Oovvuu was founded by three leading executives from the news, broadcast and tech industries in late 2014 who had a shared mission to distribute trusted video to massive audiences worldwide.
They shared a belief that quality video from known broadcasters and distributed via established publishers would increasingly matter in the era of an unchecked social media.
Three years later, Facebook and YouTube are being hit by a ongoing slew of crises around brand safety and trust, confirming the need for a new way to get trusted video to trusted articles at a global scale.
Today, Oovvuu is helping more than 100 broadcasters and publishers distribute video to millions of people in 143 countries, while Facebook and YouTube flounder under increasing scrutiny and impending regulation.
Oovvuu has never wavered in its work to support trusted journalism. It has won multiple accolades and awards, and is receiving increasing attention and big stage exposure worldwide.
Its work using artificial intelligence and the cloud to distribute video at scale led to Oovvuu being inducted into Amazon’s Activate program alongside Airbnb and Slack, and onto IBM Watson’s Global Entrepreneur program.
Oovvuu was also named IDC’s Digital Disruptor of the Year and Gartner’s Cool Vendor.
Oovvuu founder and CEO Ricky Sutton, a former journalist and editor in the UK and Australia, said: “Trust issues surrounding Cambridge Analytica and brand safety at YouTube seemed to come as a shock to many but was no surprise to those of us who had worked in newsrooms for decades.
“We had plenty of experience and scar tissue from knowing how news can be manipulated by bad actors.
“The inexperience of the social media brands to recognise this, combined with their inaction to deal with it when it arose, has created a crisis of trust for a generation of news consumers.
“What is needed now is a Compass, to know where to go for the news that matter that you can trust. That is why our tool is called Compass.
“Oovvuu has grown to become a global consortium of publishers and broadcasters with a shared mission to create and match the best video and articles in the world, and have them matched by Oovvuu’s cutting edge technology.
“The outcome is an ability to embed a relevant video in every article in the world, to tell trusted news to a billion people, and through that, to repatriate billions of advertising dollars back from the duopoly to the broadcasters and publishers who report the world and keep us safe.”