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Introducing Foyer

A new way of working with video

Updated 26th March 2021
In 2020, the world shifted to a remote-first, contactless experience. It wasn't a wholesale reinvention of how we do business, but it was an upending of the traditional model for most B2B organisations who have relied on the human element for much of their sales process, especially within the professional services world. This shift brought new challenges; but with those challenges came opportunity. Time and distance became less relevant. The sales A-Team could turn up to a meeting with Tokyo in the morning, London at lunchtime and New York in the afternoon. Video calls and webinars became normal and the predominant method for initial lead acquisition. Our teams became comfortable with being on video wherever they were.

Content overload

In mid-2020 Simon was working as the CTO of a global marketing agency, helping clients to adjust to this new environment and coming up with new ways for them to communicate with their markets.

There was a surge of video and long-form video content across the globe.

We were seeing audiences receive dozens of invitations every month, of which they typically attended two on average because they did not want to spend hours watching a live video for a few minutes of valuable content.

More and more companies were producing long-form videos and webinars with the aim of getting as many people as possible to watch live. They were then posting recordings to their websites to try and catch viewers after the event – often with little success, people were Zoom-ed out!

The problem

We could see there was a problem. There was great content being produced but often people were not watching it. The audience understands there is value in the video but doesn’t have the time to access it.

As we explored the video communications and events ecosystem we became increasingly frustrated. Frustrated that even the great overall solutions were lacking vital components which seemed like a given, but only with the hindsight of the situation, we were now in.

Audience-first

We wanted to put the audience first. How could they gain access to this content without necessarily having to watch the video?

We wanted to be able to generate accurate transcripts for viewers who either couldn’t or simply didn’t want to watch the video but still wanted to digest the content, without sending the video to another service or trusting an imperfect AI to understand the nuance of industry terms.

We wanted to provide soundbites that content- creators could use in their campaigns, text summaries that make it easy to understand the key highlights, and podcast-ready versions so the content could be listened to on the go.

Two-way video

We also wanted video to be more than a one-way communication tool. We wanted the audience to be able to interact with the content and also to let the content-creator gain insights on the video itself.

Foyer was born

We wanted more for users of videos. We wanted to fundamentally transform the way video content was consumed. We wanted to stop videos and webinars from being abandoned on websites hoping to be seen. And, instead, giving the audience the content they want to consume and on their terms.

We’re currently running an early access programme – if you would like to be one of the first to see what foyer can do for your video, book a demo

If you have any questions or just want to chat about video, drop us a line at [email protected]

– Simon
@SimonMinton