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Words and interview by Simon Bland
We’ve all been there. Watching a live event on telly and missing out on a key moment due to the camera operator’s angle choice — or even worse, attending an expensive gig only to get stuck behind someone twice your height. Lack of viewer control at live music or sporting events is something that has plagued fans for years but what if you could control exactly what you wanted to see from a performance? With Multiview Media you can — and according to its CEO Ray Meadham, it’s a power shift that’s going to change the game for viewers and advertisers alike.
“I started as a professional musician touring with major artists and living the rock’n’roll dream but I realised that living out of a suitcase wasn’t where I wanted to be,” chuckles Meadham. With his roots in the music industry, Multiview’s current CEO is uniquely placed to understand the issues that were impacting the sector when it came to the transaction between viewer and performer. After a stint handling artist careers, he shifted gears to focus on concert streaming. “We were looking at ways to increase revenue for the artists we were managing at the time and we looked at streaming their concerts. Single angle was already covered so we came up with multiangle as a way of having a camera on the drummer, the guitarist and the singer.”
First developed around 12 years ago, Meadham’s goal of bringing audiences closer to the action proved to be a little ahead of its time. “The world wasn’t ready for the technology and we weren’t ready to run a business,” he admits. Then the pandemic happened and both the sector and audience understanding of its potential took a huge leap forward. “Three years ago, we revisited it. The technology had moved on, the cloud had improved and now we’ve got a world-beating product. We’re also all now used Zoom,” adds Meadham. “Up until that point, nobody had heard or Zoom whereas now, 90% of the public are aware of it and of multiangle conversation — so to some extent, it helped us demonstrate our concept a little bit easier.”
Now everyone’s up to speed, Meadham can focus on rolling out Multiview Media for all to enjoy — and there’s plenty of benefits. “We’ve done eSports, sport and we’re working on some educational applications but because we can take any single-angle video player and make it multiangle, I can make YouTube, TikTok and Twitch multiangle too.” In essense, it puts viewers in the director’s chair like never before: “If you’re at a concert or a live event, you have to rely on whatever’s on the big screen. Now, fans can decide what they want to see and they can go back, rewatch and engage with it differently. Also, our data tells content creators what audiences like to see,” he adds. “For example, we’re working with Robbie Williams at the moment and he thinks everyone wants to watch him — but the data suggests people want to watch the drum or audience camera because they’ve never had that ability before.”
The challenge now is getting this service infront of users who are already familiar to a certain type of content delivery elsewhere. “We haven’t got the budget to get people to leave YouTube and join Multiview so we’re going the other way,” explains Meadham. “We’re working with the single angle video companies that provide players for places like CNN, NBC and Disney and telling them that we can add multiangle within the infrastructure they already have. It’s a lot easier to sell it that way than to create a whole new lane for everybody to jump in.”
Meanwhile, Multiview Media offers unrivalled opportunities for advertisers who are keen to get their brands seen by the widest audience possible. “The technology allows us to change branding, so I can put product placement in video streams that were never there before,” Meadham tells us. “For instance, if Monster Energy drinks sponsor a motorcycle event, I can replace their adverts with Red Bull logos. Also there’s the global picture; if one brand in one country doesn’t work very well in another country, you can shoot the concert and rebrand it however many times you need. Brands are starting to look at this more because more angles means more real estate for their brands being in shot.” Then there’s the statistical element: “I can tell brand producers how many minutes, seconds or hours was spent in customer eyeballs — and that data is priceless. If you imagine YouTube makes several billion dollars from advertising, we’ve essentially got multiple YouTubes.”
To help bring Multiview Media to as many eyes as possible, Meadham has joined our most recent Creative Enterprise Evolve cohort. This Creative UK support scheme provides high-concept, screen-based business with bespoke mentoring support aimed at help them to level up and secure investment. “We were very privileged to be invited,” says Meadham. “We heard about the Evolve programme and felt it’d be useful to be in the network. To be any successful company, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know and the people in your network. By working with Evolve, it was all about ‘how can we access that network?’” he reasons. “We’re a creative company trying to build a multi-angle YouTube that could benefit the creative industries for years to come. We want to work with the biggest and best film and production companies — that takes a lot of work but it’s all about knowing people who know those people.”
As an entrepreneur that’s very familiar with these type of schemes, Meadham particularly appareciates Evolve’s ability to link creatives and potentially birth new concepts. “There are people on the cohort who are very experienced in different areas and we’ve already spoken with a few of them. It’s not about ‘what can I get out of the scheme?’ We’re all on the same journey together, so let’s work together and create an ecosystem.” The bespoke support offered also sets it apart: “The feeling I get from Creative UK is that there’s a vested interest in wanting to work with you and the mentors we’ve been introduced to are already showing personal levels of investment. It seems more personally factored to your individual case rather than providing a blanket kit of information that every company may need. That’s how it should be because we’re all different.”
With such a strong core concept, Meadham’s convinced that Multiview Media has a bright future. Together with the collaborative support of the Evolve scheme and the opportunities it might bring, with any luck, our days of obscured views and missed live moments could soon be a thing of the past. “We’ll hopefully be a multi-angle YouTube or TikTok, that’s what we aspire to be,” says Meadham, looking to his company’s future. “We’ll have a multi-angle music department and eSports company in each of the areas we trade in and eventually, we’ll become a content producer too,” he adds. “Our goal is to become the market leader in the multi-angle world.”