Sky Go or whatever it’s called these days – for Sky. There were no products available at the time to support this. We built 4 on Demand for Channel 4. Again, it was very early days and a very bespoke implementation.”
Nowadays, the company has a broad portfolio of products and managed services to support customers delivering video in all manner of industries. Its Fuse Metadata Manager helps companies manage and deliver huge video catalogues by ensuring video content is correctly tagged, for example. It has products that help orchestrate a video supply chain and deliver that content to viewers. It’s also behind the video services in transport hubs, such as Heathrow Airport. “We’re a name behind lots of household brands,” said Brown.
The Big Data of video
Video is, of course, a Big Data business. Much of the success of Netflix is attributed to the company’s success in putting the content that people want to see in front of their eyes – the menu of programmes being recommended to each viewer is tailored specifically to their likes and previous viewing habits. “Metadata is very important,” said Bullett. There are huge amounts and different types of metadata that can be collected for each piece of content. First, there’s the technical metadata: which camera was used to shoot the scene, how long is it, what resolution is it shot at, which devices can it
support. “That really does go as far as what camera lens was used to record this piece of video,” Bullet said.
Then there’s the content metadata that describes what the video contains. “When I bring that piece of video content onto our platform, I pull out the technical information, someone may add the description information… but in terms of analysing that video content we can start doing some interesting things to it.
“We’re talking about machine learning,” Bullett added. “I can do things like entity identification. Do I recognise that object? Do I recognise that landscape? Do I recognise that location?”
How does recognising objects and locations help video producers? In two ways. First, much of today’s viral video content is made up of clips cobbled together. If you’re putting together the “Top 10 movie car chases in London” or “Top 10 Ronaldo goals”, having a platform that can automatically recognise things, people and places is a huge timesaver. Being able to automatically identify scenes of violence or nudity is another big plus for content owners, who are often shipping footage to different geographies with different regulations on what is and isn’t allowed to be broadcast. Then there’s the corn that can be earned. “If you can advertise holidays in Cyprus because the video [you’re watching] is filmed in Cyprus… there’s some pretty obvious benefits there,” said Brown.
Piksel’s platform can perform other services that increase the value of the footage to its owners or help drive down their costs. For example, the company’s software can listen to the audio and then transcribe subtitles, if they’ve not already been provided. “I’m sure you’ve seen online videos were the lip-sync is out and it’s really annoying,” said Bullett. “We can correct that – the computer can see when people’s lips are moving and realign the audio. People have to do that manually at the moment.”
Piksel’s software can even determine the emotional punch of a particular clip. “We have various techniques to understand how happy or sad should this content make you,” Bullett explained. “If you’re watching Netflix, we can then say ‘actually, based on you as a consumer, we know this will make you feel happy, and therefore we can recommend other pieces of content to you that will also make you feel happy.” It’s got to be better than Prozac.
With all this metadata and the ability to slice and dice video content into different formats, what does the future hold for the video business? Bullett says too many companies aren’t thinking far enough ahead. “Frustratingly, so many broadcasters and distributors, all they want to do is try and catch up with Netflix,” said Bullett. “You talk to them about interesting things and the response will be, ‘ah, Netflix are doing this. Can we do that?’”
Beyond Netflix
However, there are some clients that are looking for a point of differentiation and Piksel is working on finding the answers for them. “We can make a very personalised experience for you as a consumer,” Bullet explained to me. “How far could it go? I can certainly see a situation where we are doing on-demand productions of content in a very personalised way. Can you imagine a situation where you’re viewing a personalised version of a movie because they know how you like to consume that content? Not a Director’s Cut but a Barry Cut.”
And that (terrifying) Barry Cut might not only contain personalised content, but personalised advertising, too. “Once we identify that’s a can of Coke in a piece of content, there are techniques that let us replace that with a can of Lilt or a can of Fanta,” said Bullett, who is clearly such a clean-living chap that he’s not bought a can of soft drink since 1986.
The question is: will consumers start railing against this personalised product placement in the same way they used ad-blockers to stop banner ads for the holiday destination they Googled ten minutes ago? “It’s got to be sufficiently subtle if you’re going to do product placement,” said Bullett. “In the UK, we have legislation against product placement, as well.”
You may have been spared. For now.
I can see a situation where we are doing on-demand productions of content in a very personalised way