Video Online?
Written by Nuri Djavit
There are some distinct advantages to being British and doing work in the US but there’s also a few disadvantages. Today I am reminded of one in particular: modesty. It’s a blessing and a curse all by itself and very often I’m prompted to be less shy about boasting our company’s achievements.
Last Exit was borne out of a company called Deepend. Started by three Royal college mavericks, one of them the inimitable Gary Lockton, the company was twice named world’s #1 creative interactive agency. We were a design powerhouse and also a technology pioneer, notching up firsts in Flash development, iTV (interactive television), mobile, integrated campaigns and online video. When I started Last Exit with Andy Beach, online video was a speciality of ours and as one of Apple’s technology partners we produced boutique encoding services and development services for interactive QuickTime. Interactive video, we were sure, would be big and bigger, would be distribution and sharing of video. To that end, we developed the first interactive QuickTime powered by a full content management system. Long time friend to Last Exit, Eyeball NYC was our first commercial success as we produced a video library for their archive - all in QuickTime. The amazing thing was that you could senf the QT skin to someone via email, it would launch and draw the content over the net from our servers. It was a bloody masterpiece and was such a success that we went on to develop several iterations, finally going for an HTML interface and branding it “WaterCooler”. Ken McGorry wrote an article about it back in early 2003 (click here to see the article) and we won several contracts including one with Voltage Video - a traditional tape house/archive - for whom we customized the entire system and built out transcoding infrastructure at their New York city HQ. This enabled their clients to securely long on, and manage all their video based assets and even distribute in any media via Voltages distribution channels. But technology was merely transportation for the creative campaigns we were developing and other fantastic tools started to emerge that we began to use also.
We now utilize a range of solutions as best fit our clients and have built a very successful creative agency. I do want to pin a big fat medal on our collective chests though as (very) early mover in the world of online video. We now continue to exploit all the best aspects of video online and it is now part of almost every campaign we’re involved with. Good job we have the nous to to deploy it properly, effectively and relevantly.
Some examples:
