Member Article

Skylab chosen as top ten future leader

Manchester digital agency Skylab have been selected by Creative England from a field of over 500 companies, as one of the country’s top ten Future Leaders, for their innovative MediaTank video platform.

MediaTank is a powerful cloud-based video platform that offers any business, brand or organisation opportunities for marketing, selling videos online, digital asset management and also has a flavour dedicated to developers.

Last night saw the launch of the Creative England Live event in London. Held at the OXO Tower in Southwark, the event was an exciting showcase of creative industries, demonstrating the wealth of innovation and talent emerging from across England in film, TV, digital and games.

Creative England has helped to fund over 500 projects across the country and the event celebrated the launch of the Creative England 50; a list of the 50 individuals and businesses chosen from that field for their ability to turn a bright idea into a commercial success.

The highlight of the evening was the announcement of the Creative England Future Leaders. Skylab’s MediaTank video platform was chosen as one of the top 10 out of a field of over 500, by a prestigious judging panel including Nicola Mendelsohn, Vice President of Facebook EMEA, the BBC’s Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, entrepreneur and investor Saul Klein and Stuart Rock, Editor in Chief for the Business is GREAT campaign. These top 10 companies have been chosen as Future Leaders for demonstrating exceptional innovation and the potential for disruption.

Skylab’s BAFTA Award winning Managing Director Nigel Collier said, “Being selected as one of the country’s top ten Future Leaders for our MediaTank video platform is great recognition for the hard work the team have put in to create a world class product. What’s most pleasing is the recognition for MediaTank being innovative and disruptive. Those are core principles of both the platform and the Skylab philosophy.”

MediaTank’s marketing functionality offers a white label ‘Brand TV’ video platform, that empowers any business, brand or organisation to broadcast HD video via any existing websites, apps and social media channels. For example, if you are ASDA, Audi, Nike or even the NHS, MediaTank allows you to create ASDA TV, Audi TV, Nike TV and NHS TV, each of which can broadcast HD video content to their respective audiences.

MediaTank has been described as “a white-label version of the BBC iPlayer”. The platform also allows content owners to sell, monetise and promote their videos online, generating additional revenue streams from new and existing video content. MediaTank also offers robust digital asset management functionality, helping users organise their video library using a simple cloud workflow to ingest, encode, store, organise and deliver video online. There is also a dedicated flavour for developers who create websites, apps or social media projects, with fast integration using APIs and open source libraries.

On the night, there were speeches from the Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Caroline Norbury MBE, Chief Executive Officer of Creative England, Hasan Bakhshi MBE, Director, Creative Economy in Policy & Research at Nesta and Harvey Goldsmith CBE.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lisa Collier .