ScreenLight
Streamlining Video Production Through Centralized File-Sharing and Feedback

A managing director at an L.A.-based production company faces serious challenges to deliver media that meets the expectations of a global roster of clients. Massive video files take a long time to upload and send. It’s hard to know if clients are commenting on the latest version of the video or have even seen it at all. And it’s frustrating to fish through confusing email threads for client feedback. The separation between a project’s media files and feedback makes for inefficient progress and poor communication. Chris Potter co-founded ScreenLight to solve these problems.ScreenLight is an advanced cloud-based video review and approval platform that ties together project media and feedback, saving clients and producers time, money, and headaches. “We provide a simple, private, and centralized way to share media and get feedback on it during video production and post production,” Potter says. Editors, production companies, broadcasters, creative agencies, and even in-house media departments at Fortune 1000 companies can upload.

ScreenLight is an advanced cloud-based video review and approval platform that ties together project media and feedback, saving clients and producers time, money, and headaches. “We provide a simple, private, and centralized way to share media and get feedback on it during video production and post production,” Potter says.

Editors, production companies, broadcasters, creative agencies, and even in-house media departments at Fortune 1000 companies can upload videos in any file format. ScreenLight transcodes them and creates high-quality proxy versions. This allows video professionals and their clients to view the videos on computers, tablets, smart phones, and practically every other device without downloading a plugin or app. Potter and his partner, Marc Tremblay, designed ScreenLight to make project collaboration simple. Once video files are uploaded and ready for review, project stakeholders can watch them and offer real-time feedback. ScreenLight’s user-friendly interface lets them type in comments as they watch videos, and the platform automatically timestamps them and adds them to the appropriate place on the video timeline. Collaborators read and respond to the comments all in the same location.

ScreenLight is private by default, relying on bank-grade encryption to keep projects secure. The user decides who else gets to see the video files and their level of interaction with them. Users can access video files via a password-protected login system or quick links.
The ScreenLight difference lies in its simplicity of use. Clients can work alongside more tech-savvy video professionals without a hitch. Because the platform keeps the critical project information in one place, everyone involved sees feedback in its proper context. There are fewer miscommunications, wading through email chains, and version control issues when everyone can see the exact video frame each comment refers to. ScreenLight is powered by Amazon Web Services, which allows encoding capacity to be scaled up instantly to keep videos from getting stuck in the long processing queues characteristic of most consumer video services. Likewise, the CloudFront content delivery network ensures clients can reliably view videos from anywhere.

Serving a global market across the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, ScreenLight’s clientele includes Angle Media, Biscardi Creative Media, The Second City, and York University Media Services. Epitome Pictures, the producer of popular TV shows Degrassi and The L.A. Complex, struggled to find an efficient way to share video with their production team and the broadcasters who ultimately aired the episodes. ScreenLight helps them organize project media and get feedback from time-stretched producers and broadcasters around North America, who can review videos anywhere and on any device Using the ScreenLight platform improves Epitome’s project communication and helps them meet tight production-industry deadlines. While there are plenty of great platforms for mass distribution once video is done, professionals are hungry for a better way to share video as its being produced. The market potential isn’t lost on Potter. “The amount of video on the web is growing at an astounding rate,” he says, “and much of this is still professionally produced.” ScreenLight continues to adapt to better serve that market, which Cisco estimates is growing by 30 percent each year; it’s about to launch a new version of its product that expands its capability to address much more complex workflows and the needs of much larger customers.