72 START-UP ALLEY Rotor Video
To achieve this he assembled (or in Moloney’s words “chased”) a crack team of creative coders and award-winning music video producers. His first port of call was Dr Hugh Denman, a trained engineer, video editor, coder and jazz musician who led a research team at Trinity College in Dublin, which had built video post technologies that they later sold to Google. On the creative side he also recruited two award-winning music promo producers: Phil Tidy, who has produced videos for Coldplay, Oasis, Florence and the Machine and Primal Scream; and Eoghan Kidney, whose credits include work for Underworld, Caribou and Madonna. The video producers helped design the system and curate the clip library so that it did not become, in their own words, “a sterile stockpile of generic clips”. He adds that the library, which contains over 3,500 clips, has become a bigger part of the offering over time, simply because around 85% of users elect to use this footage rather than their own. “When we launched the prototype we just had a few on offer in the background, mainly as a test, but everyone wanted them. Most of the footage we commission ourselves – and we have a community of videographers ready to shoot stuff on brief,” he adds. Other key members of the company – which is mainly funded by private individuals – are CTO and co-founder, Tim Redfern, who coded Rotor’s cloud-based rendering engine, and co-founder Simon Hamilton, an entrepreneur who also runs a bespoke app development agency in Belfast. “Simon managed the development of the product, made sure we got something in the cloud and got it beyond the point of beta,” Moloney adds. Since its full launch at the beginning of 2017, over 200,000 videos have been created using Rotor, for the price of $25 per bespoke HD video. And it’s not just independent artists who are using the software: the bigger music labels – including Sony Music, Universal and Warner Music Group – have become customers, too. “They have huge catalogues of music they need video content for, so they can monetise them on YouTube,” Moloney explains. The venture has involved creating some hefty tech, but Moloney insists that the wrap around is user friendly. In fact, he adds: “One band was so impressed with how easy it was, they said even their drummer could use it...”
ROTOR VIDEO
COUNTRY: IRELAND STARTED: 2012
FACE THE MUSIC Publishers of music have flocked to Diarmuid Moloney’s
‘WordPress for music videos’
There’s something of a punk ethos behind Rotor Video, which aims to be WordPress for the music video world. “Things don’t have to be done like they’ve always been done – now we can use AI, data, signal processing and algorithms to level the playing field and help independent artists get their stuff onto YouTube,” says the company’s co-founder Diarmuid Moloney. Because YouTube accounts for almost half of all music streaming, it’s important for musicians to have a presence on the platform, but putting together non-generic video content still requires a decent budget. Rotor Video aims to disrupt this process. Users upload a song onto the website, add their own clips or choose from Rotor’s clip library and then leave the rest to a music video creation tool. Rotor’s software lives in the cloud and analyses songs in segments, looking at features such as the chorus and verse
composition, as well as beats and intensity levels, enabling the software to make the appropriate editing choices. According to Moloney, this is achieved through a mix of algorithms as well as signal processing and audiovisual processing technologies, although there are plans to add machine learning to the mix next year. “We intend to use AI on things that will improve the complexity and variety of features available to users. Machine learning tools will help create better customisation and make it a bit more of a bespoke experience for each user,” he says. Moloney – a graphic designer, visual artist, animator and music producer – first designed the tool as a plug-in for music production software. “It was more than just a visualiser, it could edit clips into a coherent piece, it was quite basic but its popularity convinced me that we could turn it into a standalone app.”
THINGS DON’T HAVE TO BE DONE LIKE THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN DONE – NOWWE CAN USE AI, DATA, SIGNAL PROCESSING AND ALGORITHMS TO LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD
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