M+E Daily

Blending industry-leading media know-how with innovative cloud technologies, Los Angeles-based Flomenco is laser-focused on one goal: streamlining and optimising your media workflows.

With a team touting decades of industry experience around software development and enterprise cloud architecture, Flomenco’s no-code tools aim to make media workflow automation easy, fast and, best of all, affordable.

Flomenco CEO Ryan McKeague spoke with MESA about the quick successes the company has found a year since it launched, the importance Flomenco places on surfacing data in its solutions, and how AI and ML will come into play in future Flomenco offerings.

MESA: How did Flomenco first come on the scene, what workflow solutions for the media and entertainment industry has the company sought to fulfill?

McKeague: Flomenco was formed in April 2023 when the company’s founders realised customers were faced with the multiple complexities of migrating their media workloads from on-premises to the cloud, leveraging the scale of the cloud to transform their media supply chain operations, and adopting best-in-class buy-over-build strategies for software tools.

Our customers face growing pressure to improve efficiency through the reduction of manual processes and increase productivity by connecting information systems while reducing pressure on development teams and costs.

Flomenco’s mission is to streamline media supply chain workflows with a no-code platform that allows operators to automate their work without requiring lengthy and costly development.

MESA: What does Flomenco do differently than competitors, what makes the company stand out in a crowded field?

McKeague: Flomenco offers a user-friendly no-code platform that simplifies the integration of media and productivity applications (e.g. EIDR, Fabric, Rightsline, Ateliere, Google Sheets, Airtable, Salesforce) to a drag-and-drop process on a visual workflow builder canvas. The Flomenco platform transforms the complex process of data mapping between systems in a workflow into a simple drag-and-drop configuration process that takes minutes to set up and can easily be updated as business requirements change.

With the same Flomenco WorkFlo platform for integration, customers configure powerful workflows that run automatically based on media supply chain events or time-based triggers to automate processes such as title hierarchy synchronisation, metadata enrichment, and media file transcode and ingest.

The team behind Flomenco is applying their decades of experience in the media industry to ensure the product delivers the most value for media operators, allowing them to iterate quickly to make business improvement and agility a reality.

MESA: Data — and making the right decisions using it — has become more important to M&E decision-making than ever before. How does Flomenco help clients make data-driven decisions for their supply chains?

McKeague: Data is the lifeblood of business success today, and Flomenco understands this. We see all media organisations taking on information initiatives to unlock their siloed data (such as descriptive title metadata, technical asset data, and rights data), aggregate it, and analyse it to power business insights. Our platform, Flomenco WorkFlo, allows customers to easily connect these supply chain systems using pre-built nodes for immediate visibility into the data they contain. Workflows are configured with media-specific system connectors, productivity connectors, and business logic operators to automate passing data between each supply chain system, provide dynamic decision-making, and surface data in analytics tools.

Flomenco also provides analytics with the FloCharts module that surfaces data from workflows in an operational dashboard, providing customers with at-a-glance insights into workflow status, metrics like average execution time to guide efficiency improvements, and contextual data to provide visibility into what is happening at each step in the media supply chain.

MESA: Flomenco offers help in implementing the Cloud Localization Blueprint. What does that entail, and what type of impact do you see the CLB having on our industry?

McKeague: The Cloud Localization Blueprint (CLB) defined a framework for a cloud-based, loosely coupled, event-driven media workflow connecting best-in-class systems for each function in the localisation supply chain. The CLB provided this guidance as a framework rather than as an easy-to-use production-ready product.

Flomenco WorkFlo borrows all the best practices defined in the CLB and delivers them as a software platform that can be immediately put to work in production without Amazon Web Services or software development expertise. The Flomenco platform is built on the same scalable, resilient, and secure AWS infrastructure the CLB uses.

The CLB specifically connected systems for rights management (Rightsline), title metadata management (Fabric and EIDR), asset ingest and management (SDVI and Vidispine), localisation (Iyuno), and packaging and delivery (Ateliere). Flomenco offers out-of-the-box connectors for Rightsline, Fabric, EIDR, Ateliere, and over 200 more systems, building towards full CLB system coverage driven by customer demand.

MESA: What are some of Flomenco’s favourite use case stories to date, where media and entertainment companies made great use of your services?

McKeague: Flomenco is solving customer challenges with automated workflows that range from simple to complex. For example, one workflow allows users to continue manipulating title metadata in tools they love, like Google Sheets, while enforcing the best practice of storing that metadata in a reliable single source of truth metadata management repository, like Fabric.

The Flomenco workflow automatically updates Fabric if the data in the Google spreadsheet is changed and vice versa. In another more complex example, a Flomenco workflow provides full title hierarchy synchronisation between Rightsline, the customer’s title source system, and multiple downstream supply chain systems, including Ateliere and Fabric, ensuring title metadata stays in sync between systems and is immediately available in all systems when a new title is created.

These pre-built workflows in Flomenco save developers countless hours of developing this from scratch and provide operators with the peace of mind that they are implementing industry best practices.

MESA: What’s next for Flomenco, what advances in your M&E industry offerings do you see on the horizon?

McKeague: Flomenco is committed to simplifying our customers’ media workflows.

Our next step on this journey is to offer ready-made workflow templates for common use cases (for example, transcoding, transcribing, and extracting metadata from video and audio files and then storing the metadata in media asset management (MAM) systems) that can be rapidly configured to meet a customer’s unique use-case.

We are also working on allowing customers to dynamically route workflow actions based on business drivers like quality, cost, and time instead of requiring workflow automation to be “one size fits all.” Finally, Flomenco plans on AI/ML-driven recommendations that simplify workflow by allowing customers to define workflow intention in natural language and receive best practice workflow recommendations that achieve the desired outcome.

Our motto is “bringing down integration time from months to minutes,” and we intend to deliver on that promise!