Beet.TV Transcripts

Brightcove Says Quality Comes from Locally Encoded Flash: New ABC Video Player is Awesome

Sanjay Desai, On2 Technologies

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Sanjay, tell us about The Publish Pod and why you guys did it and some of the utility there.

Sanjay Desai: Sure. The Publish Pod is a desktop application that we released about three months ago and it allows you to do a couple of things. One is to take a Flash video file and upload it into Bright Cove and you can actually batch several files, one after another and have them upload consecutively. The second, which is an interesting and new capability is to take files, video files that are not in a Flash format and have those both encoded and then uploaded directly into Bright Cove, all with The Publish Pod.

One of the ways that we trade off quality versus performance is to look at novel and innovative ways to actually deliver the technology that provided that quality. So one of the approaches we’re thinking hard about now is to actually look at the load of the video and to limit the amount of – the amount of images that are actually loaded in that initial set, such that the entire process actually becomes quicker and a better experience for the viewer.

Andy Plesser: You know, we’ve been talking about Flash 8 and of course that’s what you guys use and it looks so good. How come it looks so good?

Sanjay Desai: That’s right. Well, that’s again where On2 provides a lot of value. The video compression technology that’s inside the Publish Pod actually allows the encoding to be done at a high quality. And that’s the video that you see that comes out at the other side. We think is one that stands out from the competition in terms of the quality of the video.

On2 actually provides a couple of unique elements. One is on the encoding side of the business, as we’ve talked about, the video compression technology is part of our Publish Pod and allows folks to take files from any format and convert them into Flash video. The second piece where On2 provides value is through their Flicks Pro editing tool which allows a lot of our larger publishers to be able to edit their video and then directly upload that content into the Bright Cove service.

We have a very close relationship with Adobe and have continued to migrate as they have from Flash 7 to Flash 8 and now Flash 9 you’ll see become stronger and stronger in the marketplace.

I think we’re moving towards a world where again the picture quality will continue to improve and the interactivity between the video and the consumer will continue to improve as well.

We’ve focused on providing the highest quality experience that you can find and you’ll see our video, as compared to other sites, tends to rank very highly on that end of the spectrum. What we’re looking to do is also optimize performance. So find that nice balance between providing high quality, but also doing it in a way that allows the consumer to have a really good experience and for the video to load quickly and to play well.

My name is Sanjay Desai. I’m a director of product marketing here at Bright Cove.

[End of Audio]

On2 Technologies, Brightcove, Flash Video

YouTube to Present Video Awards as More Producers Use YouTube as Distribution Platform Including Trailblazing TurnHere...Beet.TV Holds First Networking Shindig in NYC on Weds!

Brad Inman, TurnHere

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[Start of Audio]

Brad Inman: I started out as a freelance writer and I remember I got my first important gig that was semi-permanent as an independent contractor or freelance writer was with the L.A. Times to write a column four times a month, $200.00 a week, and that was the difference between me getting by and not getting by.

So my experience professionally for 20 years has been organizing freelancers and so from a business standpoint what I saw was this incredible network of very talented filmmakers who were waiting in line for the next big shoot on television and in between were waiting tables or they were being told upload your stuff for free and maybe you’ll make some money, and having been a freelancer, we said, “No, we’re gonna pay filmmakers. We’re gonna pay them the going wage and we’re gonna try to keep them regularly busy with more and more work.”

Andy Plesser: So, Brad, since the last time you appeared on Beat TV, you’ve taken on some new corporate clients. My question is, “Have you adapted the Turn Here style to the realm of industrial corporate videos?”

Brad Inman: Our corporate work is not a big part of our work but as an example, Intercontinental Hotel. They came to the conclusion that, you know, one big major television ad that says the same thing over and over again, shooting at us, you know, through the television waves over and over and over again was work but the Internet was about search, useful information. At the same time, they wanted to extend their brand into this new medium.

So they came to us and said, “We’d like to shoot some videos, we think, of our hotels in locations around the world.” They have 140 of them. And we said, you know, “What if we use the Turn Here style and took your concierge in the cities – whether it’s Singapore or Berlin or Santiago, Chile – let’s take them and have them give us a tour of not the hotel – everyone’s got thousand-count sheets but, you know, where’s the good places to eat? Where’s the good places to go out? What are some things you gotta see around the city where the hotel is located?”

So we used the concierge to be the narrator, again, local trustworthy, you know, character to give that kind of authentic experience. So it’s not like we’re shooting corporate video as much as we created for them these stories, these micro-media that are searchable on the Web, that people can find and find useful information.

Andy Plesser: So what’s next for Turn Here? I understand you’re experimenting with some new publishing platforms. If I’m not mistaken, you just opened a You Tube channel.

Brad Inman: Yeah, we created – we realized You Tube was a search engine for video. I’ve always contended that Google bought You Tube not because of its video or even because it was user generated. It was a search engine for the next, you know, wave of content which is video and so we looked at You Tube as this powerful search engine. So as the early days of search generally, if you had a Web page, you’d want to get it indexed and get it up there quickly.  So we created a channel on You Tube. We created a real estate play list. We created a travel play list, a local merchant play list.
We have all our videos up there, you know, very searchable and accessible and there’s a lot of user-generated tools on You Tube that make it powerful where people can register for your play lists. They can store it. They can send email messages. They can comment. They can rate them and we just began to do this and we’re – you know, already – take the small merchant videos or the neighborhood videos. They’re getting a lot more streams than if we’d just, you know, done it from our own destination site.

[End of Audio]

YouTube, TurnHere, Brad Inman

Ford Models is Now a "Media Company".....And You Can Be One Too!

John Caplan, Ford Models

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[Start  of Audio]

Andy Plesser: You know, in a sense, you’ve become – you’re building kind of a brand through – online, it seems, and what are the – what are some of the goals? What is the strategic objective of this whole project?

John Caplan: I think we classify for today as a media company. We are a new kind of studio, where we are – we represent the talent and we manage the talent’s career, and we partner with them to produce and distribute content.

And the reason why I think that’s interesting is because we have such a unique relationship with the talent, we’re able to understand them well and partner with them on developing content, and distributed underneath this global powerful brand called Ford, so I think the goal would be – and it may take us two or three or five years as the marketplace matures, but I think the goal is to deliver a next-generation MTV, youth culture that is deeply passionate about style, fashion, design and advertising platform and a sponsorship platform that’s compelling.

And I talk to advertisers all the time, heads of marketing, all the big brands, who say, “John, there isn’t enough great style or fashion or youth culture content online that isn’t jackass. There’s a lot of jackass out there, but there isn’t a whole lot of infotainment that’s gonna be predictable and reliable, both for the audience and the advertiser.

Andy Plesser: I imagine that the videos will help the models with their reputation, their business, their billing, their visibility. How does that work, and another part of that question is how will it help fielding new models and people to really join the Ford family? How does that work out?

John Caplan: Crystal Wren, one of our plus-size models, went on Oprah, and her day rate tripled the day after her exposure on Oprah. Well, Crystal’s got a fan base currently at MySpace. She is a spokesperson for a number of national brands, but we’re not producing content with her that will, in many ways, expand her people brand.

And so we see there’s a direct correlation between developing and giving our talent a voice than becoming people brands and their ability to monetize that as spokespeople and brands in and of themselves.

[End of Audio]

Ford Models, John Caplan, digital media company

Veoh Growing Fast with 4 Million Users -- And Many Videos Will Be Seen in High Quality on TV Screens

Dmitry Shapiro,Veoh

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[Start of Audio]

Dmitry Shapiro: We have a comprehensive broadcasting platform for them to use. And what we mean by that is it’s extremely easy for you to create an account, upload your videos, group your videos into various types of traditional groups.  You’d want to group them into series, some episodic set of videos, channels where you can group series and videos together into your own channel. We expose all of that out for syndication so you can publish once to VO and tell us to automatically publish your videos to YouTube, automatically publish them to MySpace, automatically publish them to Google.

And we’re talking about actually uploading those videos for you, which today, independent producers have to manually, and they do that. We don’t really know many people that are serious about delivering their video that simply publish it on one sight.

Andy Plesser: So you guys have this desktop application; you save video, which is cool. How is does it actually work where you can get that video onto a TV set? Like could I – what’s that last mile or that last ten feet?

Dmitry Shapiro: Believe it or not, it’s actually quite easy today for early adopters. It doesn’t require a lot of technical skill. In fact, if you can hook up your TiVo to your TV, you can hook up your computer to your TV. It’s actually easier, I think, to hook up your computer than your TiVo. I’ve done both.

Today, most people hook up their computer to their TV by VGA out, to VGA in, if your TV has a VGA in. If your computer has a DVI in, which is a high-resolution output, all the new plasmas have DVI, and so you can do that. If not, then your computer typically has, these days, an S-Video out.

You can put it to S Video, and so lots of ways to get a video signal out of your computer into the back of your TV, and in audio, simply a little mini jack to your headphone jack on your PC out to – I put it to my receiver, so I can use my surround sound system, to the input of your receiver, and you’re done. All you need is a remote control, which again, these days, ships with a lot of PCs, or you can go to CompUSA and buy a $20.00 remote control, and with VO, you’re sitting back and you’re watching Internet television.

Andy Plesser: So tell us about the business model. Where do you guys see this and how do you think you’re gonna monetize this business?

Dmitry Shapiro: Well, also, we always say the only thing we know about the business model right now is that it’s wrong because nobody really knows what it is yet. We envision the business model to be a revenue-sharing business model and revenue sharing on kind of a number of fronts.

First of all, we believe that the majority of the revenue will come from advertising because we have a deep belief that content wants to be free, and so we allow publishers to publish their content to us. We do not charge them for hosting that content and delivering it because we have these cost-saving capabilities with our peer to peer network, and for that, we require that they choose a business model.

One business model may be to allow us to go and sell ads, place the ads, very targeted ads, onto their content, and then share with us in that revenue. A second model may be that they want to offer that content on a premium basis. Again, kind of pay per view, pay to rent, pay to own or subscription basis, and then share with us in the revenue that’s generated off of that. But we believe that out of those kinds of two models, the vast majority of revenue will come from advertising.

[End of Audio]

Veoh, Dmitry Shapiro, P2P

Amazon Powers Diversion Media, the New Online Video Content Company Launched by MTV Veteran Nicholas Butterworth

Nicholas Butterworth, Travelistic

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Can you tell us briefly why you decided to go it alone, and walk us through a little bit, you know, how it works.

Nicholas Butterworth: Sure. Well, I used to run this site called Sonicnet, which was an independent music site, and we built our own platform in the ‘90s because that was the best way to get what we needed. And then we merged with MTV.com and all the international MTV sites. Sonicnet ended up providing the platform that powered 18 different websites around the world. So my experience is if you’ve got a good platform, you can share it between a lot of different sites, and that’s what we’re trying to do with diversion.

My co-founder, Tatum Lade, was the head of engineering at a site called iFilm, so one of the biggest viral video sites on the Internet and probably one of the biggest video sites of any kind in its day. And so he’s got a lot of experience in developing kind of scalable video architecture, so we looked at many platforms. We liked Britecove; we liked the Platform.com; we liked a couple others. But, ultimately, we decided that we had the resources and the experience to build our own platform.

So we have a great developer team. We’re writing it in Ruby on Rails, which I think the _____ is Ruby also, which we found to be an excellent programming environment and has allowed us to do a lot of things pretty fast. And so we’ve taken, for example, the same platform that we built to publish Travelistic and we’ve reused almost all that to publish Snowvision. Now, we add some custom components in Travelistic. We integrated Google Maps everywhere because it’s travels, so maps were really important. For Snowvision, we have weather data, so we have some feeds that were ingesting of snow conditions at 350 mountain resorts.

But as we go on and do other channels, we’ll keep adding to that shared platform. Hopefully, that lets us make a more customized user experience for each vertical.

Andy Plesser: So tell us a little bit from the technical standpoint about the encoding and the uploading and the side of distribution. Talk us through it a little bit.

Nicholas Butterworth: So there’s one piece, which is what we call ingesting the video, so there, we’re using a Kodak from Onto. We looked at a bunch of different Kodaks. We liked that the best. That’s for flash, so whether we upload video ourselves or a user uploads it, it gets processed by the Onto Kodak and turned into flash. Then we have our own sort of servers to do content management, so it’s effectively a video publishing system that we input meta data that goes on with the videos.

In the case of Travelistic, we associate a latitude and longitude pair with each video, for example, so that we can locate them all on a map, through a map or any other mapping system that we chose to plug in; other stuff, typical media stuff, like author and publisher and length and duration and format, and we use a tagging system, an internally generated tagging system.

So then we take the actual video files and we store them on Amazon’s S3 Service, so this is a little bit of like a trade secret, but I’m so excited about it, I don’t mind telling you. Basically, Amazon is like our CDN, so instead of using a VitalStream, or a Line Light or an Akama, we use Amazon to actually store the bits.

So when a users comes to our site, it’s our own severs that figure out what kind of content to deliver them, to do the personalization, the community features, present all the meta data around the video and also decide which ads to insert, so we go out and do calls to different ad networks, and then the actual files, the flash files, get sent from Amazon.

Andy Plesser: It’s amazing. What is the arrangement with Amazon? How does that work?

Nicholas Butterworth: I think that the S3 acronym stands for “Simple Storage Solution,” and I don’t’ deal with it directly, but my understanding is it’s insanely simple and that they really made it super easy to use, and I think a lot of startups are starting to use it. I will say that I think we probably could get a little higher quality of service if we did use like a Line Light, so we have a little bit of a tradeoff and that sometimes it’ll take a little time to initiate, but the actual quality of the file we’re delivering is very high.

We benchmarked ourselves against YouTube. We coded a little higher bit rate. The frame size a little bigger, and we actually have gotten lots of compliments on the quality of our video on Travelistic, which is great. For Snowvision, we’re actually going up again in file quality because this is a very broadband-centric world, very technically savvy, so we have an even bigger frame size and even more bits that we’re pushing up.

Andy Plesser: With the higher quality videos that are part of travel and snowboarding, are you considering distributing downloadable videos?

Nicholas Butterworth: Yeah.

Andy Plesser: And what are your thoughts about that?

Nicholas Butterworth: So the map, which is kind of our flagship original series that I talked about on Travelistic, is available as a podcast so that you can subscribe to it and get it through iTunes just like any other podcast. And I think, over time, we will probably offer a lot more content on Travelistic for download. I personally like to download queue, so I like to have a play list and set it to download in the background. I think that is going to be a powerful application for travel. You could be downloading – if you’re flying to Jamaica, you could download 50, 60 minutes worth of video, and then watch them on your iPod or your laptop on the flight itself and really get a feel for the place that you’re going to.

With Snowvision, we’re going to have almost all of the videos available for download right off the bat. So, yeah, we’re definitely are moving towards kind of multi-format delivery, and we envision that, in the future, we may have another tier of service where we have like super high quality, HD quality on most downloads. That might take a little longer, but there’s probably a segment of the market that’s going to want them.

Andy Plesser: Well, how do you see this other smaller crop or this smaller niche of video distribution companies, such as yourself – is there this opportunity now to kinda create your own?

Nicholas Butterworth: I will say it’s not easy. We have a terrific team of developers. They worked for months to develop even the first version of the platform. As I say, Tatum is a very experienced leader of this team. I have a lot of experience with video infrastructure. So it’s not for everyone, but we fundamentally can set ourselves to be a media company. Now, out of our ten people at Diversion Media, five of them are developers, so we are a very technologically focused media company, but having gone from Sonicnet, which was ten people in a loft in Tribecca, to MTV iGroup, where I managed 500 people around the world, and now going back to ten.

Technology is really being rapid adopters and understanding the technology and what it can do quickly is the only thing that lets a little guy compete against the big guys, you know. So it doesn’t matter, fundamentally, whether you’re using someone else’s platform. I mean, if you’re a blogger using WordPress, just fine. You don’t need to go create your own blogging platform.

And there are increasingly going to be more people that are going to give even small independent publishers a platform to use, but if you can create your own, especially if you’re doing multiple brands, then we kind of feel like that’s definitely the best way to go, and I would think that any sort of aggressive media company would want to be very technology focused.

Now, my experience in big media is that it isn’t always the case. Sometimes, there’s a lot of lip service paid to it, but when push comes to shove, people feel like; hey, we’re not really software guys. Why should we have all these engineers around here? Let’s let someone else do that. For us, the technology is kind of the key that unlocks everything else.

[End of Audio]

On2 Technologies, Nicholas Butterworth, Content Distribution Networks, Amazon.com

Magnify.net Brings User Generated Videos and Revenue to Blogs and Web Sites

Steve Rosenbaum, Magnify.net

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[Start of Audio]

When you go to Magnify.net it basically says do you have an existing page or do you want to start from scratch. So in this case you say I have an existing page and the set up is three quick pages. You give it the current URL and then you can create a header and footer to match yours. So we’ll mirror your CSS style page; so we’ll match colors, header, footer. The idea is that from your home page you should be able to click on videos and go to a basically identical environment that looks and feels like nobody’s left Beat TV or whatever the site it. Our goal is to be the daughter pages behind your home page that’s your video experience.

Magnify is not a destination so must of our sites you’re gonna reach by going first to a page and then looking at our video. So let’s go to Sailnet because Sailnet is actually a good way to see how Magnify works. Sailnet.com. Okay. So now we’re on Sailnet and you see that the URL is Sailnet.com. Not our site. Over here you see in their right hand column there’s a bunch of videos and it’s rotating and it says Magnify Video and there’s a whole series of videos. This is feeding off our server so we’re basically providing them with a video service on their home page, above the fold. If you go and you click on any one of these videos, we’ll click on this one here, it’s a pretty one, in you go and you’re now in the same domain, same space, same colors, same look, same feel but the only difference is you’re now being served off the Magnify server and you’re seeing a video that we’re feeding. It makes you wonder; the thing about this is you look at this and think how could there have not been video on Sailnet for us? And why did this person make this video and put it on UTube and what did they expect would happen? Well the answer is that other sailors would see it. It’s gorgeous.

Now there’s a whole series of tools that we offer you. So search, play list, ranking and voting, email a friend, all the things you’d expect in a video community to organize, share and promote videos. And it’s pretty seamless. I’d have to say is the nicest thing we get – we have a very big, open community of developers and so we have a discussion board and we get all these – “You guys are amazing. This is so cool.” “How come you’re doing this for free?” And the answer is we don’t think that we’re doing anything for free. We think we’re part of the emerging video ecosystem on the web.

Let’s go ahead and look at a New York favorite. Let’s – we’ll go back to the home page and then we’ll search on NYHH.magnify.net. NYHH is the New York Hamster House. This is – can’t make this stuff up – this is a woman in New York who specifically works to rescue abandoned hamsters from families that don’t want to care for them anymore and then it helps them be adopted. And she told us that video helps people decide they want to adopt a hamster. Here’s her videos on our blog. If you click on that you’re now on her video site. And this is the ever popular dwarf hamster.

So what Magnify basically says is we live between the destination sites and your site. We help you organize and gather, we’ll help you make revenue and we’ll share the revenue with the publisher. And we’ll also share the revenue with the destination site that’s providing the video.

[End of Audio]

Magnify.net, Video Aggregates, Online Video

New York Times Media Critic as Media Innovator -- David Carr is a Very Cool Video Blogger...

David Carr, The New York Times

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: I believe that video blogging is going to be an important part of the future of mainstream media, and certain mainstream media are embracing in a big way and doing a great job or are at least experimenting. The New York Times Company is certainly one by giving David Carr, the media critic, a current crew to go around and create really interesting, definitely un-Times-like video packages.

And I think it’s indicative of the opportunities that print media have to create a new kind of form of video that’s not slick; it’s not broadcast TV. It’s just good, fun, solid video reporting. So here’s David.

David Carr:  Hi. Welcome back to the Carpetbagger. It’s freezing out here tonight. Global warming is in hand.

Andy Plesser: David Carr, the Carpetbagger himself. David, congratulations on the blog. It’s going great. So the look of it is not Times-like, the video blog, but in a way, the medium has to be redefined. It’s not like a CNN package or a traditional broadcast package. It’s different. Video reporting or video blogging; that it’s really different from a traditional news package. What are your thoughts about that?

David Carr: The idea of what looks good now, I think, has changed. I mean, people want what looks real and what looks – I’m obviously not a television person either by voice or by look. I look more like a homeless guy in Times Square than I do a TV star.

I do think that at the beginning of the year, we started talking about what we would do with the Carpetbagger, and they talked about two cameras, more production, and I said, “You know what? You improve this at your peril.” Has to look natural; has to look fresh.

I’m a reporter who’s doing video reports. It shouldn’t look any different than that. It shouldn’t be any slicker, any fancier. What we try and put across in doing the video in Times Square is that the Square America meets, okay; it’s – there is every manner of folk out here.

The movies are something that brings people together, and of all the things I do doing these MOS’s, Man on the Streets with people; I love that. I love talking to people. That’s what people are connecting with.

They don’t see me as a Big X Oscar expert or a big movie expert. I don’t think people are looking for fun. They’re looking for entertainment. I think they’re looking for expertise or great production values in a very secondary way on the web.

Andy Plesser: Now, stepping out from what you’re doing personally and creatively, do you think that video will be embraced by mainstream media and do you think that they can succeed more broadly?

David Carr: Well, if you look on the newspaper side, I think the Washington Post has had some significant success in doing videos and bringing value added. It isn’t like, “Let’s replicate what we do. Let’s try something else.” I think some of the times; videos have been very successful.

Magazines, a little less so, although they’re examples: Time Out, and New York has real cute stuff. I’ve seen some sort of enthusiast sites for like snowmobile magazines that look really good. Part of what is going to happen is consumers – if you look at like TMZ, which does gossip; you have text; you have headlines and you’ve got embedded video.

That’s what people are becoming used to is within that frame, all forms of media expressed, each carrying bits of information that they consume at the same time.

Andy Plesser: Where do you see consumer-generated content going next year? Do you think that publications like The Times or other mainstream media will actually use some of that material? Will that other material become more serious?

Right now, we’ve seen a lot of stuff that’s funny, humorous. There is some cultural videos out there, some interesting political videos, but where will consumer-generated video – where will the sort of the citizen video revolution go this year, do you think? Do you have any thoughts about that?

David Carr: Well, consumer video works on the algorithm of the wisdom of the crowd. The crowd pushes up that which they like, so they like funny; they like lude. Somebody that does a lengthy exigest on the Holocaust on video is probably not gonna do all that great.

But already, mainstream media, MTV over here, is grabbing onto some of, not just consumer-generated video, but some of the people that make it and starting to bring them into sort of the corporate structure, and so I think you’re gonna see increased merit hybrid, sometimes onsite, sometimes not; increased exchanges between citizens and corporations.

Video is, after all, a way of sending messages, and it’s a way of talking to each other, so that conversation is really only bound to increase.

Andy Plesser: Well, David, thanks very much. Tell me what you’re up to tonight. What’s going on with your taping, and when might we see this on the Times site?

David Carr: Well, when might we see this on The Beet’s?

Andy Plesser: Ah, well, maybe – I don’t wanna scoop you, so all right, I know. We can’t say what’s in the editing bin. At any rate, I know you’re off to –

David Carr: Well, you know, what we’re gonna do first is get one of these – look at this. I know. We want one of these.  It says “beggar” on it, NOT Beet.TV. You can have it back.

We’re going to National Board of Review, which is over at Cipriani. We’re gonna do a little red carpet, but we’re gonna try and sneak in there and talk to some celebrities. That’s a little tougher because they’re used to a very formal sort of dynamic, and they never really seem to know what to make of me.

It’s like who is this guy, and is he gonna hit me with the microphone?

Andy Plesser: It’s not Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood. It’s like a little bit, you know –

David Carr: Looking at me and going, “Who does his hair and makeup?” You know? But the primary dynamic, sort of the ethic of the show is we’re supposed to have a good time, so we’re gonna go over there. We’re gonna take whatever’s there, and then through the magic of editing, come up with a package that people will be able to tune into, the New York Times, and you know what?

They can not only watch it, but now, we’ve got it all set up on iTunes so you can download them all, and if you choose to get on an airplane and watch serial versions of the Carpetbagger, I don’t know why you would. I wouldn’t watch it with your eyes.

You can. That’s the thing.

Andy Plesser: Is that new? I hadn’t heard about that.

David Carr: It’s brand new. It’s being announced too, so we got a big newsbreak on Beet.TV.

Andy Plesser: Oh, I got a big scoop. At any rate, David, congratulations on doing an amazing job and really defining what newspapers can do in terms of creating a different form of video reporting, and it’s really, really good, and I wish you all the best.

David Carr: Great. The great thing is it’s made me incredibly wealthy. I’ve had offers from all sorts of networks.

Andy Plesser: Agents, book deals?

David Carr:  I’m not gonna get in the middle – let agents get in the middle of it. It’s just the great thing about web TV is how lucrative it is. It’s just incredible. Last week, I think I got a box of dirt for what I did, but it was a nice box of dirt.

Andy Plesser: It’s for the good cause. You’re a pioneer, man. Congratulations. All right.

[End of Audio]

New York Times, David Carr, Online video, Video blogs

Net Video Is Coming to the TV, Finally -- Akimbo is Leading the Way, Says William Randolph Hearst -- Apple's iTV Is Not Far Behind

William Randolph Hearst III

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[Start of Audio]

I love it. I’m a user. I don’t invest in products that I wouldn’t be a passionate user. I start out as a consumer, and then I become an investor, like the guy with the Razr. I liked it so much; I bought the company. Well, I bought shares of the company.

But I figured the Internet is getting faster. I like to watch certain kinds of media on a big screen. I paid all this money for this big screen TV, and I love the Sunday football games on the big screen, and I like it, and I like HD better than regular D.

And I just felt, “Hey, there ought to be a way to use Internet technology to do that.” In fact, I started out talking to TiVo, the company, and replay, and saying, “Hey, you’ve got a connected DVR. Could you have content come through that Internet connection, as well as just sort of control information and billing and all the rest of it.”

Maybe that was too early, so Steve Shannon and Josh Goldman had started this company to build a technology that would sort of look like a set-top box attached to the television. One of the things that they did that I think is very clever is that they have an Internet strategy right from the beginning.

So when Akimbo started, there were a couple hundred titles, and you could kind of surf through them, up/down, left/right. Now, there’s 15,000 titles, and you really have to use some sort of computer browsing interface, search interface to find all the stuff, but then when you’re done, you just say, “Send it to my Akimbo box.”

So you could be at the office just before you go home; you decide what you’re gonna watch that night. By the time you get home, it’s there. And people say, “Well, it’s not instantaneous,” and I say, “Yeah, but it’s faster that Netflix, and it’s faster than Amazon, and you don’t have to drive it back to Blockbuster.”

And they’ve done a great job of building that library up. I mean, one of the challenges for Akimbo is how do you tell people what’s in a 15,000-passenger library? You’ve gotta think about how do you organize things by genre, action, comedy – video blogging is also on it, and we’re trying to kind of take a page from U-Tube’s book and make it easy for people, like you, for example, to say, “Hey, I’d like the Akimbo audience to see my interviews on the big screen, so how do I insert content into Akimbo without having to do a business development deal? How do I become a sort of publisher into the system?”

And we’d like to add that capability the next few months, and then, of course, we finally were able to crack this deal with movie links, and now, we have the – you know, if you’ve ever stayed in a certain level of hotel or motel, you have this in-room system, and it has current movies, and they’ve added some sopranos and other stuff.

And so when we were first sort of brainstorming Akimbo, we thought; well, you know, let’s take that system and put it in peoples’ homes, and maybe we only need 25, 30 titles. Well, the Internet says there are no wall gardens. You’ve gotta really open the system up, so now, you can basically buy an Akimbo box for, in some cases, less than $200.00 and subscribe to a service, and then there are pay-per-view movies and free content, and the trouble with Akimbo is we sit, and some days, we think, “Oh, we’re a cable company,” and some days, we think, “We’re an Internet appliance,” and some days, we think, “We’re just a peripheral through a computer,” and some days, we think, “We’re a website,” and the beauty of the Internet and the challenges is you can be anything, but you have to be something.

And so it becomes a business question. “How should we organize it? How do we describe it to people?” When we started the at-home service many years ago to develop Internet over coax, it was very difficult to explain to people. Now, I think people know – you just say they were broadband, and people sort of nod, like, “Yeah,” and they know what you’re talking about.

But in the early days, I remember sitting on an airplane and I’d talk to a guy across the country. The conversation started with, “So, Will, what do you do,” and somewhere around Cleveland, I was still explaining data over cable, and it was – it didn’t – it seemed clear to me that I was able to explain it.

One day, we went down to Fry’s, and we just set up a table and started demo’ing at‑home service, and, boy, people would just spend two or three minutes and see it, and then they go, “Great. I want one. How do I sign up for this? When is it gonna be in my area?”

And this is kind of what’s happening at Akimbo. If you get one in your hands and you play with it, it’s like, “Oh, I see what this is. I see how this fits into my life.” But I could sit here until you run out of tape trying to explain to people how to use it, how to think about it.

[End of Audio]

William Randolph Hearst, Akimbo, Apple, Broadband Video

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

[Start of Audio]

I love it. I’m a user. I don’t invest in products that I wouldn’t be a passionate user. I start out as a consumer, and then I become an investor, like the guy with the Razr. I liked it so much; I bought the company. Well, I bought shares of the company.

But I figured the Internet is getting faster. I like to watch certain kinds of media on a big screen. I paid all this money for this big screen TV, and I love the Sunday football games on the big screen, and I like it, and I like HD better than regular D.

And I just felt, “Hey, there ought to be a way to use Internet technology to do that.” In fact, I started out talking to TiVo, the company, and replay, and saying, “Hey, you’ve got a connected DVR. Could you have content come through that Internet connection, as well as just sort of control information and billing and all the rest of it.”

Maybe that was too early, so Steve Shannon and Josh Goldman had started this company to build a technology that would sort of look like a set-top box attached to the television. One of the things that they did that I think is very clever is that they have an Internet strategy right from the beginning.

So when Akimbo started, there were a couple hundred titles, and you could kind of surf through them, up/down, left/right. Now, there’s 15,000 titles, and you really have to use some sort of computer browsing interface, search interface to find all the stuff, but then when you’re done, you just say, “Send it to my Akimbo box.”

So you could be at the office just before you go home; you decide what you’re gonna watch that night. By the time you get home, it’s there. And people say, “Well, it’s not instantaneous,” and I say, “Yeah, but it’s faster that Netflix, and it’s faster than Amazon, and you don’t have to drive it back to Blockbuster.”

And they’ve done a great job of building that library up. I mean, one of the challenges for Akimbo is how do you tell people what’s in a 15,000-passenger library? You’ve gotta think about how do you organize things by genre, action, comedy – video blogging is also on it, and we’re trying to kind of take a page from U-Tube’s book and make it easy for people, like you, for example, to say, “Hey, I’d like the Akimbo audience to see my interviews on the big screen, so how do I insert content into Akimbo without having to do a business development deal? How do I become a sort of publisher into the system?”

And we’d like to add that capability the next few months, and then, of course, we finally were able to crack this deal with movie links, and now, we have the – you know, if you’ve ever stayed in a certain level of hotel or motel, you have this in-room system, and it has current movies, and they’ve added some sopranos and other stuff.

And so when we were first sort of brainstorming Akimbo, we thought; well, you know, let’s take that system and put it in peoples’ homes, and maybe we only need 25, 30 titles. Well, the Internet says there are no wall gardens. You’ve gotta really open the system up, so now, you can basically buy an Akimbo box for, in some cases, less than $200.00 and subscribe to a service, and then there are pay-per-view movies and free content, and the trouble with Akimbo is we sit, and some days, we think, “Oh, we’re a cable company,” and some days, we think, “We’re an Internet appliance,” and some days, we think, “We’re just a peripheral through a computer,” and some days, we think, “We’re a website,” and the beauty of the Internet and the challenges is you can be anything, but you have to be something.

And so it becomes a business question. “How should we organize it? How do we describe it to people?” When we started the at-home service many years ago to develop Internet over coax, it was very difficult to explain to people. Now, I think people know – you just say they were broadband, and people sort of nod, like, “Yeah,” and they know what you’re talking about.

But in the early days, I remember sitting on an airplane and I’d talk to a guy across the country. The conversation started with, “So, Will, what do you do,” and somewhere around Cleveland, I was still explaining data over cable, and it was – it didn’t – it seemed clear to me that I was able to explain it.

One day, we went down to Fry’s, and we just set up a table and started demo’ing at‑home service, and, boy, people would just spend two or three minutes and see it, and then they go, “Great. I want one. How do I sign up for this? When is it gonna be in my area?”

And this is kind of what’s happening at Akimbo. If you get one in your hands and you play with it, it’s like, “Oh, I see what this is. I see how this fits into my life.” But I could sit here until you run out of tape trying to explain to people how to use it, how to think about it.

[End of Audio]

William Randolph Hearst, Akimbo, Apple, Broadband Video