The Tech Guy Driven by Passion
Since I was a young boy, everything about technology always fascinated me, mainly things I can create independently. My biggest passion was making video games and anything related to video making. Writing software, exploring new video processing hardware on the market, and getting involved in the latest technologies around video creation was my main occupation. So, of course, it felt logical to get into computer science studies and get my degree, but life had a different idea. After a couple of years of studying, I realized I didn't have much of an academic drive in me. However, all the little projects I was working on always gave me more pleasure and took all my time literally.
Who could imagine that the tech guy who never enjoyed watching television programs, especially news channels, will work in the Broadcast industry for over 20 years. But, what has been driving me to stay so many years is my never-ending interest in video technologies. For sure, there was so much of that going on in the last two decades.
The Tech Guy Making News Happen
It all started with joining a local television station where I was involved in graphics and motion picture making. I enjoyed producing content and expressing my creativity through my designs. Still, I figured I enjoyed more in technologies that were rapidly changing at that time. I was the one who always wanted to make things easier, faster, and of course, in better quality.
Over the first decade, I have moved through different departments, gained experience through entirely different roles, and reached the top technology management position in my country's most prominent new digital Broadcaster. But that was just the beginning of my worldwide career. I had the opportunity to work with the giants in the Broadcast industry throughout my career and meet many people who made a significant change in media, which we know have.
It is worth mentioning that over the second decade of my experience, I had the opportunity to lead multiple projects within Al Jazeera Media Network on three different continents. Some projects involved building the complete television stations, while some involved transforming the existing stations into the new infrastructure. Managing processes, equipment installation, Broadcast teams, IT teams, civil work, and upgrading the production workflows were my responsibility. I am grateful for all accomplishments that my team and I achieved over the last ten years.
However, in the last few years, I have started to identify some gaps in content production within the Broadcast industry. The traditional television environment is not flexible to change into new ways of video technologies, video making, and sharing. As an additional problem, technologies used in the Broadcast industry are now old. Every change or upgrade to newer technology is prolonged and complicated. Unsatisfied users who have to speed up and reorganize their production would look for standard online solutions to do their job. Constant workarounds, broken workflows, solutions that we failed to deliver on time successfully, and unsatisfied users became my reality.
These past experiences made me believe that it is my time to move out of this industry. So, I decided to use my 20 years of experience and create a solution that users love to use and which I would again have a passion for making.
The Tech Guy Got an Idea
The last few projects that I worked on while being in the Broadcast industry were online media projects. The vision of making the next generation of The Newsroom in the Cloud had led me to explore some new web-oriented technologies. And the whole new world of possibilities had opened in front of me..
My interest rapidly started to shift from traditional newsrooms to online content creators when I realized that they create over 30.000 hours of content/hour. And that is just on YouTube alone. Keeping in mind that the number of content creators is growing every day, the amount of content and production needs will grow with time. Like all emerging industries, content creators use multiple platforms to overcome difficulties within their everyday production. Sharing content, communicating, reviewing content, organizing content, sharing tasks, and even writing their scripts – content creators use multiple tools that are not free but cannot play the video? Or even upload more than 50MB of content? Or collaboratively work on script and video at the same time? Really?
That is is how the idea started to shape into a StoryDeck – one platform where content creators can organize, collaborate with other people, store and archive all of their stories. And publish from there too. But, of course, those are just starting features, and there is so much more to come. StoryDeck will not be another online solution that will integrate with many external tools to satisfy our customers. Instead, we have built an extensive video-oriented infrastructure that will serve all future iteration of the product development. We intend to work together with content creators to develop our future features and draw the roadmap hand in hand with the end-users.
StoryDeck team aims to bring our experience from the media production and make story production available and affordable for anyone willing to tell their story and share it with the world.
If you have a story to tell and want to join us on our journey, welcome to StoryDeck!
Miljenko Logozar
Co-founder of StoryDeck