· Graham G. Hughes
Why Mediawork? What does it do for media production vendors?
Post production facilities and freelance creatives, and indeed other vendors in the media production space, have various options for managing their work. But they mainly solve problems for just a part of the job lifecycle. Then there's emails, and spreadsheets, and more emails. There's got to be a better way.
Alright, Mediawork... who is it for?
It's a platform of two halves, built for both:
- clients: media productions and studios
- vendors: anyone supplying productions, from studio spaces and sound stages during filming, to post houses, VFX and animation studios, and freelance creatives during post, to distribution vendors and advertising agencies during localisation and distribution
Mediawork's main customers at this stage are vendors, though.
Great, but what does Mediawork actually do for me?
Well, for now I'm going to assume you're a vendor and you're trying to manage your work supplying productions, whether that be film, TV, commercials, or even music videos or games.
There are some really common problems in this space, and maybe you can relate:
- You have important information all over the place: in emails, in spreadsheets, in system X and system Y, and in Bob's head, who is on annual leave. Everyone's trying to share info, but it's hard
- Quoting is a pain, but you have to do it; the same work is happening on repeat and it's slow and error-prone
- Scheduling makes your company work, but you're constantly putting information in and pulling information out
- To pay your team, you need to bill your clients, but billing is a never-ending stress
- Your clients love your work but never quite have the feeling that they're in control
If I'm on the right lines, then Mediawork should help your team and your clients stay in sync.
Bold claim. How, exactly?
Every organisation is different, but when it comes to project workflow, we've put a lot of thought into how the pieces fit together.
- Everything starts with sales, most likely
- Create an Opportunity for work you know is potentially available
- Create a Job, or convert an Opportunity into one, when you have enough information to quote
- Create that Quote! We have templates, we have rate cards, we have client rate cards!
- Schedule the work as possible to see how it fits
- Good job, your quote was accepted. Now over to Operations
- Schedule the work for real. We have templates, and when you apply one, our algorithm will do its best to plan it out for you
- Monitor resource capacity utilisation
- Track billable work against the original quote as you go
- Finance time — work is shipping, time for billing
- Run billing using the cost tracking data you've already collected
- Export to CSV for use in your financial software, or
- Send invoices straight from Mediawork
What's the bigger picture here? Everything flows through. No re-entry. No moving data from one system to another. From the first opportunity to the final invoice, the information is already there — unless, of course, you want to export it to your existing financial software at the end.
You can add notes and tasks throughout Mediawork and attach them to the things they're relevant to. These also appear in your Messages, alongside conversations between your colleagues and your clients.
About my clients... are they on Mediawork? Do they have to be?
They can be, sure! But they don't have to be.
If you send your client a message through Mediawork and they're not signed up, we'll send your message by email. When they respond, it'll appear in your chat automatically.
If you send a message to anyone, we'll also fall back to email if they're registered on Mediawork but haven't read the message within around 15 minutes.
If your clients sign up, they'll see a Gantt overview of the work you're scheduling for their jobs. Their view is automatically linked to the jobs they're a contact for, and cost tracking is available to them too.
About AI... I love it, or I hate it...
Whatever works for you. Mediawork is AI-ready, but there's no separate AI plan. Not interested in AI? You can ignore it, because it's not there by default.
Love it? Bring your own Anthropic (Claude) or OpenAI (ChatGPT) API key. Plug it in to enable the AI Assistant, which can work with your Mediawork data. You can access that same information in your own Claude or ChatGPT app using our MCP connector.
The AI doesn't start with write permissions, but you can grant them for most object types in the system.
Anything else?
Yes, there's always more! By signing up, you'll list your facility in our vendor directory.
Your clients can also send you quote requests directly through the app — something that will become increasingly useful as the Mediawork production community grows.
So, Mediawork: just another SaaS product?
Well, in a sense, yes, Mediawork is just another solution. In this new era of AI, new products are being created at an incredible pace, and it's easier than ever to turn an idea into working software. That's exciting, but for software that businesses depend on every day, we think architecture, security and scalability still matter.
Mediawork started out in 2024 under our previous name, BIDPOST. While we now use Claude to help with development, everything sits on a foundation designed and engineered by me, Graham, a software engineer with over 20 years of experience.
It's not something we've just thrown together; it's a labour of love. If there's something we can make more intuitive, more functional, or just better, then drop me a line.
Graham