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Internet TV: Michael Eisner seeks next YouTube |
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Written by Howie Rumberg, asap
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Monday, 30 April 2007 |
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The search for the next YouTube is all about love.
Believe it.
Former Disney chief Michael Eisner does. Or at least, he’s putting his name and money behind the person who believes it.
Eisner is backing Veoh Networks, one of the new players aiming to take Internet TV to the next level. The site’s creator, Dmitri Shapiro, says his technology is about, yes, that most elusive of emotions.
“Veoh will help you find love of all kind,” Shapiro says. “You don’t really know what you’re going to love. So serendipitous moments where you discover something new that you all of a sudden love, those are the things that are really magic, and those are the things that the Internet is great at doing.”
However hippy-dippy that may sound, it’s the principle that drives his quest to differentiate Veoh from the alphabet soup of companies trying to take the YouTube audience to places they didn’t know they needed to go.
Despite the humongous success of YouTube, Internet video is in its infancy.
There’s a whole new wave of providers insisting that there’s a better way for you to find, organize and watch video — and for advertisers to collect. There are winners and losers at the precipice of every new frontier. Remember Betamax?
In this wide-open new world, Eisner is betting on Veoh.
“Their player is really the most advanced player in the industry,” Eisner says. “They don’t have the cultural ear yet of a YouTube or a MySpace or a Yahoo, but I think they will down the road.”
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WHERE TO WATCH
There are thousands of places to watch video online, and content is plentiful. But there are several sites that stand out, at least in the short term.
Joost, by the creators of the popular Internet telephone service Skype, is counting on amassing quality content — it has a deal with Viacom — near DVD-quality video and social networking to guide its peer-to-peer site to the forefront. Still in beta mode, Joost recently announced advertising deals with several major companies.
Revver, operational since late 2005, splits advertising revenue with creators of user-generated content. It places ads on the videos and tags the clips so they can be tracked. Lonelygirl15, of YouTube fame, has a deal with Revver.
Brightcove is another content-driven site. Founded by Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove is backed by Barry Diller and AOL among others. It has a wide range of publishers from big media to small-time home directors.
Brightcove provides the publishing tools, then places the videos wherever the client wants. Visitors can search the Interent for all sorts of video.
DaveTv offers 100,000 hours of licensed video to consumers, and allows content providers to publish their works and tailor advertising. They also plan to sell a set-box ($200) for watching downloads on a television.
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AND THEN THERE IS VEOH
While Veoh allows filmmakers to set up channels, post videos in multiple places and share ad revenue, the reason the company caught Eisner’s eye is its DVR-like video player and the “home delivery system.”
The downloadable player allows users to watch near DVD-quality programming in full screen. They can select a video at work and have it waiting at home or on an iPod. Sort of like Netflix — without having to wait for the mail.
And using what he calls “crazy math,” Shapiro’s team is pushing the envelope of artificial intelligence to gather information on users. Veoh will map behavior — i.e. where users fast-forward or what they save — compare it to others, find behavior similarities and recommend programming based on the data.
Which brings us back to love:
“And this allows you to discover content you never even thought about wanting to discover,” he says. It also gives clients the ability to narrowly target and tailor content (and the ads) to niche audiences.
Todd Chanko, an analyst for Jupiter Research, says all this new technology is fine, but it’s not the answer.
“It’s a technology in search of a purpose,” Chanko says about the Veoh player. For Veoh to be successful, he says, “there would have to be, in my opinion, whole new categories of content that on the one hand are strong enough to attract an audience and yet for one reason or another are not available on a traditional multichannel video service (i.e. cable).”
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ENTER EISNER
And that’s where Eisner comes in.
Through his production company, Vuguru, Eisner is creating shows specifically for the Internet. The first series, “Prom Queen” could be seen as a “Beverly Hills 90210” for Web 2.0. A story set in high school, the episodes — 80 in all — are each 90 seconds long.
Eisner, who was president of Paramount when “Saturday Night Fever” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” were hits, made his name identifying quality content.
“My whole career has been thinking about, ’What is the story? Is there a beginning, middle and end? How do the characters relate? How do you get emotionally involved?”’ he says.
In his “old” media days, Eisner read script coverage. Now he and a small staff surf the Web for creative storytelling. While he won’t say what sites he has bookmarked, you can at least get a glimpse of what he finds interesting on www.vuguru.com.
Launched without fanfare, the site will be home of the company’s series, including a section called “The Cream” — its most interesting daily find, not necessarily the most hit.
“I believe that the human mind is more interesting and complicated and creative than the computer,” Eisner says. “I believe in the editorial process.”
Delivering content is another story. “Prom Queen” is on Veoh, but it’s also on MySpace, YouTube, ELLEgirl.com, and promqueen.tv among others. He would have never dreamed of sharing a Disney film like that.
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if I were at Disney,” he says. “I like the idea of being cross-platformed, bascially being an advertiser-driven model. So if you’re an advertiser-driven model you want to be in as many platforms as you can.”
Eisner adhered to that model for “Prom Queen,” and he says the show was profitable from “the first day” — he credits the exclusive he gave to MySpace for making that possible.
After all, you can talk about love all you want — but the real desire here is profit.
“We are in a business of entertainment,” he says, “otherwise, as Woody Allen would say, it would’ve been called ’show show.”’
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asap reporter Howie Rumberg is based in New York. | Only registered users can write comments.
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