At any given concert, hundreds of phones are already capturing the show from every angle. Nobody is doing much with any of it. Nicolai Amter thinks that’s a structural opportunity worth pursuing.

Nicolai spent more than two decades in professional television production, directing campaigns for MTV, Disney, and National Geographic Channel, and filming NGOs across sub-Saharan Africa with little more than a backpack and a DSLR. When he returned to Denmark and started attending live music events again, he noticed the same thing most people noticed and ignored: audiences filming everything, constantly, on phones that were getting better by the year.

“I thought there must be some way we could collect all this stuff and make it into something that has a benefit to the artist,” Nicolai says. “Maybe even cut together as a live concert clip so they could resell it as a track.”

Rather than dismissing it as a nuisance, he started asking a different question. In August 2024, Nicolai, together with Nicolai Emlqvist and Hans Peter Vith, co-founded SureShot, a Copenhagen-based platform that collects crowd-filmed video from live events, organizes it through a centralized backend, and uses AI-assisted curation to produce highlight reels that event organizers, artists, and brands can actually use. The company, backed by Danish venture firm Soundinvest and private equity investors, has launched apps on iOS and Android.

SureShot Home Screen

A Beastie Boys Concert as a Business Model

The conceptual origin of SureShot predates the company by two decades. In 2004, the Beastie Boys handed out 50 DV cameras to the audience at Madison Square Garden and filmed their entire concert through the crowd. The resulting film took more than a year to edit. Nicolai saw it as a proof of concept that nobody had scaled.

“This is exactly what we are doing, just with modern technology and a faster editor,” he says. The company name itself is a Beastie Boys reference.

For Nicolai, the broader context matters: streaming has eroded per-play revenue for most artists to the point where live performance and ancillary content have become central to income. His thesis is that the footage fans are already producing for free represents an underutilized asset for artists who can’t afford traditional multi-camera production budgets.

“With streaming services devaluing music in many ways, I thought there must be some way we could build something they can use both for their marketing, but hopefully also put together and resell to their fans,” he says.

SureShot Camera

Event Setup, a PIN Code, and a Curation Portal

The mechanics of SureShot are straightforward by design. An event organizer creates an event inside the app, enters basic details, and the platform generates a PIN code and a shareable landing page. Attendees who download SureShot and enter the PIN are connected to the event; everything they film uploads directly to SureShot’s backend system.

From there, organizers access a web portal to review and curate content, select clips for highlight reels, or commission editing as an add-on service. Finished reels can be sent back to the attendees who filmed them, which Nicolai sees as a critical loop: contributors receive something tangible in return for participating.

SureShot Event Screen

The platform currently supports uploads via both the app and a web portal for attendees who prefer not to film directly in SureShot. Clips are retained in the system and can be downloaded to personal camera rolls. Nicolai describes the current version as early-stage, with self-service event management and automated editing tools planned for later in 2026.

“Eventually, the app will be the one-stop place for doing everything,” he says. “Where you can select clips, download them, share them.”

SureShot Event Countdown

AI as Editor, Not Author

Nicolai draws a sharp line on where AI fits into SureShot’s product. The platform will use AI to identify and select the most usable moments from submitted footage, detecting when something interesting is happening in frame versus when a user was still finding the record button. It will not generate any video content.

“Our big North Star is authentic videos created together,” he says. “We will never be using AI to generate video. We’ll only be using it to be the editor and the curator.”

The distinction reflects a broader conviction about where the Creator Economy’s value actually lies. Nicolai is openly critical of what he calls “AI-generated UGC,” a trend gaining traction on platforms like LinkedIn, where synthetic content is positioned as a scalable substitute for genuine user-created material. His argument is that the appeal of crowd-sourced footage is precisely its rawness: the half-obscured face, the elbow in the frame, the mosh pit shot that no camera crew could reach.

“A lot of people are fed up with this very polished, curated look,” he says. “There’s a real interest and need for raw, unpolished content where you can say, ‘I was there.'”

Brands Are Already Paying for Event Content They Don’t Have

SureShot’s early commercial traction has come from two directions: music festivals and brand activation events. The company has several Danish festivals lined up for summer 2026 and has established a partnership with Royal Unibrew, a Danish brewing and beverage company. Under that arrangement, SureShot has been given access to events sponsored by one of Royal Unibrew’s drink brands.

Nicolai describes brands doing in-person activations as a particularly strong fit. He notes that these companies are already spending on experiential marketing and are struggling to get usable content from one-time events. “It takes so much time to try and chase down people on Instagram to get content from them,” he says. “And sometimes they send it on WhatsApp, and it gets compressed.”

Beyond music, Nicolai sees applications in sports, fashion weeks, corporate events, and any setting where people are already filming. He points to a New Year’s Eve activation SureShot ran in which participants filmed the 10-second countdown from locations across the world, producing a single piece of multi-location content. “That showed a real potential for what this really could do,” he says.

On an Algorithm You Don’t Control

Nicolai’s view of the broader Creator Economy is skeptical, particularly around the influencer model. He argues that paying creators based on follower count is a fragile foundation because the reach those followers actually represent is controlled entirely by platform algorithms that creators have no access to.

“You’re sitting on somebody else’s channel, hoping that they still like you,” he says. “I find it hard to understand whether that is a maintainable source of business when you have no control over the actual system that feeds your content to your audience.”

Nicolai notes that SureShot’s design implicitly responds to that problem. The footage collected through the platform exists independently of any feed algorithm. An artist who uses it to produce a tour recap video, or a festival that uses it to assemble a post-event highlights package, owns that content outright, and the decision to distribute it is entirely theirs.

Scaling From Venues to Everywhere People Are Already Filming

Nicolai’s near-term goal is to establish SureShot as a standard tool within the music industry, the vertical that motivated him to start the company. But his longer-term ambition is to become a default platform for collective video capture at any event where people are already filming, which, as he notes, is nearly every event.

As Nicolai shares, the early signal from users has been encouraging. In a pre-app test at a live music gig, before SureShot had anything more than a basic upload page, one attendee showed up with six phones so she could scan the QR code on each and upload from all of them. Nobody offered her anything in return.

“People just want to participate and be part of something bigger,” Nicolai says. “You don’t use Snapchat. You use SureShot instead at events. That would be a big milestone for me.

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