Large private equity firm Silver Lake is buying a large stake in powerful Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, which is being described as a way to turbocharge its digital efforts.

While the pair would not disclose any financial details of the deal, which they are calling a “strategic partnership,” sources said Silver Lake is acquiring 31 percent of WME.

“Over the years, we have been brick-building, as we have been doing more and more digitally,” said Patrick Whitesell, co-CEO of WME with Ari Emanuel, in an interview today. “But the opportunities are so vast, there is a need for more capital to do more.”

Whitesell and Emanuel said they had been considering a range of investors, especially among media entities, but that they wanted to work with Silver Lake since it had more digital experience as an active investor in technology.

Skype, for example, was the driver of the sale of Internet telephony giant Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, while WME reps stars such as Matt Damon and Hugh Jackman, among others.

“In addition to capital, we really wanted a partner that to help us build it out that had more technology expertise,” said Emanuel. “We are good with brands and creative and talent, but there are many more Silicon Valley opportunities.”

In fact, WME has long tried to up its digital portfolio to respond to the needs of its clients and the changing nature of entertainment distribution as consumer Internet use has exploded. That’s included a digital advertising effort, as well as one in online gaming.

Silver Lake, which has most recently looked at investing in Yahoo, it was a chance to get closer to a trove of premium entertainment content.

“You have two forces at play, ubiquitous distribution and four billion people connected,” said Silver Lake’s Egon Durban. “As that distribution has been commoditized, the only way to differentiate is through A-plus content.”

Along with the core investment, WME and Silver Lake said they will also be considering other possible deals together as they move forward.

“There is nothing we like more than handing our best partners more money,” said Durban, who will join WME executive committee and also help create a technology advisory counsel at the firm.

Calling Marc Andreessen! Actually, in an interesting factoid, it was the well-known tech investor and entrepreneur who introduced Durban to Emanuel.

But this movie has been shown before and is not the first Hollywood-tech hookup to happen. A variety of efforts have waxed and waned over the years — most of which have largely been underwhelming.

Last year, for example, Accel Partners invested $40 million in Legendary Pictures and, back in 2008, Accel, the then William Morris Agency and AT&T formed an investment consortium to focus on Southern California start-ups.

Most closely related was the 2010 deal, in which TPG Capital took a 35 percent stake in Creative Artists Agency.

Here is the official press release on the Silver Lake-WME deal:

WME Press Release_5 02 12_FINAL

In an interview last week, Greylock partner David Sze said he thinks a celebrity content management system will be a big business. “It used to be when these platforms first started, the top users were always digital stars — the Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble types. If you look at it today, there’s an amazing shift going on — it’s all general celebrities and the scale is order-of-magnitude multiples of when the tech stars were dominating the system.”

As I’ve described it before, WhoSay is a social media tool for celebrities, aimed at “helping them manage their social media presence and making sure photos and videos are posted on a page the stars themselves can control and eventually monetize.”

For instance, here’s a picture of Tom Hanks’s refrigerator, via an embed code that allows the actor to maintain the rights to his image. Hanks also used WhoSay last week to bitch about how RSS feed readers of Gawker’s headline about his new movie might think he was actually dead. (Tom Hanks knows what RSS is?!)

Greylock has one of the most extensive venture capital portfolios of the leading social Web companies, among them general and open platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Airbnb and Tumblr. WhoSay, by contrast, is a much more specific publishing tool.

WhoSay — which was incubated by Creative Artists Agency but operates independently — had already raised $6 million from investors including Amazon and High Peaks Ventures. Greylock is adding an undisclosed amount into a previous Series B round.

Not unless you’re famous.

WhoSay, it turns out, is a sort of HootSuite for the stars, helping them manage their social media presence and making sure photos and videos are posted on a page the stars themselves can control and eventually monetize.

I spoke with WhoSay CEO Steve Ellis yesterday about his 18-month-old company and what it has accomplished so far. First, the start-up basics: Los Angeles-based WhoSay has raised $6 million from investors including Amazon and High Peaks Ventures. The premise for WhoSay was developed at Creative Artists Agency but now the company works with all sorts of talent agents and managers. Ellis himself previously sold his start-up Pump Audio to Getty Images.

The WhoSay product, which has been out for nine months, has hundreds of users, and they collectively have 570 million social media fans across Twitter and Facebook and get “multiple tens of millions of page views per month,” said Ellis. More than half the content posted on the service is uploaded directly from WhoSay’s various mobile apps.

WhoSay doesn’t offer a public index of all its clients, though it’s obvious who’s using WhoSay since the pages themselves are all public at WhoSay.com and their tweets use the URL shortener Say.ly. Other users include Ellen DeGeneres, Dwayne Johnson, Diane Keaton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Silverman, Cristiano Ronaldo, Shahrukh Khan, Steve Martin and Katie Couric.

“Our clients create value in media space but don’t get return for that value,” said Ellis, pointing out this includes both new media and old media — huge amounts of entertainment coverage is driven by pictures and videos from the lives of stars, taken from their own Twitter posts or bought from paparazzi.

Any social media service will retain at least some control over the rights to use and monetize the content its users upload. WhoSay, by contrast, says it won’t do anything without its users’ permission and without paying them too.

“This will never be a consumer application,” Ellis said, though he added that he can’t exactly specify the criteria for admitting WhoSay users. Today WhoSay is primarily television and movie stars, and the company hopes to beef up its sports, politics and finance roster.

WhoSay does advise stars to post their own updates, but Ellis says he always tells them “Authenticity doesn’t mean you have to tell people what you had for lunch.” For instance, Diane Keaton often posts pictures of art she finds interesting. Tom Hanks has created his own series of publicity stunts for his new movie “Larry Crowne” (I had no idea Tom Hanks was such a goofball). James Franco used WhoSay to post videos from his iPhone while he hosted the Academy Awards (though he appears to have since deleted his social media presences).

But Cristiano Ronaldo’s most-viewed WhoSay picture of all time is indeed a picture of his plate of food (I think it’s this one), Ellis said.

Today WhoSay integrates with four platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Myspace. Next will be Tumblr and international social networks, especially in China, Ellis said. The company has also started doing larger deals, for instance signing up all the contestants in the recent Miss USA pageant.

The next big thing, Ellis said, will be commercializing the service with an ad sales partner, which is coming soon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110628/whosay-brings-social-media-to-the-stars-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101208/when-marc-met-mike-andreessen-interviews-ovitz/ http://allthingsd.com/20101208/when-marc-met-mike-andreessen-interviews-ovitz/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:05:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38289

There is no question that legendary entrepreneur Marc Andreessen is a power player in Silicon Valley.

Nor that Michael Ovitz, who used to be the power player in Hollywood, is one of the people who did most to disrupt the way business was done in the entertainment industry, with his bare-knuckle approach at his groundbreaking Creative Artists Agency.

So, if you put them together, as happened recently at the Sand Hill Road offices of the Andreessen Horowitz venture firm, you get what turned out to be a very interesting discussion.

In fact, Andreessen actually interviewed Ovitz in front of a private audience about his life and philosophies.

BoomTown attended the event, which had been off the record until now, when a video of the talk was provided to All Things Digital.

The pair met up awhile ago, as Ovitz developed an interest in Silicon Valley after his glory days as an über-agent and his fateful stint as a top exec at Disney.

Here’s the video of the full interview, in which he talks about all of that. It’s long, at one hour, but–as you’ll find–quite riveting:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101208/when-marc-met-mike-andreessen-interviews-ovitz/feed/ 16 http://allthingsd.com/20071219/the-striking-writers-and-the-striking-lack-of-web-hits/ http://allthingsd.com/20071219/the-striking-writers-and-the-striking-lack-of-web-hits/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:44:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071219/the-striking-writers-and-the-striking-lack-of-web-hits/ Why does the idea of a marriage between Hollywood writers and VCs make me slightly queasy?

But that’s just the feeling I got when I read the always sharp Joseph Menn of the Los Angeles Times, who penned an interesting piece earlier this week about writers in Hollywood turning to venture capitalists as the strike drags on.

Wrote Menn: “At least seven groups, composed of members of the striking Writers Guild of America, are planning to form Internet-based businesses that, if successful, could create an alternative economic model to the one at the heart of the walkout, now in its seventh week.”

That includes meetings with Silicon Valley VCs like Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, whose investment in Facebook gives it insight into the creation of new audiences.

The hope for the–let’s just say it, shall we–unnatural pairing of tech VCs and Hollywood folks?

That the sour lemons being thrown between studios and writers–ironically over future Internet revenues–will actually yield delicious lemonade, spurring the creation of quality online programming using the Internet’s massive distribution system that could also make lots and lots of money.

“Could” is obviously the operative word here, because–as we have noted many times in this column–very little original content created on the Web has had any true payoff yet.

Um, well, none, actually. (Save porn, which is an almost perfect content format for the Web.)

To be fair, there have been promising signs.

Ex-Yahoo exec and Hollywood player Lloyd Braun struck a deal with PepsiCo to pay for and create online content.

MySpace has been backing a range of online-only shows made by Hollywood types (although none has shown strongly increasing popularity and even seem to display worrisome declines in viewership, despite the justified potential touted by creators).

Of course, there’s the high-profile Sequoia Capital-backed and Will Ferrell-fronted FunnyorDie.com, as well as MyDamnChannel.com, from former MTV executive Rob Barnett.

And Viacom agreed this summer to create a new online entertainment studio in a 50-50 split with the creators of the popular “South Park” TV program.

Finally, Creative Artists Agency, which is the biggest talent agency in Hollywood, is apparently working with Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson to raise up to $200 million to invest in the digital entertainment sector, even as other such firms as UTA and William Morris are making similar moves.

While that is a very little amount of money considering the billions of dollars that slosh around Silicon Valley to fund things like dopey widgets and yet another movie-comparison site, it is still a start.

The presumable goal is that by creating and distributing content for the Web in a lower-cost way, many kinds of revenues could be garnered via everything from advertising to getting back investments by selling the online material to television and the movies.

That sounds like a plan, except for the fact that the current state of advertising innovation related to Web videos is quite nascent, even pre-fetal.

While a lot of companies are focusing on this and advertisers seem willing to move in the direction of more online ad spending, it will simply be a long time before these investments pay off.

Which is just not part of the no-risk-and-all-reward mentality of most players in Hollywood, who wouldn’t know a start-up unless it took their prime table at the Ivy.

In all seriousness, it seems unlikely that the high cost of production now in place in the entertainment industry would in any way lend itself to the critical need for that kind of massive shift in economics required to make online content pay off now.

Currently, studios still only grudgingly want to consider sharing ownership of content, and the talent seems even less willing to take the burden of risk required onto its shoulders.

Still, I admire all the efforts on the part of writers to not just strike, but strike out from their current comfort zone and move into the future, where online entertainment production and distribution seems obviously inevitable.

The problem is that it might take a longer while than those creators have patience for and they will prematurely abandon their efforts and return to propping up a system that is destined for, while not oblivion, then certain diminution.

So what’s needed–as in all marriages–is a crazy leap of faith, like this one from “Heroes” Peter Petrelli on NBC.

I am definitely no expert on this topic, except to say that the problem is that the delta between falling flat and succeeding is frighteningly close.

In other words, I Has No Idea what to do.

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