PAMETNA HRVATSKA Miroslav Zarić

Guest Miroslav ZarićHosted by Bojan ŽivkovićMay 3, 2026

Miroslav Zarić

About this episode

What you'll hear in this conversation

Who hasn't been there: watching a film, seeing something intriguing — a location, an actor, a stunt — and immediately reaching for a phone to search? That moment of curiosity, often quickly lost to the friction of typing and sifting through search results, is the precise problem Miroslav Zarić and his co-founders set out to solve. As a co-founder of Beyond Screen, Miroslav discusses their X-Ray platform, often described as 'Shazam for video,' but which aims for something far more expansive than simple recognition. This conversation explores how to build a technology that not only identifies what you're watching, but immediately delivers a 'wellspring of information' directly to your device, transforming passive viewing into an interactive experience. You'll walk away considering the subtle shifts that define the next generation of content engagement.

Insights from the conversation

What to take from this episode

Miroslav Zarić describes the 'director' title in a startup as 'misleading,' clarifying that all three co-founders are 'responsible for everything.' In early-stage companies, formal titles often obscure the reality of shared, hands-on responsibility from everyone on the founding team.

The X-Ray platform is frequently pitched as 'Shazam for video,' but Miroslav immediately clarifies the real point: it's not just about recognizing *what* you're watching. The true value lies in providing an immediate 'wellspring of information' about everything within the video, from actors to locations to stunts.

As a self-professed film buff, Miroslav describes the irritation of pausing a movie to research something, often losing interest or focus by the time the information is found. The core product isn't the data itself, but the seamless, immediate delivery of that data, preventing user friction and preserving engagement.

Beyond Screen spent almost two years developing the underlying technology to 'recognize video' before focusing on scaling content. Their partnership with Doku TV proved they could make an entire channel's programming 'scannable,' demonstrating that proving core technical capability on a contained dataset is crucial before tackling large-scale content acquisition.

Miroslav notes that 'forty thousand hours' of video content might sound small, but it's 'almost twice Netflix' in terms of processed data. Benchmarking abstract numbers against familiar services helps convey the true scale and technical challenge of processing content for metadata, not just streaming it.

The X-Ray platform does not host any video content; instead, it consists of 'pure data' that enables the application to recognize films and provide information. This model allows for vast scalability without the copyright burdens associated with directly hosting large volumes of media.

When approaching potential clients like TV stations, Beyond Screen learned that many lacked the resources to create the 'additional content below' the basic recognition data. Anticipating this, they decided to provide this content themselves as a 'basic level,' solving a downstream operational gap for their clients.

During its beta phase, the X-Ray app saw 'only a thousand' downloads without any marketing, but Miroslav emphasizes that every comment, positive or negative, was valuable for improving the app. Early user numbers, especially without marketing, aren't the only metric; the quality of feedback from a small, engaged group is often more critical for product iteration than raw download volume.

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