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Video as a medium continues to gain prevalence given better bandwidth, mobile connectivity, and cultural factors. Creation and distribution tools also continue to democratize “pro-sumer” video like TikTok. But at the professional end of the scale, quality production is still expensive and hard to find.
This is the segment of the video market that Stringr addresses. The company has created a sort of networked marketplace to connect supply and demand for video creation. That includes everything from a library of locally relevant B-roll footage for news stories to specific on-demand assignments.
Traditionally, the latter is commissioned in old-school ways including the finite rolodex of a given news organization, documentarian, or brand advertiser. Stringr saw this as an opportunity to bring greater marketplace transparency and network effect to the production of localized video content.
This brings speed and efficiency to the process of sourcing video, according to Stringr co-founder & CEO Brian McNeill, the latest guest on our Heard on the Street podcast:
“We have a network of over 100,000 videographers who have signed up for our platform and have our app installed on their iOS or Android device. So, what this means is as a media organization, for example, NBC News who needs video of a given news event…say a protest in Illinois… they can drop a pin on a map and request that video. Then a push notification goes out to everybody nearby. And those folks who choose to accept, shoot video of that protest then upload it. NBC sitting back in New York can then view that video and purchase that video. When they do so, the original videographer gets paid. So what we’ve done is basically make the process of sourcing video much more efficient and much more rapid than has been done before.”
Providing the possibility for exponential growth, Stringr can gain value as its video repository expands in ways that makes it a searchable library. With a taxonomy wrapped around it, this allows Stringr to launch a subscription product and all of the recurring-revenue benefits that go with it.
It can also achieve a better network effect as it builds each end of its two-sided marketplace. The more videographers (supply) and news organizations (demand) it has on the platform, the better network density it can achieve, meaning greater ability to match specific needs to a local video pro.
Other macro trends meanwhile position Stringr in interesting ways, says McNeill. Those include everything from 5G (low-latency live video capture) to drones. The barriers to drone ownership continue to lessen, meaning a potentially vast library of aerial imagery to fill out Stringr’s library.
We discuss these and other dynamics with McNeil on the latest episode of Heard on the Street. Check out the full episode above, find out more about Heard on the Street, and see our entire episode archive here. Contact us if you’d like to sponsor an episode and stay tuned for Street Fight’s updated media kit.
