Livecamp stories: Contentflow
An eSports legend builds the live streaming platform of the future.
We’ve talked about new communities and forms of entertainment, created as a result of a growing live streaming ecosystem. But those live experiences tend to centre around an individual streamer, equipped with an iPhone or webcam to capture their stream or a professional, multi-engineer streaming set-up for a high-value live event. For live to become further democratized and far-reaching as an entertainment or communication medium, the mechanics of setting up, capturing and editing highlights from a live stream need to become easier and cheaper. Cue Contentflow–a cloud-based SaaS solution for all facets of live-streaming.
Contentflow founder, Sebastian Serafin, has an unusual background–he was captain of the German national eSports team and worked for the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation as an events manager. Contentflow was created as a direct result of the combination of Sebastian’s gaming and events management background. He spotted the growing demand from event managers to live stream conferences and events and wanted to build a solution that allowed for the rapid cutting and clipping of highlights during these events, without the need for a dedicated editor or video team.
S- Who are you and what did you do before starting Contentflow?
I’m Sebastian Serafin–a German builder adopted by Betaworks. I am the CEO of Contentflow, a company building the live streaming solution of my dreams.
When I was younger, I spent hundreds of thousands of hours playing computer games at a competitive level, which led me to become the captain of the German eSport national team in WarCraft 3. I was also team leader of mTw Gaming’s WarCraft 3 squad and led the team to win the WarCraft 3 Champions league (ESL WC3L Series) two times. Following this, I became the chief-editor of the most important eSport coverage site at the time, mymTw.de and within this role I got awarded with the eSport award 2004 for the best international eSport coverage.
eSports were not huge at the time, so all these glamorous-sounding things basically took place in basements and with barely twenty spectators at the time, most of them other gamers. So I had to move on, which led me to becoming an expert on the topic “Right-wing extremism in Europe”, giving lectures, researching deeply into the topic and writing a book.
As life continued, I became an event manager, working for the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (German NGO) and was responsible for high-level international conferences and events, with 1000+ attendees all over Europe, such as the “Europe calling” event series.
S- What are you working on?
Contentflow is a cloud-based SaaS solution for all facets of live-streaming. Our mission it to make the live streaming, postproduction and editing of videos as easy to use, whilst still maintaining the high quality that you need. The Contentflow platform allows you to capture a live stream with as little as 1 iPhone and share it across all marketing channels. At the same time, users can live-clip and live-edit highlights from the live feed and quickly turn it into shareable video content–all via a cloud-based platform, without the need for expensive additional editing software or experienced editors.
We built this in Europe and very quickly brought onboard paying customers like Electronic Sports League (ESL) and the Online Marketing Rockstars (OMR). We’ve recently opened an office in New York City to enable us to break into the US market, where video and live streaming is even further developed than it is in Europe. My focus is now on getting meetings, meetings and hopefully more meetings, in an effort to find people that are willing to pilot our product. I’ve been in the city since May and I’m loving it!
S- Explain your product in 3 words?
Live-streaming made easy.
S- What has been your biggest challenge so far during the Betaworks Camp program?
As we arrived in the city not so long ago, it would have been easy to be overwhelmed by how fast things are going here. Coming from Germany, we’re used to having 72 page long presentations and an unbelievably long description of our tech stack before even one meeting would take place. Over here, people want you to “show, don’t tell”. Instead of all the preliminary paperwork and slide decks we very quickly go from product demo, to free trial, to paying customer. We were (pleasantly) surprised at how things are done here and had to adapt quickly to the cultural differences.
From the technology side, a persistent challenge has been the audio/video synchronization in live streams and videos that are stored using our streaming-engine, as it is not the same requirements for every livestream. There are so many potential differences in what codec, encoder, or surrounding situation the customer is using. The good news is that we have found a solution to cater to all their varying needs and inputs, and are continuing to work every day to optimize this.
I’ve also had to work hard not to eat all the candy in the Camp kitchen.
“We were (pleasantly) surprised at how things are done here and had to adapt quickly to the cultural differences.”
S- Where do you hope to be by Camp Summit?
The past few weeks have been action-packed as we closed our seed-fundraising round (raising $2.2M), which now gives us the momentum to hire a small sales and marketing team. These additions to the team will help us ramp up the business as fast as possible, notably here in the US. In the run-up to demo day, we are working day and night to complete the next step in our product roadmap: increasing the speed of the Contentflow platform for all users. In practice this will mean it will only take 3.75 seconds to live-clip and/or cloud-edit a 5 minute videofile, or 3.75 minutes for a 5 hour long video. Feedback from users has already been very positive, so we hope to have this platform optimization complete by Demo day.
Betaworks will also be using Contentflow’s technology to live stream Demo Day across their social channels and to journalists and program partners. The marketing team will be able to live-clip the highlights from the day and share across social media. I’m hoping that by 7pm of demo day, I will be exhausted but *fingers crossed* happy that it worked to plan.
S- Why did you apply for Betaworks Camp?
As we moved to New York City in the beginning of this year to build upon our European success, we were looking for mentoring and coaching to help propel us in the right direction. One of our US customers recommended I have a chat with Betaworks earlier this summer, I did, we liked each other, and we decided to apply to the Camp program.
S- Why did you build this product?
While working as an events manager and with my background in professional gaming, I was always looking for a good, easy-to-use and reliable solution to have my video-content available as fast as possible, be it live streams or video-recordings of my events. As the NGO I was working for was funded by public funds, we did not have a lot of money to spend on full-service providers and all existing solutions were not only expensive but also too complicated to implement.
I had tried everything else that was out there and found that existing options either required a lot of components or were too expensive for me to afford (and still would not do what I actually wanted). It was a really disheartening experience and I knew that my colleagues in event management were facing the same two issues nearly every day: (1) How to livestream what’s going on to as many channels and websites as possible and (2) How to actually be able to provide the video snippets as fast as possible to stakeholders, speakers, sponsors and be able to edit them from an iPad or laptop without having to rely on an expensive full-service provider. My dream solution would allow me to be able to access all the content while the event was still live, with the ability to cut highlights like key quotes and opening statements as fast as possible.
So I decided to build the solution myself.
“… I knew that my colleagues in event management were facing the same two issues nearly every day: (1) How to livestream what’s going on to as many channels and websites as possible and (2) How to actually be able to provide the video snippets as fast as possible to stakeholders, speakers, sponsors… “
S- If you could get introduced to one person to help the development of your product, who would it be?
I’ve always been deeply impressed by the New York Times, and more recently, by how they are successfully earning engagement and monetizing all their digital offerings. I would love to get their input on what we are doing and advice on how to shape the product. If it would have to be 1 person, I’d start with their chief-editor Dean Baquet, because he could hopefully introduce me to the right people that could help us to navigate the video-live streaming space.
Sebastian’s personal interests and professional experience enabled him to build a solution that answered directly to the most pertinent challenges of live streaming today, while providing an innovative cloud-based editing platform to empower users to get more from their live stream content.
Contentflow recently closed their €2 million seed round investment from leading venture capital firms and angel investors, more on that here. Be sure to tune into the Betaworks Camp Summit + Demos livestream on Thursday 15th November to see Contentflow’s technology in practice, from 2.30pm. The link to the stream will be shared on Twitter. 📹
This is the third post in a five-part series that dives into the Livecamp founders’ journeys into the tech industry, their biggest challenges and hanging out at Betaworks. Read the previous post on Journey Meditation, here.
Betaworks Camp is a thematic 3-month accelerator program at Betaworks, NYC. Stay up-to-date on Camp company announcements and future programs on Twitter: @thebetacamp
