Flyr Launches a Video Creation Platform

With an eye on the increasing importance of video content in advertising, Flyr today launched its artificial intelligence–powered video creation platform, on that enables users to quickly create and share videos for social media—a process that is often painstaking.

"This company is inspired by the challenge and the need around brands being able to create posts and ads in a video format," says Brett O’Brien, cofounder of Flyr. "That's the best-performing type of content. We set out to build a creation and publishing app and platform that makes it super easy for any brand, any agency, pretty much anyone that wants to create these Snapchat Discover–style videos very fast and inexpensively."  

In today's world, everyone's a videographer, but brands need to be a cut above. "Anyone can take a selfie kind of video, but a brand is not going to be running around trying to take live video, so there needs to be some type of a creation and publishing tool that lets them be able to [do that] quickly and easily," O'Brien says. "[Video] helps break through all the clutter that's out there. From a creative expression standpoint, [it's] more compelling, from a consumption standpoint, [it's] more compelling; it's just hard to do well."

Inspired to "democratize the creation of video stories and video storytelling," according to O’Brien, Flyer faced three big technical challenges. The first of these was the video creation process itself, which the company addressed by creating a graphic design production studio with an interface similar to that of dating app Tinder. The second challenge involved rendering and uploading the videos; Flyr relies on cloud media assets to expedite the rendering and uploading processes. The third challenge was enabling the videos to transform to fit different platforms. "We created a way where algorithmically you create the video one time and one size, and then it will rearrange all the elements in a smart way so that if you want to share on Snapchat, it will be vertical; if you want to share on Instagram, it will be square; if you want to share on YouTube; it will be horizontal. And wherever you share, it’s going to look great,” he explains.

“How are [organizations] going to create content that's animated and interactive and eye-catching and stunning?" O'Brien adds. "It’s going to be impossible for them unless they have a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of money and expertise. We solve for all of that."

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