I don't think it's saying too much to talk about how we're building latakoo into a cloud media database. Customers from all over the world - a large number of which are television journalists - are using us to send footage, archive it in a searchable way, and synchronize it with their own enterprise infrastructure. Broadcasting and Cable recently discussed one of the things we're doing with NBC News, which leverages our API to distribute archive footage to paying clients. But every day, we're adding more hooks and functionality to allow people to build sophisticated media workflows with latakoo as the back-end.
Here's one example of how it works.
A journalist out in the field shoots some footage, and pulls it straight off the camera into the latakoo desktop app. (For example, we'll take footage from a Panasonic P2 card.) They choose one or more destinations, and hit "start". The app then intelligently compresses the footage, taking note of metadata like timecode, and stitches segmented video files into a single long piece of footage if the user wants it to. It's then rapidly sent over a standard Internet connection (some folks use 4G cards, others go to Starbucks or use sat phones) to our servers. There's an iOS app too, of course, and Android is on the cards. We're also releasing new versions of the desktop app later in the summer, which includes much faster uploads for high-bandwidth environments.
Once the media hits our servers, it might be transcoded into a format of the recipient's choice, and sent to their infrastructure. That's important, because media operations don't want to have to worry about format incompatibilities: they just need to receive the footage quickly, in a predictable, fast way. There's full individual and role-based permissions, so only the people of the recipient's choice can see it on latakoo.com, and of course they have full control over their infrastructure.
They can embed the video on the web, of course, but they can also add extras like automatic transcriptions, or push to a custom-branded video portal. They can also use our API to search, retrieve and manipulate their content (which is designed to make integration simple, unlike the SOAP-based messes a lot of professional media platforms are saddled with).
Internally, our platform has the ability to hook any custom metadata at all off the footage, and we're in the process of releasing that to our customers too. There are also tags, notes, comments, and everything you'd expect from a social platform for business.
We're a very small team, but I'm proud of everything we've put together. We punch above our weight, consistently, and although enterprise software might not be as sexy as the next Snapchat or Instagram, we get to be the delivery backbone for some very high-quality news operations around the US. They depend on us, and we're proud to serve them.
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