Unfinished Business
By: Mike Folgner
Tags: Collaboration, Editing, Video, Scenery, Remote Working

Introducing Scenery

Today we’re delighted to announce funding and introduce the world to Scenery, a collaborative, intelligent video creation platform. We’re excited to bring on Ashot Petrosian as head of product and co-founder and to partner with Dave Samuel at Freestyle VC as well as other amazing investors to bring Scenery to life.

In 2005 this team helped build Jumpcut.com. Jumpcut was the first web based video editor and one of the first fully functional web creativity tools. We didn’t use the word collaboration at the time, but Jumpcut allowed groups to share and edit source files and even allowed for published videos to be re-mixed. By simply pressing a button you went from viewing a video to being in your copy of the edit. We learned how creators such as iJustine built a community of artists that congregated around the craft of video editing.

Photo credit to @weibel our amazing Jumpcut Creative Director and designer

Today, most major productivity software categories have made the leap from desktop software to the web. Despite significant progress in web technology, professional video tools have not made this leap. With WebGL, WASM, and other advancements this will change. We can now build performant, feature rich applications integrated with the fabric of the web. That’s what Scenery is. We’re rethinking from scratch what video creation should look like, feel like, and be like today. We want to help make video creation into a team sport and build a platform for creators to create, learn, grow and teach each other (read a more about Scenery here).

We’re excited to continue getting feedback from editors and teams to help us further understand problems we can help them solve. Please sign up at http://scenery.video to try early releases and give us your thoughts.

This team has learned a lot from building products at Jumpcut, SnappyTV, Facebook Stories and Events, Yahoo! Video, Flickr and Twitter. Ryan and I helped lead SnappyTV, a live video post-production editor used by media companies such as the NFL and NBA which was acquired by Twitter. At Twitter we helped lead media publishing, live video and Periscope. Ashot started several companies then was instrumental in building Facebook Stories and Events. Chris Martin, who leads Scenery’s platform engineering, previously led Flickr’s platform engineering. We are excited to continue to learn how to better serve creators and their audiences through web technologies.

We are hiring an amazing engineering team to join Ryan, Ashot, Chris, Kavi and Chet to crank out the amazing designs that Alyssa is dreaming up. We have made good headway in this direction, but more remains to be built, designed and imagined. If that is something that peaks your interest, let’s talk.

Select Investment funds: FreeStyle VC, Precursor Ventures, Wireframe Ventures, Transmedia Capital, Uphonest Capital, Rembrandt Venture Partners

Select Operators and Individuals: Kayvon Beykpour, Kevin Weil, Elizabeth Weil, Russ Fradin, Joe Bernstein, Keith Coleman, Ross Walker, Bobby Jaros, Dong Min, Brian Parker. Special thanks to David Pidwell, Ryan Peirce and Don Ryan for investing in our 3rd company

Team: Alyssa, Chris, Kavi, Chet, Ashot, Ryan and Mike