BLAM vs BOLT: what’s in a name?

Since its launch in 2020, Blue Lucy’s flagship product, BLAM, has also been the company’s only product. BLAM is a sophisticated workflow orchestration, system integration and media management platform, and both its core capability and the microservices which comprise its orchestration functionality have constantly evolved in that time. It has, however, remained Blue Lucy’s sole solution.  Until now.  At IBC 2024, Blue Lucy launched BOLT, a new product that’s described as a global gateway to content libraries for non-technical users. We asked Blue Lucy founder, Julian Wright, what prompted the decision to develop a new product and what distinguishes BOLT from BLAM.

Q: Can you give us an elevator pitch overview of Blue Lucy, BLAM and BOLT?

A : Blue Lucy’s ethos is to take an orthodoxy-challenging approach to solving media business problems.  Our core product, BLAM, is a sophisticated integration and orchestration platform designed to meet the complex and evolving business needs in production, localisation, and distribution. BLAM is an “enterprise” platform that serves the operational needs of multiple aspects of a media business.  Our new product, BOLT, is an operationally-simple offering designed to meet a fundamental, but most important, business need for any operation handling media assets – accessibility.

Q: What was the initial motivation for developing BOLT?

A : In BLAM deployments our implementation engineers and analysts tend to work with the media operations team within the ‘engine room’ of the operation.  In conversation with senior management teams, we were often surprised by statements along the lines of “your platform is great, the automation is really driving time to market and cost efficiency but at the executive level we would just like a really simple way to view our current inventory.” 

Q : So, is BOLT simply a media portal for viewing content?

That’s how it started, but it’s developed into more than that. On further examination, we uncovered a number of apparently simple requirements within the commercial business (i.e., outside of the technical content supply operation) that could be addressed by a toolset similar to BLAM.  Alongside the basic requirement to search and discover content is the ability to create showcases and viewing rooms and distribute these to sales prospects or internal marketing teams via secure links. Some customers want to create one or more branded ‘storefront’ portals to directly support sales or similar customer self-service functions.  On the subject of “portals” we saw a clear a common requirement within distributors to provide easy-to-use media upload portals to their production partners to allow them to push finished content and production metadata to the central content management and processing function.  This is particularly important to the aggregator distributors or production companies that hold a number of separate brands or labels under a broader umbrella.  BOLT satisfies all of these needs – it gives you effortless access to your content, provides an intuitive upload function and allows content owners to showcase and monetise content catalogues.

Q: Many of these capabilities are available in BLAM – what makes BOLT different?

A : All of these functions can be supported by BLAM as standard but as a collection of capabilities there was clearly a need for a commercially-focused product in its own right.  This is particularly the case in the overarching requirement that the tools needed to be easy to use – we took this one step further and defined the vision for the new product that it should have a zero-training requirement and be as intuitive to use as an on-line banking app – well the good ones at least.

Q: Are BLAM and BOLT totally independent products?

BOLT is built on the BLAM core technology and existing BLAM users may add the BOLT capabilities to extend the operational reach of their BLAM platform to support commercial and external business activities.  In this context, if BLAM is the engine room, BOLT is the viewing platform.  But BOLT is of course also available stand alone as a separate product.

Your content inventory represents the most significant proportion of the value of your media business. To maximise that value, make it accessible with BOLT from Blue Lucy.

Find out more about BOLT here or get in touch with the team to arrange a demo.