The Origin
The entertainment industry is legendary for its never-quenching thirst for technological breakthroughs and improvements. So, it was as of no surprise, when at the beginning of the century, a studio marketing group engaged a group of engineers to solve a small, yet big-scale problem. Marketing needed to collaborate with their agencies for legal approval of video assets from external teams, but it took hundreds of dollars to ship tapes across the continent and days or weeks to receive back an official reply in the mail.
While simultaneously working on a number of projects, the engineers pull together, and within a few months, produced a prototype of what eventually became the most adopted digital clearance platform connecting the studio and consumer advertising with guilds and TV legal standards groups.
As the project started to gain traction with Studios, they were approached by Deluxe Entertainment corporation with an offer to join and further develop this promising tool
Early Years
Over the next few years, the team established itself as a competent and reliable service provider, growing into a standalone SAAS group subscribed by the vast majority of entertainment and consumer product advertising agencies. Some estimations at the time were showing that over 80% of domestic consumer product advertised on TV, and over 95% of motion picture advertising content in US movie theaters have been cleared through the platform
Because of the stellar reputation and superior customer service, the team was given an opportunity to extend its digital delivery service from creative and media advertising into the studio exhibitor relations, expanding the platform into B2C realm of digital content delivery.
The old clearance platform was completely revamped into a new web-based standalone consumer-oriented digital screener product, which over the next couple years became Deluxe’s official sales and Academy awards screener platform
Industry Experience
As the industry started to slowly shift away from the traditional chemical film processing, new challenges started popping up throughout what used to be a well-oiled heavy machinery process in dark rooms of Deluxe Laboratories. However, since solving problems is what engineers live for, the team got invited into assisting sister production and post-production teams at Efilm, Encore, Company 3, Method and other Deluxe facilities around the world. The projects were ranging from creating a bespoke on-location filming production Realtime+VOD service for color-corrected video takes (AKA iPad Dailies), to facilitating secure high-speed long-haul transmissions fully saturating company’s worldwide 10Gb uplinks and surpassing Aspera and Signiant capabilities at the time. The new products ended up assisting with hundreds of productions, processing thousands of scenes, takes, episodes and scouting principal photography or hair and makeup shots filmed around the world.
By the end of 2015, the combined span of service platforms managed by the team was responsible for delivery, screening and clearance of millions of pieces of content or full features representing a large majority of domestically screened and aired content for the motion picture and consumer advertising industries annually.
The New Wave
In early 2016, shortly after buying out his division back from Deluxe into private ownership, the ex-president of Deluxe Media Management group, Michael Alvarez Jr., invited the core team to join the ranks of executive leadership at his company – Vision Media Management. The mutual respect of the talented teams on both sides and an industry-established “can-do” reputation, allowed the team to seamlessly integrate into key roles and lead a number of business initiatives at Vision Media. Quickly expanding the company’s existing digital platform into field of the exhibitor, sales and academy awards screening services, the team successfully more than quadrupled the revenue from those business verticals.
Realizing a promising opportunity of improving the neglected by then advertising clearance industry, in early 2018, the team strikes a deal with VMM to spin-off the digital clearance vertical into a separate standalone partnership, effectively founding MediaQurator LLC. The new, secure and intuitive web-based platform quickly receives roaring acceptance throughout the entertainment and consumer product advertising industries. The newfound success solidifies team’s reputation in the media industry and serves as a testament of their unflinching strive to excellence in solving complex workflow improvements through modernization.