2011 – a Year in Review. When you shoot more than 50 real estate videos a week (just on the Gold Coast) and manage an online video network that now stretches across the world, through multiple time zones, a PlatinumHD Propvid day is one long and remarkable 48 hours.
What’s remarkable is the burden of responsibility. We may only receive, say, $275 for a video-only product yet that film is responsible for selling a $350,000 plus home.
Given the emotional roller-coaster that is residential real estate, if that video has one ‘loose thread”, it could be used against an Agent, who could ultimately lose not only commission, but time and his or her credibility.
It’s that pressure – around the world and around the clock – that’s made us a tremendous Company in 2011.
We’re fortunate to be able to work with some of the country’s most elite Agents as Clients who choose to use online video are first movers/early adopters.
They’re equally hard task Masters who continue to push the us and the envelope.
At the end of that long day – “It’s the people who make the difference.” Finding the right ones is what business is all about.
We’re fortunate – blessed – to have awesome people and they made for a year of highlights. We opened in New Zealand and British Columbia, with Matt Grant and Jacob and Jamie O’Neal joining the CREW.
We formed a new Group Company and Christian Fitzpatrick, Anthony Lowe and Michael Suzor became Directors and share-holders of a much ‘bigger picture’ roll out.
We rolled with a series of bombshell Real Estate videos that were viewed by literally tens of millions of people around the world. On the Internet and the Idiot Box.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4DiEn7OU7Q
We added a satellite shooter in Yeppoon, welcoming Peter Szilveszter, and had to say goodbye to a great mate and DP Mark Deere who had to leave his post in Brisbane, put cinematography on hold and shift further north for personal reasons.
We got our franchise agreements sorted out, and the bundles of paperwork that goes with it.
Mostly importantly, we got our business model tweaked so our partners can invest in building legal businesses to serve the real estate and lifestyle industries.
Nicholas Tod, with Travis Place, re-built our backend video delivery and distribution system known as TSR (The Screening Room), wrote our own video transcoder and even a QR code generator.
We then set about adding dozens of new features like HD downloads so Clients didn’t have to re-stream Propvids.
If they like a video – now they can download it and keep it on their desktop or mobile device. We’ve added e-commerce, so Vendors can pay by credit card on approval; launched Agent mini sites and video-in-video FLASH sites.
We got ready for SMART TV – and saw our videos stream on APPLE TV.
And we set our sights on creating images five times the resolution of High Definition; committing to a $120,000 RED Epic ‘M’ development curve and a new journey into what’s known as 5K.
What we’re learning will be invaluable in the months and years ahead.
We wound up the Year with Greg Weatherall joining us to open up PlatinumHD Pacific (Gold Coast South) and Gabor Kukucska coming onboard to really focus on our home State capital Brisbane.
We also welcomed Dave Cleeve in Melbourne and Alfio Jr Stuto in Sydney to roll the PlatinumHD Propvid brand out in the Eastern Seaboard’s other two Capital cities. 2012 will see us able to offer, for the first time in Australia, an Eastern Seaboard PlatinumHD Propvid Network of specially selected and trained digital Cinematographers. Here’s to exceeding expectations.