GENERATION 247 - Web TV, Internet Streaming and Online Entertainment by Kevin Foong

More to come from GEN247

My good people at GEN247 tackled the world's fastest growing criminal activity, identity theft, with the Webby Award winning interactive web thriller, DELETED: THE GAME.  The web show told half the story and the interactive game story told the other half.  Personally, I think the balance was a little off making the web show a little hard to follow watching it on its own without playing the game.  The team will address this in the sequel which is coming very soon ;-)

Also, look to them to tackle the second fastest growing criminal activity, human trafficking, with a collaborative work working titled Matchbook.  I'm particularly moved by this project and its the kind of work I'd like to do more off.  I know some of you would be interested to get involved, the team is in sponsorship raising mode so this would be the most helpful kind of input at this stage.  Watch out for details of how else to contribute down the road.

Finally, the team plans to tackle the third fastest growing criminal activity, counterfeiting, with a tongue-in-cheek interactive docu-drama with a working title named Full Price.  It explores the demand side of the equation and I'm sure you'll agree will provide excellent grounds for character study.

HERE'S A RECAP OF DELETED: SEASON ONE

Welcome back Mania TV

When it launched in 2004, ManiaTV became the world’s first Internet television network. Which seems insane as it’s only five years ago but it really just shows how much has happened in the world of online television since then.

ManiaTV produced programming purely for the Internet, with shows being sold and distributed across the Web without ever going near a network executive. The primary ManiaTV audience was 18 to 34-year-olds, with the shows focused on subjects close to that age range’s heart, such as video games, music videos, and cutting-edge comedy. Dave Navarro, Tom Green, and Chuck Norris all had shows on the network.

Gone. For Good?

All was seemingly going well until founder Drew Massey sold three-quarters of the company in three rounds of venture capital raising. The company eventually hit financial troubles right in the middle of the current recession, and ceased operations in March 2009.

Now, according to The New York Times, Massey wants to give the venture another go. He has successfully bought back the brand name and much of its old programming for what he claims is a small fraction of the $26 million invested by the venture capitalists. The ManiaTV Web site will soon be back online, initially airing reruns of old shows.

Onwards and Upwards

Once everything is back up and running, Massey then plans on making new shows by the end of this year, again looking to appeal to the youth market. Massey is looking to run a lean company which will turn a profit by concentrating on sponsorships and product placements in shows rather than other forms of Web advertising.

Massey maintains there is room for small, Web-only programme-makers such as ManiaTV out there, even with the likes of Hulu and YouTube leading the charge for professional content. He claims, “This will be a billion-dollar business, it will just take longer than some people would like.”

Chances For Success

Massey seems to be going about this task the right way this time, keeping everything small and manageable and appealing to sponsors and product placement advertisers. However, the brand has a severely tarnished reputation at this point and will require a lot of rebuilding.

Then there is the biggest problem of all, that we live in a post-Hulu world where both viewers and advertisers seem to be less interested in original Web shows than they once were. Can ManiaTV buck the trend which has seen rivals such as 60Frames and Ripe Digital also go out of business?

Source: WebTVWire

Ripe TV shuts its doors

Online network and VOD content provider Ripe Digital Entertainment is reportedly closing down and trying to sell its assets. Deadline Hollywood Daily broke the story, which paidContent subsequently confirmed with its sources.

Founded in 2004, Ripe Digital was focused on creating entertainment for dudes with the online networks RipeTV, OctaneTV and FlowTV, featuring such shows as Sexy Road Test, Funk Flex TV and Pauly Shore’s America. In addition to its online presence, the company had VOD distribution deals with Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Ripe had raised $45 million with investors including Hearst-Argyle, Time Warner Investments, Columbia Capital LLC and Rho Ventures.

We tried to contact Ripe for this post, but its New York office phone number went straight to a busy signal (repeatedly) and an email to the info address bounced back.

Ripe was just one of many sites targeting young men with content built around bikinis, cars and music. Other players in that space include Spike.com, KushTV (KushTV dropped the male focus and became branded entertainment siteRedLever) and UGO.

Ripe is also the latest content startup to fail this year. Other casualties in the online video world that shut down recently include ManiaTV and 60Frames.

Source: NewTeeVee

Atomicus and Bad Boy Records at Bayard Studios

Atomicus Films brought their filming of the new Day 26 viral to Bayard Studios.  It's the first time we've worked with Bad Boy Records and it was a blast!  Great people, amazing talent.  We loved the group so much we've invited Atomicus to join Bayard Studios as a resident artists.

Day26 - New Music - More Music Videos

An original web TV show DELETED: THE GAME with an integrated online game?

I am delighted to share that the web TV / online game production I've been funding has released a trailer for public viewing. You can check it out at www.youtube.com/deletedthegame and/or www.myspace.com/deletedthegame, you'll learn a lot about the project from on their website but the team still has lots of tricks up their sleeves - one of which is a launch in autumn in six languages (English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish), you heard it first here.  The team is trying to decide if they want to commit to playing the game out on YouTube or MySpace ... let me know what you think.

There's a wonderful and sublimely talented group of people behind this, here's a shout out: Andreas Hager, Carmine Picarello, Charlie Miller, David Rudd, Elia Monte-Brown, Joshua Davis, Josie Torres Barth, Matt Gielen, Ning Zhou, Ryan Gielen, Shawn Parsons, Thomas Jacob and last but not least Tom Cryan. It's a nice mix of skills, some internet TV veterans, actors, filmmakers, viral marketers and info technologists.

The essential startup team composition

Here's a neat interview the folks at PartnerUp had with Guy Kawasaki of Apple and Garage Technology fame:

Q: What sets of skills do you look for in the team members of a startup? Should you look for people with skills the same as yours or different?

A: Startups are pretty simple: someone has to create it, someone has to sell it, and someone has to collect the money. So generally, a team should have these three skills and not, for example, be all engineers, all marketers, or all accountants.

Q: How many team members, do you feel, are needed to adequately launch a startup?

A: Two or three are sufficient. One is lonely. Four is overkill for the three main roles.

Q: What personal qualities (personality, etc.) do you look for in startup team members? Are there any qualities that you always try to avoid including in your team?

A: You always look for “chemistry,” but I think this is bull shiitake. It’s funny how if a company is doing really well, all the jerks can get along. Also, if a company is tanking, even the nice people start getting testy. You could make the case that nice people communicating well can make a company successful, but I think luck is more powerful than this factor.

Q: Do you prefer to see startups teams where each team member has some of their own money invested, or are you ok with only one team member providing the seed money?

A: It really makes no difference…to the extreme of no one investing any of their money. The theory is that a team will spend its own money more carefully. However, if it’s the team’s money, they also think that the other investors shouldn’t have as big an influence.

Volomedia raises $3.5 million in third round financing

Formerly known as Podbridge, Volomedia reported that it raised the financing from Leader Ventures.  For those of you stepping into the free ad-sponsored video space, Volomedia is a provider of advertising, metrics, and reporting solutions for downloadable media, both video and audio.  Brian Steel, the CEO of Volomedia, says they plan to use the funds to accelerate growth and invest in multiple opportunities.  It's not clear what these are though.

Meanwhile here on the East Coast, iMediatreams of New Jersey is soon coming out of stealth mode with their own suite of online advertising measurement, targeting and reporting solutions.  Speaking with Ahmed Gomaa, Co-founder and President of iMediastreams, I learnt that their patent pending technology makes use of the huge amount of information about people presented in their blogs to enrich advertising targeting.  I love the cleverness and cheekiness of iMediastream's central concept, inferences can be drawn about people and their audiences from their blogs, it's free, why not exploit it.

Conserving cash for start-ups, or not

Here's a random walk post for my start-up colleagues who fear a looming recession and cash crisis.  Late last week, Jason Calacanis, CEO of human search engine Mahalo, posted 17 cost saving tips for start-ups. 

I like unconventional thinking, Jason certainly exhibits plenty and offers many workable ideas. Tips 11 and 12, however, caused quite a stir in the start-up blogosphere especially when Duncan Riley of Techcrunch took up the gauntlet with his post "Calacanis Fires People Who Have a Life". Duncan's post kicked off hundreds of comments and trackbacks both supporting and deriding Jason for Tips 11 and 12, see what the fuss was about. 

For those of you too lazy to click on the earlier link, here's Jason's Tips 11 and 12 in its entirety:

11. Fire people who are not workaholics ... come on folks, this is startup life, it's not a game. don't work at a startup if you're not into it--go work at the post office or starbucks if you're not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

12. Get an expensive, automatic espresso machine at the office. Going to starbucks twice a day cost $4 each time, but more importantly it costs 20 minutes. Buy a $3-5000 Jura Industrial, get the good beans, and supply the coffee room with soy, low fat, etc. 50 people making one trip a day is 20 hours of wasted time for the company, and $150 in coffee costs for the employees. Makes no sense.

And a couple of Duncan's retort:

"[Calacanis'] helpful advice includes (our interpretation):

• If you do meetings, have them over lunch, because you shouldn’t let your employees eat alone
• Buy people who work hard a computer for home, so they can work after hours, on weekends and public holidays
• Urinary catheters are cheap, hook each employee up to one so they don’t waste minutes going to the restroom

OK, so I made the last point up."

Now I might not have worded Tips 11 and 12 quite the same but heck, how many of you have heard me say, "Always know whom you'd fight-to-keep and whom you'd fight-to-sack".  Different point but the same lack of sympathy. Still, you have to admit, my adage resonates with logic.

CrunchBase Information

Jason Calacanis

Mahalo

TechCrunch

Information provided by CrunchBase

Pando Networks just raised $8 million

New York based Pando Networks, a P2P content delivery network has raised $8 million dollars in new money from existing investors. Dan Rayburn says reports that Pando is looking to raise $20 million are incorrect, it's not. Robert Levitan, CEO, Laird Popkin and Yaron Samid (the two co-founders who are the CTO and CMO respectively), plan to use the money to build out its sales and marketing force. Pando was the winner of the NBC Direct TV download service contract Feb 27, 2008 which should be going live in the next few weeks.

CrunchBase Information

Pando

Information provided by CrunchBase

thePlatform a one-stop broadband video solution or bottomless money pit (PART II)?

Doug Fulton, President of Entertainment at Dave Networks, dropped me an email after reading my post today saying that Dave Networks pretty much does all that thePlatform claims it does, and more.  Well yes, that's true,  in part. The alliance formed out of thePlatform pretty much caters to the universe of needs out there and no one has been able to do that to my knowledge.  And if Ian Blaine, CEO the Platform, is right  (see PART I post) then those with online broadcast aspirations but with their own set of unique restrictions will be bypassing the fixed menus of companies like Brightcove, Dave, Narrowstep and Roo.  I wouldn't underestimate the nature of these unique restrictions often borne out of technical or contractual (e.g. content rights) or budgetary issues. 

So in PART II of this post, I've drawn up a little comparison chart of four notable providers namely Brightcove, Dave Networks, Narrowstep and Roo (I left out thePlatform because it theoretically should be able to do the lot):

Now, I wish I could simply have copied this comparison chart from one of the four's websites but one can always wish. Notably, few of these can provide live linear feed signal ingestion (i.e. they cannot capture a live broadcast).  And of course you'll have noticed one of the biggest factors that I've left out for a lack of data is the critical matter of cost (which inspired the cheeky title viz. "money pit" in the first place). If any of my colleagues has any data to share on price points for these services, I would encourage you to post it as a comment for all.

CrunchBase Information

Brightcove

Roo

Information provided by CrunchBase

thePlatform a one-stop broadband video solution or bottomless money pit (PART I)?

One of the questions I’m most often asked once the decision to launch offline content online has been taken  is who would I recommend to provide an end-to-end solution? Unfortunately, there has been no one until perhaps now.

Last month, thePlatform, a Seattle-based broadband video services company, announced the broadband video industry’s largest collection of pre-integrated partner technologies and an open approach for assisting media companies with their online and mobile video initiatives. thePlatform’s customers benefit from the widest choice of pre-integrated partner services and technologies to support their unique business needs. Companies participating in thePlatform Framework, the company’s premier partner program, span the entire ecosystem of online video, including: advertising campaign management systems, ad sales networks, content delivery networks, content protection, media formats, transcoding engines, payment processors, syndication outlets and video search. In addition, customers can easily use their own in-house digital asset management system, customer relationship management and other back-office applications in conjunction with thePlatform’s system.

 

“Every media company has its own unique vision for online video, and they are becoming less tolerant of technology constraints or specialized vendors that inhibit their growth or agility,” said Ian Blaine, CEO of thePlatform. “Our customers want the ability to trial new technology and choose the best vendors without dramatically impacting their operations. thePlatform framework addresses this need with a robust menu of pre-integrated solutions that give them flexibility to easily create the optimal solution. No other broadband video management company has our open approach to partners or proven history in the space.”

Now I’m not recommending thePlatform yet as I've not worked with them but I’ll post a review once/if I have.  And yes, this is a cop out to the cheeky question posed in my title.

CrunchBase Information

EdgeCast

Limelight Networks

Move Networks

Information provided by CrunchBase

Basic components for internet TV broadcast

This is just a quick post for someone who’s asked me to outline the components of a system capable of broadcasting live and on-demand television over the internet (I’ll be writing a companion guide to this outline later):

COMPONENTS OF A LIVE & ON-DEMAND INTERNET VIDEO SYSTEM:

- Content Ingestion
- Encoding/Transcoding
- Media Formats/Codec
- Digital Rights Management
- Content Management System/Metadata
- Content Delivery Network
- Search
- Syndication and Distribution System
- Ad Inventory Management
- Ad Sales Networks
- eCommerce Engine
- Customer Relationship Management