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Flickr, Behance, Vimeo and YouTube Add New Pinterest Attribution Tool

Liz Gannes — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:02:54 +0000

One thing Pinterest hasn’t necessarily done well is link the content its users “pin” with the people who originally created it. That has angered copyright holders and dampened the service’s potential to be a driver of traffic to other sites.

So today Pinterest announced it has signed four content hosting sites to use a new attribution tool: Flickr, Behance, Vimeo and YouTube.

The tool was developed in conjunction with Flickr, which is interesting because the photo-hosting site had previously implemented code provided by Pinterest in order to block pinning of copyrighted images. This is a separate project, said a spokeswoman for Pinterest.

Now, content for which the creator has enabled sharing on these four sites will include a “Pin it” button — on Flickr this is in a menu alongside Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumblr and WordPress. Once pinned, an attribution statement will be displayed that automatically includes a permanent link and can’t be edited as it’s repinned by other Pinterest users.

Here’s what it looks like:

Twitvid Launches "Pinterest for Video"

Liz Gannes — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:07:42 +0000

Twitvid, whose name has historically been extremely informative — it’s a host for sharing videos on Twitter — is trying something new. This week, the company launches a section of its site devoted to sharing and discovering the best Web video from sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Twitvid (which raised about $10 million in venture funding) will continue to provide its existing service, and hopes to get some of its 12 million monthly uniques to participate in its “Pinterest for video,” said CEO Mo Adham.

Ways to Make Web Watching More Like TV, Less Like a PC

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:04:16 +0000

Some folks watch movies, TV shows and videos from the Internet on their TVs by plugging in their computers, using ugly cables, keyboards, or mice that seem out of place in the living room. That PC-to-TV experience is more like using the computer than leaning back to enjoy TV.

[ See post to watch video ]

So this week, I decided to try out three inexpensive set-top boxes that aim to make this process easier and neater. They are the $100 Roku 2 XS, the $99 second-generation Apple TV and the $199 Boxee Box from D-Link. The intent of the three products I tested is to do what a computer can, but in a simpler, cheaper and more TV-like manner—with easy setup, clear onscreen menus and small, simple remotes.

None of these boxes can handle your regular cable or satellite service. Typically, you plug these gadgets into a separate input on your TV and switch to that input to use them, just as you do when using your DVD or Blu-ray player. Nor do these boxes play discs.

Clockwise starting from the left: Roku 2 XS with ‘Angry Birds’ on the TV; the uniquely shaped Boxee Box with its remote; and the Apple TV box.

While all three products carry some of the same popular Internet video sources, such as Netflix, YouTube, MLB.TV and Vimeo, they otherwise have different offerings. Apple’s huge and popular iTunes video store is available only on Apple TV. But Roku and Boxee each have numerous sources that Apple lacks, such as Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video on Roku, and Vudu on Boxee.

Of the three, I’d recommend Apple TV primarily for people who frequently use iTunes, or who own an iPad or iPhone. I’d recommend Roku for people who aren’t hooked on the Apple world and crave simplicity, variety and a low entry price. I’d only recommend the Boxee Box for techies because of its complexity.

Roku 2 XS

This is the smallest of the three, a tiny black gadget about 3 inches square and less than an inch thick. It’s the high end of a lineup that starts at $60.

The Roku uses a large, simple menu of “channels” of content providers—some free and some requiring a subscription or a pay-per-view fee to the content provider.

In my tests, the Roku 2 XS set up easily on my 50-inch Pioneer Plasma TV, and provided sharp, clear high-definition TV shows, movies and other videos from a wide variety of sources. Menus were mostly consistent and clear. I was able to watch TV shows like “30 Rock” and movies like “Star Trek,” though the most recent movies aren’t available and the selection of newer TV episodes was spotty.

The newest feature of the Roku is casual gaming, notably the popular “Angry Birds.” However, the Roku can’t access video, photos or music from computers on a home network, though it can play content from a USB drive.

Apple TV

This small black box seems to have inspired the new Roku design, although it’s a bit larger. It allows you to rent movies and buy TV shows from the iTunes store. A new feature also allows you to stream, for free, any TV show you’ve purchased from iTunes, even if you bought it on another device.

Though Apple won’t confirm this, I expect this same free feature to apply eventually to movies as well.

In my tests, Apple TV delivered great video, even though its resolution isn’t as high as those on the other two devices. Its user interface is clean, simple and consistent, and its remote is tiny and very simple.

The selection of non-Apple Internet sources on Apple TV is very limited. It includes a few paid services and some free ones, but ignores most of the non-Apple video on the Internet. But Apple TV really shines in fetching video, photos and music from any PC or Mac on your home network that is running iTunes.

Apple TV is becoming even more useful as an adapter for an iPad or iPhone. Using a feature on those devices called AirPlay, you can wirelessly beam some videos to your TV via Apple TV.

And, with a software update due soon, you’ll be able to wirelessly mirror the entire display of an iPad 2 to your TV, and stream music and photos you’ve stored on Apple’s new iCloud service.

My main gripe with Apple TV, in addition to its limited Web content, is that the remote lacks a “home” and “back” button.

Boxee Box

This is a much larger device, with an unusual, angled shape that costs twice as much as the others. Even with a new software update, I found Boxee more confusing and geeky than the other two.

Boxee’s strongest feature is that it has loads of content, and can play almost any video format. But this content is presented in two very different ways. If you just select a movie or TV show, you may find yourself in a Web browser, trying to control the video with a cursor—a scenario I find annoying from 10 feet away. If, however, the content comes from an app, such as Netflix or Vudu, it’s presented in a TV-friendly fashion. Depending on how you navigate to the video, you may be surprised by which interface you get.

In addition, Boxee has the flavor of a techie device. For instance, it includes setup choices like Deinterlacing Policy, and watching content from your home network requires you to choose from a geeky list of options.

Boxee also is rough around the edges. It failed to play any of the standard-formatted songs on my home network, and it froze on me twice.

A free Boxee iPad app can fetch videos from social networks or bookmarked Web pages, and has its own method for sending videos to the TV via the Boxee Box. Boxee also claims to support Apple’s official AirPlay feature, but, in my tests, this failed more often than it succeeded. (The company calls this feature “experimental.”)

On the other hand, the Boxee remote is the only one with a built-in keyboard—on the back of the remote. With the others, you have to peck out letters on an onscreen keyboard when doing things like searching.

Bottom line: To watch Internet video easily on a TV, either Roku or Apple TV is the best choice for average consumers.

Jon Stewart Thinks Newt Gingrich Should Stay Off Twitter

Peter Kafka — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:19:12 +0000

Newt Gingrich announced his entry into the 2012 presidential race on Twitter this week. Jon Stewart does not approve–apparently he thinks the olds should not be on the Interwebs. (Alarming news for some of us olds-to-bes.)

Includes shout-outs to Tumblr, Vimeo, bit.ly, YouTube, Groupon:

Showyou: An iPad Experience for Shared Videos

Liz Gannes — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:00:17 +0000

Watching videos your friends recommend on Facebook and Twitter can be awkward. You often lose your place on the page, or have to grab headphones, or want to come back to something when you have more time later. Or all of the above.

Showyou is a new iOS app with an imaginative interface built for social video consumption. It’s meant for spurts of time dedicated to watching videos.

The main Showyou view is a never-ending tiled video wall intended primarily for use on the iPad. Scroll horizontally or vertically and you’ll find videos shared by your friends (the organization seems somewhat random, but more recent videos are generally up and to the left, and popular older videos are down and to the right). Click on a video and it pops out from the wall and plays immediately.

Videos keep loading on one page as you move, giving the (somewhat overwhelming!) sensation that there are infinite options to watch. It might be disconcerting not to have a playlist function or a way to filter videos by any sort of topic, but Showyou does also offer a more traditional feed view that shows just the activity of other Showyou users you follow.

The app comes from San Francisco-based Remixation, a True Ventures-backed start-up which for the last four years has been working on a video curation tool called Vodpod. Vodpod still exists, but the Remixation team has in the last six months shifted almost entirely to work on Showyou, in part inspired by iPad consumption experiences like Flipboard.

At launch, Showyou only supports YouTube, Vimeo and TED videos (in part because they are available in HTML5 for display on iOS). There are also a smattering of social tools in the app, so you can click to share a video, “thank” your friends or comment on videos within Showyou. And Showyou is living-room-ready at launch–that is, if you have Apple TV 2.0 with Airplay.

Assistly Extends Customer Service to Facebook Walls

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:08:59 +0000

When something breaks, we users ask for help wherever we think we can find someone responsible. Or maybe we just stand up on our social media soapbox and whine.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.

Early Adopter: Connect Your Personal Data Pipes Together With Ifttt's Digital Duct Tape

Drake Martinet — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 17:00:11 +0000

Early Adopter is all about emerging trends and the chewy little companies that creep in to define emerging spaces.

For a couple of years, I’ve been watching companies expand the conception of what APIs can be used for.

As the complexity and utility of those data pipes grow, companies have been adopting another trend: One that places graphic and interface design at the center of a new product, as much as the engineering and programming that makes it function.

This is a trend that ifttt founder Linden Tibbets has been thinking about as well.

Ifttt, (pronounced “ift”) stands for “if this, then that,” which über-geeks will recognize as a foundational logic and programming action.

The concept is simple. When one state is reached, an action will automatically be triggered.

For example, there is an “if” function inside the computer that controls the automatic wipers on a car. If rain is sensed, then the wipers turn on.

Ifttt pulls a user’s Web services out of their silos and allows those automatic if functions to take place across several services at once–essentially allowing users to easily connect several APIs end-to-end.

In the case of Tibbets’s ifttt Web app, the user chooses from channels to create the if situation, and then from other channels to have the output, or the then-that action. All of the ifs and thens are gathered from the growing API-driven Web.

Got it?

Although bootstrapped and still in private beta, ifttt is already building up an impressive set of services that can help users connect to and semi-automate.

As of today, ifttt already connects to and enables actions between several Web clipping services, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Evernote, Flickr, phone–both voice and text–and even craigslist.

Each channel has its own set of action choices, depending both on what the service is used for and what actions are acessable via that service’s API.

Actions can be as simple as automatically sending the user a text message when the weather changes to rainy (not a new trick), or as complex as automatically uploading an image to Facebook whenever the user uploads that photo to flicker with the tag “Facebook.”

“Right now we are focused on adding more channels and listening to what users want to use the service for,” said Tibbets.

He explained that he and co-founder Jesse Tane are working on integration with cloud file service dropbox, as well as on Google Chat integration.

Tibbets comes to ifttt after a few years situated right between the design and tech spaces.

After attending Santa Clara College on a basketball scholarship (he’s around 6′ 6″) and graduating with a computer engineering degree, he spent time working on games at Elecronic Arts before moving to Palo Alto, Calif.-based design darling IDEO.

Tibbets spent the last three years working on internal social-sharing projects at IDEO, before founding ifttt and launching the Web app of the same name in early November of 2010.

Ifttt is useful for sending yourself notifications, but Tibbets believes the real value is in creating connections between the Web services available in ifttt.

The zeitgeist for APIs use is to channel info out of one Web service and into another, as defined by a single site or app maker. Tibbets’s efforts put individuals more at the center of how their information flows around them.

This concept can get complicated in a hurry, and that’s where others have failed, at least according to Tibbets.

He explained: “It’s about usability, and being simple enough to understand and implement in your own life. Ifttt began more complex, but we cut a lot out of it, to make it simple enough to understand quickly.”

Indeed, lack of simplicity may be what keeps services like Yahoo’s Pipes, which can do many of the same things ifttt can, from becoming popular with a broader consumer group.

Ifttt is also developing native mobile apps that will focus on ultra-simple activation of an ifttt task.

He said that a major barrier to him doing certain things on a mobile device is that he feels it is just anti-social to have his phone out for more than 20 seconds.

To alleviate the anti-social dilemma, ifttt’s mobile apps will focus on quickly activating preprogrammed tasks.

Ifttt co-founder Tane is working full time on the apps, although there is no release date set.

Tibbets admits that ifttt is still little more of an idea and a high-resolution prototype than it is a full-fledged product. But his hopes hang on his philosophy about how to build value, which is either a little counter to, or ahead of, the current trend in Web apps.

“Our value won’t be built on adding your friends or sharing functionality to some other service,” he said. “Ours will be about creating something that would still be a valuable if there were only 20 people left on earth and none of them were your friends.”

We sat Tibbets down (literally, we had to make him sit or we wouldn’t have been able to reach to get good video) near ifttt’s San Francisco headquarters to get the quick rundown on ifttt’s present and future. Enjoy the video.

[ See post to watch video ]

(Early Adopter is a new column on early-stage start-ups and ideas written weekly by Drake Martinet.)

Richard Branson's iPad App: $2.99, Instructions Included. You'll Need Them.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:29:26 +0000

Richard Branson will hold a press conference in New York this morning to show off “Project,” his new iPad magazine app. But since it’s already live in Apple’s iTunes store, there’s really no need to wait. Pay $3, and you can see for yourself.

Should you? Depends: If you’re into iPad magazine apps, you’ll want to, because it’s a pretty good iPad magazine app, with some interesting deployment of art, video and live Web links. On the other hand, it’s pretty similar to most of the other iPad magazine apps you’ve seen so far.

Except more confusing–the navigation on all of these things changes from app to app, but this one seems even more random. Hence this one-page instruction manual (note to the guy who was confused – yes, this is an actual screenshot):

That said, if you do monkey around with this thing, you’ll find some cool stuff. My favorite so far is an ohmygodlookitathat photo of some nutjob kayaking off a waterfall. This image:

Expands into this image:

And then a link gets you to this astonishing Vimeo clip:

tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State from Vagueo on Vimeo.

Bleacher Report's Brian Grey Talks About New Content Biz, as Patrick Keane Joins Board

Kara Swisher — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:30:35 +0000

Earlier this week, BoomTown went downtown to the San Francisco HQ of Bleacher Report, one of the many interesting efforts trying to change the way content is made and distributed.

Bleacher Report, no surprise, is focused on sports, and competes with sites such as Yardbarker and SB Nation.

All take different approaches, with Bleacher Report delivering a grassroots platform for both professional and hobbyist writers who want give their take on any topic about college and professional sports, from the latest draft to explaining what’s the deal with “Fear the Beard.”

Bleacher Report vets these writers and does not pay most of them. There are 3,000 contributors, with 750 designated as featured, delivering 500 pieces of content a day.

Bleacher Report also has one million newsletter subscribers across 150 teams.

The writers are presumably attracted to the larger audience–8.8 million unique monthly visitors–they can reach via the site, as well as via newspaper syndication deals.

Think Huffington Post–Bleacher Report’s main business model is advertising too–and you have the right idea.

So far, Bleacher Report has raised $8 million from venture firms, such as Hillsven Capital, and angel investors like Gordon Crawford and Jakob Lodwick, founder of College Humor and Vimeo.

And it recently went out and drafted a pro for a CEO–former Yahoo and News Corp. exec Brian Grey, who focused on online sports content at both those companies.

In addition, it also just added Patrick Keane–former Googler and also former CEO of Associated Content, the social content site recently bought by Yahoo–to its board.

Here’s a video interview I did with Grey–who, full disclosure, was my elder son’s Little League coach for one season (so he does know about baseball, for sure!)–about how the media is morphing, as amateur and professional content is mixed and distributed in new ways:

[ See post to watch video ]

Svpply Is a Social Shopping Site With a Funny Name, Good Buzz and a New Funding Round

Peter Kafka — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:00:21 +0000

One thing the first Web boom got right: Amazon, eBay and the other big e-commerce sites that made it really easy to buy stuff on the Internet.

But those sites are efficient places to get the things you know you want. They’re not good at finding cool stuff you didn’t know you wanted. The way that catalogs used to do, or that your friends still do.

This is the problem that Svpply is supposed to solve: It’s a social, online retail “discovery” site stocked with stuff you and your friends think are cool. Simple, right?

That’s the pitch, at least. And it’s been enough to get the year-old company a $550,000 seed-round investment led by Spark Capital and Founder Collective, along with high-profile angels like Ron Conway, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and former Myspace co-President Jason Hirschhorn.

One reason the company gets a warm reception: It boasts Founder Collective’s Zach Klein as a co-founder. Klein, who helped start College Humor and later Vimeo, still has a day job as chief product officer at Boxee. But last spring he connected with Ben Pieratt, a Boston-based designer who started Svpply in late 2009.

If you take a look at Svpply (you pronounce it “Supply,” but the V is supposed to make it look Roman and/or cool), you’ll figure it out right away.

But in case you don’t click over: Using a browser-based “bookmarklet” (a la Instapaper), you tag images of stuff you own or like, along with a link that tells people where to buy it. And you look at images that your friends, or people you’d like to be your friends, have tagged, too. Apps for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform are on the way.

When you do head over to Svpply, you’ll find that both the images and the stuff they depict are probably better-looking than you are. And while the company’s founders won’t come out and say it, that’s sort of intentional. Svpply is supposed to exude the same sort of digital cool, and attract the same kind of early adopters, that social Web hits like Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare did.

And like those networks, Svpply is based around the activity feed/stream concept–you can follow a few people or a lot of people. And if you don’t have anything cool to add yourself, that’s okay too.

The main thing is that everything there is supposed to be interesting and, well, cool. Anyone can set up shop at Svpply and show off their stuff, but if no one likes it, no one likes it. As Pieratt puts it: “People are very sensitive to being sold to.”

Of course, the reason people are funding Svpply is because it has such obvious potential for selling–by designers, by brands, by retailers, etc.

Which may be why it’s not the only start-up taking this approach. Poke around and you’ll see several sites doing something similar: Pinterest, Wanelo, etc.

One particularly notable competitor: Fancy, a project from ThingD, the semi-mysterious “Facebook of Stuff” that has super-high profile backers like Allen & Co. and is generating a lot of attention from Silicon Valley’s deal guys.

Fox, Yahoo Sports Vet Brian Grey to Run Sports Start-Up Bleacher Report

Peter Kafka — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:30:04 +0000

Brian Grey used to run big sports sites for really big portals, first at Yahoo (YHOO), then at News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox Sports. Now he’s going to do the same thing at a start-up: He’s leaving an entrepreneur-in-residence perch at Polaris Venture Partners to run Bleacher Report, a San Francisco-based sports network.

Bleacher Report is a two-year old company roughly similar to the better-known SB Nation. The start-up employs lots of writers and stringers to produce lots of local content, claiming it is now churning out more than 500 stories a day.

The company is trying to make money by selling ads on its core site, which Quantcast says draws eight million monthly uniques. And it’s doing syndication deals with the likes of USAToday.com and some of Hearst’s newspapers; last I heard, it was also trying to get a deal with Tribune’s Los Angeles Times.

Bleacher Report has raised $8 million in two rounds; investments include Series A financing completed in February 2008 from Hillsven Capital, Gordon Crawford, SoftTech VC and, sort-of oddly, Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick.

Let's Try This Again: How Much Web Video Is Really iPad-Ready?

Peter Kafka — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:00:55 +0000

Steve Jobs says there’s no reason to cling to Flash video on the Web, because most Web video also works on the H.264/HTML5 standard he’s supporting.

But Adobe (ADBE) says the majority of the Web’s video uses its Flash standard. And if you surf the Web via Apple’s (AAPL) iPad, you’ll quickly find clips that don’t work on the Flash-free device. Instead of video, you’ll confront the dreaded blue box.

So who’s right? Depends, of course, on whom you ask. But the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

Earlier this month, Encoding.com said that 66 percent of the videos it processes are in iPad-friendly H.264, adding that this number reflects the wider Web. But MeFeedia, a video search engine, which says it catalogs millions of videos from 30,000 sources, pegs the H.264 universe at a much lower number, 26 percent of all clips.

The two data sets aren’t necessarily at odds. Encoding.com is looking at clips it has been paid to…encode. while MeFeedia is looking at a wider range of clips, including lots of old ones that publishers either don’t want to re-encode or haven’t gotten around to re-encoding yet.

And it’s a perfectly rational decision for some publishers with big video archives–say, the New York Times (NYT)–to encode only their newer clips in H.264 for now. Because the new clips are probably responsible for the majority of their views.

It’s also worth noting that MeFeedia says it is tracking videos around the world. So its numbers are skewed by giant video sites like China’s Youku.com and Tudou.com, which are all-Flash.

Still, the H.264 cohort is growing. MeFeedia says that when it did the same tally in January, it found just 10 percent of clips in H.264. Easy enough to explain the jump as an “iPad effect.” And MeFeedia CEO Frank Sinton says that he has seen many publishers move aggressively to make their stuff iPad-ready: He cites Break, Vimeo, CNN and DailyMotion, among others.

No Flash Lego speed design from Tony Gil on Vimeo.

[Image credit: Tony Gil]

Time Warner Gets the iPad Seal of Approval

Peter Kafka — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:40:10 +0000

Many Web publishers are scrambling to make some or all of their sites “iPad ready,” which basically means stripping their homepages of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash. Some, but not all, are being rewarded with a shout-out from Apple, via a page that identifies “iPad Ready” sites.

Here’s the list of publishers Apple (AAPL) says “deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad”:

CNN
Reuters
New York Times
Vimeo
Time
Major League Baseball
The White House
Virgin America
Sports Illustrated
Flickr
People
TED

Apple acknowledges that this isn’t a complete list of iPad-compatible sites–both NPR and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are overhauling their pages for the gadget–and it’s unclear whether Apple has any criteria for calling out these sites in particular. (For the record, I’m told that All Things Digital should work just fine, too).

But for whatever reason, the list appears to be particularly heavy on sites owned by Time Warner (TWX). CNN makes the cut, as do Time Inc. magazines Time, People and Sports Illustrated.

One other note: Check out the description Apple uses for each of the sites it calls out and you’ll see that “iPad-compatible” doesn’t mean “completely free of Flash.”

In many cases, Apple can’t say that all of the sites’ videos will play on the gadget. Just “most” videos, or “recently published” ones.

Almost Famous: Lance Podell of Next New Networks

Drake Martinet — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:30:31 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We grabbed a Caltrain up to San Francisco to meet with Lance Podell, CEO of Next New Networks, the Web video network whose shows usually mix hi-fi production and lo-fi hosts for that ultra-Webby feel that the kids are raving about.

Or so Podell hopes.

Who: Lance Podell

What: Chief Executive Officer

Why: According to Lance, Next New Networks is aiming to transform its existing lineup of 12 Web TV “networks” into a content behemoth that competes with the big cable guys. Oh yeah, and they plan to monetize it too. Eye rolling aside, at the end of 2009, they were nearly profitable.

Where: nextnewnetworks.com (Web site); @NextNewNetworks (Twitter); New York, N.Y. (analog place)

Who else: You name it. Next New Networks competes for face time with an armada of YouTube stars (although they try to recruit some of them too). How does it stack up? Well, the camera work in the latest webisode from YouTube star Fred isn’t anything to write home about, but you don’t have to sit through video advertising either.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I had a job for a very brief time at a start-up called Savatar; it’s hard to even think about it. [Ad giant] WPP (WPPGY) had invested in this company that was supposed to build Web sites for all the WPP companies. This is like back in 1994. Not only did it crash and burn, but they made me go into I don’t know how many meetings and promise things I just knew we could never deliver.

When He’s Not Busy CEOing: I’m a dad a lot. My son plays just about every sport, so I’m at a lot of games. I also enjoy chasing my little girls around the house.

Gadget of the Moment: I’d love to buy an Internet-enabled TV. I was in the early days of interactive television trials and I really want to see that come to fruition.

Wishes There Was an App For: I really want to be able to use my BlackBerry with my Mac.

Fails At: Ugh, it’s a long list. My son would say understanding that he’s always right.

Bio in 140 Characters

Lance went from Lafayette College to the HBS, and then into the ad game. Next New Networks brought him in to be the ad money rainmaker.

The Five Questions

You guys have been around for a while now. I don’t know if I’d call you “New,” but what’s “Next” for you ?

We don’t just believe in just creating shows and niche content. We believe that the hosts of our shows have to also be a member of the community the show is aimed at. On our indy mogul network for example, Eric Beck literally runs one of the shows, Backyard FX [Think McG meets MythBusters]. He creates Hollywood-style special effects in your backyard for under $100. He’s really doing it. That’s step one.

Step two is we are asking you to contribute. It’s very Web-like, in a very Web way, right? Not like TV. We want you to contribute your thoughts, videos, comments and posts, following the video. Again, not like TV. We don’t have six-month development cycles. Every week that host is coming up with the next episode and we are relating it back to the community and their experience in the prior week.

So, the model is: No more broadcast, just piece together enough niche content, plus some revenue model, to equal profitability?

That’s true, what you said is entirely true. But I don’t want to get too bogged down in that. And the end of the day though, we are an entertainment company, so niches can mean a variety of things. Early on, the company’s goal was to have 100 “networks.” I think that was just an audacious goal to set for the sake of goal-setting. What we’ve done over time is try lots of things, see what works and what doesn’t, see where the passion within our company is, and build on that. And, as the YouTube audience has grown and matured, we can start to look there for shows that are popular and communities of interest.

Also, advertisers are asking for a lot. They want to reach moms, for example. So we are looking for gaps in the Internet that are also things moms want to watch. We don’t create programming specifically to satisfy the advertisers.

A good example of how the relationship works is that Caress had hired Carson Kressley [the "Queer Eye" guy] as a spokesperson, and as part of the ad agreement, we had him on our women’s talk show. Now, Carson wasn’t scripted by Caress, he just came on the show. It was a women’s talk show and he acted as though he were on the “Ellen” show, for instance.

You guys put your content everywhere: YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo–all of them. Are you concerned about a platform like Hulu setting up a pay wall and potentially adding a level of complication to your viewers’ experience?

We’re not concerned yet. If Hulu were to change to paid content, I don’t know that it would start with the Web originals. Do I imagine that three years from now that Web original programming will have the same kind of brand impact as something that comes out of NBC? Yes. Because Internet TV is changing everything. Our programs can be viewed on TiVo. They can be viewed on FiOS. Once, we had the kind of loyalty that might warrant it, would I be interested in selling some content behind a wall? Yeah, I’d look at it.

So you are confident that you can turn a profit without making people pay?

You know, you are talking to an old ad guy here. We have always said we’d never be able to pay for the next thing with just advertising and yet we always have. I believe we will pay, not for everything. For some things.

So if advertising is what’s “Next,” then what will those “New” ads have to do differently?

The advertisers that do really well with us, the ones who really get it, are the ones who come to me and say they want to hear their products advertised in the voice of the show host. They want the ad to sound like the voice of that community. They don’t want me to use their eight words that are in every print ad. They don’t want me to say that they are 100 percent reliable, safe and colorfast. They want me to talk about their brand in the way that the community will connect with it.

Another area that I think is hugely compelling is in the area of interactivity. And I think fashion is just the first place it should go. The idea of watching something on TV and then being able to immediately buy what the actor is wearing is just incredible to me.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

OK Go Wants You to Watch Its Video on Vimeo. OK Go's Record Label Is Suing Vimeo. Confused? Welcome to the Music Business.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:44:06 +0000

Remember OK Go, the band with the really popular treadmill video a couple of years ago? It has a new video and would like you to watch it on Vimeo, the video-sharing site being sued by EMI, the band’s record label.

What gives? It’s sort of simple: The band would prefer that you watch the video via Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, but EMI won’t let Web users like me embed the YouTube version of the clip.

The band explains why this is so here, but it’s a story we’ve heard before–in a nutshell, it’s harder to sell ads against embedded videos.

That’s supposedly going to get better with Vevo, the “Hulu for music videos” joint venture that EMI is licensing its stuff to, so perhaps this kind of thing won’t be necessary in the future.

(That said, the band’s account is well worth reading, as it is a clear and even-handed assessment of the music industry’s attempt to wrestle with Web-era economics. Excerpt: “We’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.”)

Meanwhile, the Vimeo situation is a bit confusing: EMI is suing the site because it encourages users to upload “lip dubs”–what you and I would call “music videos”–that use copyrighted songs without authorization. In this case, OK Go is the entity uploading the songs/videos, so I suppose that makes the legal situation more palatable (note the big copyright notice at the end). But I’m still not sure how or why the licensing/advertising issues that put the kibosh on the YouTube video don’t come into play here.

In any event, here’s the song, followed by a YouTube version of the one that made the band sorta famous:

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Dear Web 2.0: You Might Want to Stop Believin'

Kara Swisher — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:14:20 +0000

All in good fun, right?

I am sure this will be the dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers reasoning this group of Web 2.0 folks gives for this odd video effort, doing a lip-synch romp on their group vacation in Cyprus to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and then posting it for all to see on Vimeo.

It is titled: “20 world Internet citizens met in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet.”

Um, kids, here’s a reflection: While you swim in that pricey infinity pool in your luxury villa, Silicon Valley is tanking all over the place. You might want to check your email and see if Sequoia Capital or Ron Conway has cost-cutted you out of a job!

Oh, sorry, BoomTown’s karma is so negative, isn’t I?

But the video gave me flashbacks to heedless-partying-until-the-bomb-fell attitude before the popping of the Web 1.0 bubble. It obviously still burns.

The group rollicking includes Blip.tv’s Mike Hudack, Facebook’s Dave Morin, Drop.io’s Sam Lessin and–well, um, eek, bad idea, awkward!–tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal.

Here is the video:

UPDATE: Apparently, the makers of the video have made it private on Vimeo and blocked it on YouTube, likely due to the reaction to it, but you can see it here.

Veoh's Dmitry Shapiro Speaks!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:30:11 +0000

Recently, while I was at a conference in Los Angeles, I caught up with Veoh Founder Dmitry Shapiro.

BoomTown will be focusing a lot on online video this year and Veoh is one of the several online video-sharing sites–a group of smaller players that includes sites like Joost, Hulu, Dailymotion, Vimeo and others that I like to call not-YouTube.

But there are pluses to not being the Google-owned (GOOG) video behemoth, in that major entertainment companies who want to figure out how to put their content online aren’t wondering all day long whether to hug or sue you (or both if you are Sumner Redstone).

Today, for example, the Los Angeles-based Veoh announced that the ABC (DIS) television network would put full episodes of its hot prime-time shows–such as “Ugly Betty” (love it) and “Desperate Housewives” (not so much)–up on the site on a non-exclusive basis.

While Veoh has a lot of short, user-generated material, it has also made a push to get more professional material from big media companies like CBS (CBS)–which wins kudos for being the most promiscuous of networks–on its service.

Interestingly in this deal, media connections seem at play here: Disney-owned ABC is giving over content to Veoh, which has former Disney poobah Michael Eisner as one of its principal investors.

The traffic-type deal is typical–Veoh gets paid to send audience to ABC’s site or gets it to use ABC’s really nice player, and ABC tries to monetize it. Veoh currently says it has 28 million unique monthly visitors.

Of course, Veoh is also trying to figure out that nettlesome monetization issue that all online video sites face, which centers on building audience with the attractive big media content and then getting them to watch other ad-supported fare on its site.

But, as with all video sites, it is still in the early stages and, thus, Veoh got another tidy pile of new funding just two weeks ago to help it muddle through.

That would be $30 million more to add to the kitty of about $40 million previously raised.

Along with existing investors–Shelter Capital Partners, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs (GS), Eisner’s Tornante Company, Tom Freston’s Firefly3, Time Warner (TWX) Investments and Jonathan Dolgen–Veoh’s latest round included Intel Capital, Adobe Systems (ADBE) and also media and tech investor Gordon Crawford.

I talked to Shapiro, who now serves as Veoh’s chief innovation officer, about the money and more here:

[ See post to watch video ]

Fantasy Cutting and Pasting on the iPhone

Kara Swisher — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 07:03:02 +0000

Not that Steve Jobs takes direction well, but he should take a gander at a video suggestion about how Apple could drastically improve the experience on the iPhone.

The target: The inability to cut and paste. Oh, the horror of it all.

Thanks, then, to the creators at lonelysandwich.com, who posted on Vimeo “a mock-up of what it might look like to Copy and Paste on iPhone, using the magnifying loupe and a second-finger tap.”

Cleverly manipulating an Apple ad using that creepy fake-mouth stuff Conan O’Brien always does and with the genius “I love you” ending, it shows what such a feature might look like.

See for yourself:

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich and Vimeo.

Don't You Wish Your Workplace Was Like This?

Kara Swisher — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:29:57 +0000

An impossibly young staff hams it up to a 1998 semi-hit, Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta,” and it’s pretty infectious. And yet another Web creation I am spending my time with instead of “professional” content.

Tomorrow night, I plan on spending the whole night touring Joost, the much-hyped (and now much-funded with a $45 million infusion yesterday) new online video service from the creators of Kazaa and Skype, which has the pilot of “Starsky and Hutch” in its offerings (Huggy Bear Heaven!). Could it be the perfect meshing of Web and TV? As long is it is not WebTV–we are old enough to recall that washout, thank you very much.

Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo