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BusinessWeek's Jon Fine to Mainstream Media: You Don't Necessarily Have the "Secret Sauce"

Jon Fine, BusinessWeek

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[Start of Audio]

-- around 1900 and in the 19^th century, even before then, I’d be willing to bet that every family had a few people, and they’d get together and sing, and they’d get together and play whatever instruments they had at hand because that was the entertainment, and they didn’t go to the movies; they didn’t have radio; they didn’t have TV. They damn well didn’t have Internet, so you had to make it.

I mean, the counter of it is, right now – the stuff that people did for themselves in the bedroom or _____ can be for a lot of people. You can go onto YouTube and find kids like practicing really fast guitar solos in their bedrooms, which they were doing all along. Now, people can watch them.

I’m a musician, okay? I essentially came of age in bands, touring, making records. I was in bands in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s until today. That’s not important. What’s important is this. In the ‘80s, I think the average major label – well, to make a rock album, you need $100,000.00, $150,000.00. That’s just studio fees; then you need promotion. That’s another couple hundred grand. You make a video, another couple hundred grand, so pretty soon, you’re talking like – and I’m making these numbers up, but they’re not that far off; $750,000.00, $2 million to _____ rock band, to produce an album and get out and go on the road now.

I did all this. It’s bullshit, but you could make an album that is perfectly good for $2,000.00, $2,500.00. You could make a video, even if you needed a video, for $500.00, $1,000.00. You didn’t need tour support and to stay in hotels every night; you could get in a van and work for a living.

So what I’m getting at is that there’s an assumption on the part of the big networks, the big record labels, even to a degree like the big newspapers; that there’s some sort of secret sauce that we have that costs an awful lot of money. And, in some cases, they’re right, but in a lot of cases, they’re completely wrong.

And, more importantly, the old structure meant that there were a lot of people out there who were as talented as the people inside the structure, but didn’t have any platform. Now, they do. There’s no question that if you’re a marketer, if you’re an advertiser, if you’re a business, it’s harder than if you just had to worry about putting an ad up on one of the three big networks, and you’d go to bed at 9:00 and wake up at 8:00 the next morning.

But, I mean, too bad because this is what the world looks like now, and, for that matter, it’s kind of what the world looked like then, but there is no way to really express that.

And, sure, there’s always a time when it was easier, but sorry, the world changes and technology changes, and technology changes behavior, and people get bad‑word‑empowered by the technology, and you’ve gotta catch up. It was easier when there was a very artificial construct built all around this, but we knew then that artificial construct was essentially inaccurate. It was essentially a lie, and now, we’re dealing with the reality, and some of the reality – it’s not the best mirror to put up to America.

I mean, the most-searched term again this year was Britney Spears; I mean, it’s not Iraq War; it’s not congressional election; it’s Britney Spears and God knows how many video views of her without underwear and Paris Hilton being drunk out of her mind and in a club.

[End of Audio]

Jon Fine, BusinessWeek

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

-- around 1900 and in the 19^th century, even before then, I’d be willing to bet that every family had a few people, and they’d get together and sing, and they’d get together and play whatever instruments they had at hand because that was the entertainment, and they didn’t go to the movies; they didn’t have radio; they didn’t have TV. They damn well didn’t have Internet, so you had to make it.

I mean, the counter of it is, right now – the stuff that people did for themselves in the bedroom or _____ can be for a lot of people. You can go onto YouTube and find kids like practicing really fast guitar solos in their bedrooms, which they were doing all along. Now, people can watch them.

I’m a musician, okay? I essentially came of age in bands, touring, making records. I was in bands in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s until today. That’s not important. What’s important is this. In the ‘80s, I think the average major label – well, to make a rock album, you need $100,000.00, $150,000.00. That’s just studio fees; then you need promotion. That’s another couple hundred grand. You make a video, another couple hundred grand, so pretty soon, you’re talking like – and I’m making these numbers up, but they’re not that far off; $750,000.00, $2 million to _____ rock band, to produce an album and get out and go on the road now.

I did all this. It’s bullshit, but you could make an album that is perfectly good for $2,000.00, $2,500.00. You could make a video, even if you needed a video, for $500.00, $1,000.00. You didn’t need tour support and to stay in hotels every night; you could get in a van and work for a living.

So what I’m getting at is that there’s an assumption on the part of the big networks, the big record labels, even to a degree like the big newspapers; that there’s some sort of secret sauce that we have that costs an awful lot of money. And, in some cases, they’re right, but in a lot of cases, they’re completely wrong.

And, more importantly, the old structure meant that there were a lot of people out there who were as talented as the people inside the structure, but didn’t have any platform. Now, they do. There’s no question that if you’re a marketer, if you’re an advertiser, if you’re a business, it’s harder than if you just had to worry about putting an ad up on one of the three big networks, and you’d go to bed at 9:00 and wake up at 8:00 the next morning.

But, I mean, too bad because this is what the world looks like now, and, for that matter, it’s kind of what the world looked like then, but there is no way to really express that.

And, sure, there’s always a time when it was easier, but sorry, the world changes and technology changes, and technology changes behavior, and people get bad‑word‑empowered by the technology, and you’ve gotta catch up. It was easier when there was a very artificial construct built all around this, but we knew then that artificial construct was essentially inaccurate. It was essentially a lie, and now, we’re dealing with the reality, and some of the reality – it’s not the best mirror to put up to America.

I mean, the most-searched term again this year was Britney Spears; I mean, it’s not Iraq War; it’s not congressional election; it’s Britney Spears and God knows how many video views of her without underwear and Paris Hilton being drunk out of her mind and in a club.

[End of Audio]

Jon Fine, BusinessWeek

Veotag Indexes Videos to Create "Chapters"

Scott Rhodes, Veotag

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[End of Audio] 

Veotag is a system that lets you point at any audio or video on the Internet, and then as it’s playing, you can create a table of contents by just stopping, typing text, and it starts to appear on the right, and then you can indent or out-dent, and the result is that when somebody is playing back, they see that table of contents. They can see where they are, where they’ve been, and they can click around to jump to the part that’s interesting to them.

That table of contents gets exported to all the major search engines, so the result is that you can go to Google and type “Swift Kids Dora.” Swift Kids is a commercial advertising company, and they did a Dora commercial, and they put their commercial wheel on our website, and when you type “Swift Kids Dora” in Google, you jump into that video, in the middle of the video at the instant it corresponds to that tag.

So the result is that now, you can look at any video and open it like a book, and that really changes the landscape for the way that video can be perceived and understood because you can now view it from the outside intelligently, and while it’s playing, you can view it intelligently from the inside and see the part that’s interesting to you.

Our customers range from Jazz at Lincoln Center, which has put its music classes up on the web using this technology. The University of Scotland bought the products to be able to present their videos with coordinated slide shows. We have another version, which not only will you see the video playing, but you can coordinate any HTML or PowerPoint slide or application along with the video.

We have advertising companies. Different companies are trying to solve different problems, but it all centers around adding that intelligence to the video to make it easier to consume and easier to find.

So Jazz at Lincoln Center runs a thing called Master Classes, where, basically, you see a master student and a master teacher, and the master teacher’s giving a lesson to the master student. Normally, as a musician, unless you’re very, very good, you never get to the point where the first trumpet in the Philharmonic is personally teaching you, but you can go to this class and watch how he gets instructed, and the value to you is you get insight into how to learn this stuff.

Now, their reach, Jazz at Lincoln Center, is really the Manhattan area only. People don’t necessarily know about the classes and certainly can’t always attend. This gives Jazz at Lincoln Center the opportunity to present those classes so that other people can find out about them, can get benefit from them. It’s essentially a marketing route. I think, ultimately, it may become a pay-per-view route also.

People are beginning to realize that video presents an opportunity to present information in the same way as books do and that there ought to be a commensurate cost associated with that, so the business model is changing as well, and Jazz at Lincoln Center is leading there in understanding how to turn their asset into something that can both be marketed and sold.

[End of Audio]

Veotag, Scott Rhodes, Video search

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[End of Audio] 

Veotag is a system that lets you point at any audio or video on the Internet, and then as it’s playing, you can create a table of contents by just stopping, typing text, and it starts to appear on the right, and then you can indent or out-dent, and the result is that when somebody is playing back, they see that table of contents. They can see where they are, where they’ve been, and they can click around to jump to the part that’s interesting to them.

That table of contents gets exported to all the major search engines, so the result is that you can go to Google and type “Swift Kids Dora.” Swift Kids is a commercial advertising company, and they did a Dora commercial, and they put their commercial wheel on our website, and when you type “Swift Kids Dora” in Google, you jump into that video, in the middle of the video at the instant it corresponds to that tag.

So the result is that now, you can look at any video and open it like a book, and that really changes the landscape for the way that video can be perceived and understood because you can now view it from the outside intelligently, and while it’s playing, you can view it intelligently from the inside and see the part that’s interesting to you.

Our customers range from Jazz at Lincoln Center, which has put its music classes up on the web using this technology. The University of Scotland bought the products to be able to present their videos with coordinated slide shows. We have another version, which not only will you see the video playing, but you can coordinate any HTML or PowerPoint slide or application along with the video.

We have advertising companies. Different companies are trying to solve different problems, but it all centers around adding that intelligence to the video to make it easier to consume and easier to find.

So Jazz at Lincoln Center runs a thing called Master Classes, where, basically, you see a master student and a master teacher, and the master teacher’s giving a lesson to the master student. Normally, as a musician, unless you’re very, very good, you never get to the point where the first trumpet in the Philharmonic is personally teaching you, but you can go to this class and watch how he gets instructed, and the value to you is you get insight into how to learn this stuff.

Now, their reach, Jazz at Lincoln Center, is really the Manhattan area only. People don’t necessarily know about the classes and certainly can’t always attend. This gives Jazz at Lincoln Center the opportunity to present those classes so that other people can find out about them, can get benefit from them. It’s essentially a marketing route. I think, ultimately, it may become a pay-per-view route also.

People are beginning to realize that video presents an opportunity to present information in the same way as books do and that there ought to be a commensurate cost associated with that, so the business model is changing as well, and Jazz at Lincoln Center is leading there in understanding how to turn their asset into something that can both be marketed and sold.

[End of Audio]

Veotag, Scott Rhodes, Video search

Believe in Beets: Borcht is Hangover Cure, CNET's Chow Editor Reveals -- More Holiday Food Tips from Video-Centric Food Site

Aida Mollenkamp, CNET's CHOW

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[Start of Audio]

For Chow, our editorial take would be that there are a lot of people out there in our demographic; you know, about 25-to-45-year-olds, who love to go eat; could talk to you about anything from red, green and yellow curry, but they’re wanting to know how to make it.

And so we’re the ones bridging that gap for them, getting them in the kitchen, making them feel comfortable, trying something new and exotic or something they’re really familiar with eating, but not necessarily cooking. As far as our stories are concerned, we’re kind of getting in the grit of the industry, covering the new technology that you might not know about because only ten chefs are using it or covering just kind of the odds and ends of everything that there is in the food industry.

But, you know, in general, at Chow, we’re really trying to cover food that’s very contemporary and yet is comfortable and approachable, so during the holiday season, we’ve had a lot of stuff come online, everything from the party that you can make relatively last-minute that has some great cocktails, actually, from Public down in Soho. They gave us a fabulous guava chili margarita, and then we teamed that up with all kinds of finger food, something as simple as rice crackers with goat cheese and edamame to a little more exotic and complicated, like duca-coated skewers, and duca is an Egyptian spice mix that we team up with like a balsamic honey reduction.

And then we kind of take it different ways throughout the whole month, so coming more into the holiday season, where you’re sitting down and having a more formal dinner, we’ve got a  _____, a cookbook author that we really like working with. He gave us a whole holiday menu that’s a little more traditional, classic; rib roast, brussel sprouts; seemed to be, really, in everybody’s mind right now.

And going toward the new year, we got hangover foods coming up the last month, and supposedly, borscht is actually a great hangover cure, so we’re gonna be having that up on the website soon.

[End of Audio]

CNET Networks, Chow Aida Mollenkamp

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

For Chow, our editorial take would be that there are a lot of people out there in our demographic; you know, about 25-to-45-year-olds, who love to go eat; could talk to you about anything from red, green and yellow curry, but they’re wanting to know how to make it.

And so we’re the ones bridging that gap for them, getting them in the kitchen, making them feel comfortable, trying something new and exotic or something they’re really familiar with eating, but not necessarily cooking. As far as our stories are concerned, we’re kind of getting in the grit of the industry, covering the new technology that you might not know about because only ten chefs are using it or covering just kind of the odds and ends of everything that there is in the food industry.

But, you know, in general, at Chow, we’re really trying to cover food that’s very contemporary and yet is comfortable and approachable, so during the holiday season, we’ve had a lot of stuff come online, everything from the party that you can make relatively last-minute that has some great cocktails, actually, from Public down in Soho. They gave us a fabulous guava chili margarita, and then we teamed that up with all kinds of finger food, something as simple as rice crackers with goat cheese and edamame to a little more exotic and complicated, like duca-coated skewers, and duca is an Egyptian spice mix that we team up with like a balsamic honey reduction.

And then we kind of take it different ways throughout the whole month, so coming more into the holiday season, where you’re sitting down and having a more formal dinner, we’ve got a  _____, a cookbook author that we really like working with. He gave us a whole holiday menu that’s a little more traditional, classic; rib roast, brussel sprouts; seemed to be, really, in everybody’s mind right now.

And going toward the new year, we got hangover foods coming up the last month, and supposedly, borscht is actually a great hangover cure, so we’re gonna be having that up on the website soon.

[End of Audio]

CNET Networks, Chow Aida Mollenkamp