Niio is fast becoming the standard, ‘go-to’ platform for moving image art, making premium video and new media art accessible on a global scale to a global audience, and offering a fresh alternative to the mundane and traditional streaming media.
The company was created to inspire and connect people through moving image art, which is perhaps the most relevant medium of this generation, while also empowering video and media artists to showcase, safeguard and earn from their art.
Niio takes a unique ‘collaborative ecosystem’ approach to enabling the medium, offering art professionals (including artists, galleries, curators and museums) the chance to each have their own branded account on the Niio platform, and to empower them with a broad set of dedicated technology tools to store, preserve, publish, privately and publicly distribute, and professionally play back their digital format works. This has in-turn has positioned Niio as the default moving image art repository and management tool.
Before the business was launched, the team had over 200 meetings with artists, collectors, galleries and curators. They found people placed value in the moving image art world and felt passionately about it, but the sector lacked a market or central hub that was accessible to all of the relevant stakeholders.
Artists wanted a platform through which they could store moving image artworks, sell directly to affluent collectors, and make some works available for loan on masse to reach a global audience. Collectors had their own concerns, as there was no platform through which to view and purchase exclusive works that they wanted to enjoy privately. Niio realised quickly that whether a gallery, curator, artist or collector, the digital art world was fragmented, and there was a necessity to create an ecosystem that satisfied all of those players.
We live in a digital age, defined by technology and the growth of the online world, and that is reshaping the way we experience art. Increasingly, it means software and film have become the paint, the screen has become the canvas and a new destination for art. Niio specialises in this new generation of moving image artworks.
The next generation of art enthusiasts and collectors consume and experience everything online, that is why Niio calls it the “digital age”, and that is what the art world is starting to adapt to. This has already extended to other areas of culture with the emergence of streaming giants in the film and music worlds. Art is experiencing the same shift, because people crave access and unique, meaningful experiences, and Niio was founded with a mission to meet that demand. The screen is the natural environment for that shift to take place: it is a digital canvas that is accessible globally, and creating artworks that are designed to be experienced through it is a solution that satisfies artists, galleries, collectors, and the art-loving public.
When the platform was set up, the greatest challenges facing artists and collectors were access and maintaining value. Art is a scarcity market, and typically you might associate a model that allows for streaming of artworks as being targeted to the mass market.
Niio’s answers to those challenges were rooted in the technology and giving complete control of the tools they developed to the artists. Just as when purchasing a physical masterpiece, collectors want to own digital artworks that are not consumed by the masses. Niio spent a lot of time early on implementing blockchain and AI technology to underwrite ownership of artworks obtained through Niio to ensure that people were confident in the integrity of the platform.
Most recently in response to the COVID-19 situation, Niio has launched ‘Moving Art for Good’, a project to bring moving image art directly into people’s homes to give them that crucial dose of daily inspiration. The first step of this is the curation of a collection of moving image artworks as Zoom backgrounds. The collection includes a wide selection of artworks from leading artists, including Quayola’s Camouflage series of abstract landscape algorithmic paintings and Joe Hamilton’s Cézanne Unfixed, which blurs the relationships between painting and the museum. They are free to download and can be accessed here: https://www.niio.com/get/zoom/