Blackbird is the world’s fastest, most powerful professional cloud video editing and publishing platform.

Their fully-featured, high-performance editor is accessed through any browser as an HTML5 web application, is easy to learn and needs only 2 Mb/s of bandwidth to use. Blackbird provides rapid access to video content for the easy creation of clips, highlights and longer-form content that can then be published to multiple devices and platforms.

Their global client base includes IMG, A+E Networks, Sky News Arabia, NHL, Riot Games, Arsenal FC, Peloton and the US Department of State.

Blackbird plc has pioneered professional cloud video editing and has developed its sophisticated cloud-native editor in Java. Their strategy for global adoption requires that this runs without configuration or installation on client computers – and these days, to make that possible with modern browsers means it needs to run as a browser-based HTML5 application.

Using our CheerpJ Java to WebAssembly and JavaScript compiler , we were able to provide an automated tool in order to convert Blackbird’s Java application into a combination of WebAssembly and JavaScript, so that it could be integrated into a modern, browser-based HTML5 web application.

Following the first implementation, our technical team not only continued to make improvements to our own environment to enhance performance, but also made helpful suggestions about potential optimisations on the Blackbird side.

The Result

Blackbird now provides a browser-based version of their cloud application as standard. CheerpJ has enabled Blackbird to migrate the majority of their legacy clients to the new application and access the world’s fastest, most powerful cloud video editing and publishing platform directly from the browser on a wide variety of devices.

Blackbird has a long-term maintenance agreement with Leaning Technologies, with guaranteed development time, and we look forward to supporting them on their journey.