FOUNDER PROFILE
Justin Wastnage: a career building what video becomes next
Vloggi’s founder has spent more than two decades lowering the barriers to video participation—from early digital television and video PR to structured video submission and provenance-aware capture.
Building tools for video participation
Justin Wastnage is the founder and CEO of Vloggi, a Sydney-based video technology company. His work has repeatedly explored the same question: how can more people contribute useful video without requiring a conventional production crew?
That question has taken him from interactive digital television and rapid-turnaround business video to video press releases, event publishing, early online video blogging and, since 2018, Vloggi. Today his focus is structured video submission: keeping footage connected to contributor context, consent, labels and the evidence needed for responsible reuse.
Mobile video should be a business asset, not disposable content
Justin’s vision is that the video people capture on their phones should have a useful life far beyond a social feed. A customer’s story, an employee’s expertise or a record from the field should become an asset the business can find, understand and use again—not ephemeral content that disappears after a campaign.
That means collecting original footage directly and keeping the brief, contributor details, consent and context attached. One contribution can support a campaign today, a customer story tomorrow and a searchable library of knowledge over time. The ambition behind Vloggi is to make that lasting value accessible to every organization, without requiring everyone to become a video producer.
Video becomes far more valuable when organizations can collect it from real people without losing the context, permission and provenance that make it usable.
Justin Wastnage
CAREER TIMELINE
From digital television to verifiable video
Static 2358 (now PlayJam)
In the late 1990s, Justin worked at London and Palo Alto digital-television startup Static 2358 and its games spin-off PlayJam, during the formative years of interactive television.
HowWasIt? Productions
He co-founded a digital production company that introduced lower-cost, rapid-turnaround business video to the convention industry and experimented with new ways to capture action and mountain sports.
Microsoft
At Microsoft, Justin established a video public-relations capability, packaging broadcast-ready B-roll, interviews, case studies and product demonstrations around major announcements.
Reed Elsevier (now RELx)
He helped establish video-publishing operations in London and Sydney, producing business-to-business programming from live events across the United States and Europe.
Introducing “video blog” to YouTube
In 2006, after advertiser funding fell through for a television series, Justin filmed, presented, composed and edited the episodes himself for online release. The resulting NBAA Video Blog was the first use of the term “video blog” on YouTube, introducing the name on the platform for a production model that would become central to the creator economy.
Vloggi
Justin built Vloggi’s first prototype in 2018. The product evolved from a consumer storytelling app into a B2B platform for collecting, structuring, managing and increasingly verifying video submissions.
Message Shapers
Justin founded Message Shapers to turn strategic communications into campaigns that get people involved. Its video marketing and user-generated campaigns put customer and supporter voices at the center—from grassroots video advocacy to content that organizations can collect, curate and reuse across their marketing.
Swinburne University of Technology
Through Vloggi’s collaboration with Swinburne Innovation Studio, Justin has explored how employee-generated video can become structured business data. The work connects venture building and applied video technology with practical uses in inspections, workplace reporting and enterprise workflows.
Three principles behind his work
Participation over production privilege
The ability to contribute should not depend on owning specialist equipment, learning complex software or joining another platform.
Structure at the moment of capture
Video is more useful when contributor answers, labels, consent and project references remain connected to the footage from the beginning.
Responsible automation
AI should reduce repetitive work while people retain control over context, rights, review and consequential decisions.
Why Justin Wastnage founded Vloggi
Justin Wastnage founded Vloggi to make video contribution practical for people outside a production team, including customers, employees, applicants, communities and field teams. The product applies lessons from broadcast, digital media and software to a persistent organizational problem: collecting original video without losing the contributor context, permission and workflow data that make it usable.
Alongside leading Vloggi, Justin works at the intersection of entrepreneurship, commercialization and applied video technology. His current product focus includes consented video data collection, human-in-the-loop labeling, field evidence and capture-path provenance. That work is increasingly important as organizations need to distinguish controlled human capture from files with an unknown or synthetic history.