Making It Work: Post-production firm seeks global reach with new editing suite platform

Bryan Malone likes to joke that his mother still thinks he sells televisions. But the Dubliner’s company, Tyrell Content Creation Tools, does far more than that.

Established more than 20 years ago, it offers a wide range of services to clients in the television, entertainment and media industries, helping them with everything from graphics to video editing. It employs 20 staff between two offices in London and Dublin and has designs on further international growth.

Tyrell operates in what Malone calls a “hidden industry”, servicing post-production facilities and studios including RTÉ, Virgin, Windmill Lane and Screen Scene. It provides technology and software for editors to help them take a piece of work from idea to finished product.

Post-production sounds complicated, but in truth it’s just the stage of making a film or TV show that follows the shoot itself.

“That’s the area we’re in,” Malone said. “Content creators, as far as we see it, are people telling stories through the medium of video, film, animation or audio.

“If you’re a content creator, you can come to us and we’ll give you access to the technology that’s out there, and then we’ll hang around to help you use that technology solution.”

Tyrell, which is backed by Enterprise Ireland, began life as a satellite of Tyrell Corporation, a part of WPP, the global communications giant which had revenues of more than £12.8 billion last year. But the Irish unit executed a management buyout in the early years, and since then Tyrell has remained out on its own.

Most of the company’s work happens in the Irish market. The firm’s 2020 turnover came to €6.46 million in this country, but it also competes for business in Britain, where the industry is much more competitive.

In recent years, Tyrell has moved to diversify its operations and has begun working with clients such as Brown Bag Films, the Irish animation company which employs hundreds of people in Ireland.

“Over the 22 years, our purpose has remained the same in terms of what we deliver to our customers,” Malone said. “But we think of ourselves as having reinvented ourselves many times.”

In the aftermath of the pandemic, the firm is about to launch a new product, Tyrell Cloud, which is designed for hybrid workforces and aimed at helping post-production studios improve their efficiencies.

“With our new platform, we’ve worked out a way to replicate a post-production house in a data centre, essentially,” Malone said.

Most studios have many expensive editing suites, which are costly and cumbersome and require staff to work on-site rather than at home.

“It’s a lot of infrastructure, and it needs space and staff to operate,” Malone said. “What we’ve done is build a platform that can stage up to 200 editing suites, and hold them in a data centre with the flick of a switch.”

That means editors can do the same tasks they’ve always done, but from home, and without the need for so much software and equipment. “That’s the global reach play for us,” Malone said. “I think we can pump that out a bit beyond Ireland and Britain.”