Levels beyond streamlines video and search.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: STATE of the STATE NEWS AND NOTES ON COLORADO BUSINESS

Levels Beyond's client list reads like a who's who of big media brands. Blue-chip customers like Disney, Warner Brothers, UFC, NASCAR, and Sundance use the company's Reach Engine platform to manage - and leverage - vast libraries of video content.

"We have 82 clients and they are all huge," says Levels Beyond CEO Art Raymond. "Three quarters of them go to phase two, phase three, phase four, and stay with us for life."

Founded in 2000, the company has grown to about 60 employees at its headquarters, a converted warehouse in Denver's RiNo Art District. Sales growth is exceeding 200 percent for the third straight year.

"The digital explosion in media continues," says Raymond." That revolution is 20 percent in, so there's still 80 percent to go. We as an industry have reached a complexity point that manufacturing plants hit in the '50s and '60s."

That means some serious innovation is in order. Before implementing Reach Engine, he says that most customers "have six or seven island systems" - and at least a few typically involve Excel spreadsheets."We're sort of like the platform of platforms. We bring the whole thing together into one coherent play." Some clients manage a library of tens of thousands of shows across 80 different platforms with just three people.

If an editor inside Adobe Premiere wanted to search for a relevant clip, explains Raymond, "You can literally search your whole library worldwide from inside Adobe." And producers can map out production schedules, work with contracts, and track video from a mobile device, he adds. "It's like a manifest."

Users can also employ Reach Engine to tap into unedited news footage and produce and coordinate the launch of teasers across broadcast and social media channels to build awareness before the story runs.

"Think of us like how Google is a platform and Youtube is a platform and Facebook is a platform," says Raymond. "We started to develop apps on our own platform."

One such app, dynamic clipping, allows remote Reach Engine users to pull relevant video clips from a network's sea of video in real time from anywhere on the planet. "With one tap, they...