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I’m now old enough to have my own “when I started in this industry…” story, so I’m going to tell it in this post.
I started my career at OpenTV after graduating with an engineering degree from Stanford in 1999. OpenTV did “interactive TV” probably better than any other company that claimed the function at the time. I spent as much time as I could learning from the likes of Vincent Dureau and Joel Zdepski about how TV worked and became very good at demos showing how millions would watch Friends then buy Jennifer Aniston’s dress with their remote control. This was the future of television, buying Jennifer Aniston’s dress. There was something there, BSkyB sold a ton of Domino’s Pizzas in the UK through the TV and games were a hit, but the behavior around shows and events didn’t really change.
I went back to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and while observing the market from academia some classmates and I saw the market for video changing from tape to digital. This was a tectonic technological change that we thought would change consumer behavior. In 2003 there weren’t a lot of digital cameras shipped with video capture but by 2005 it was well over half, so we concluded that it might be a good time to start an online video company, so I found a good techie named Ryan Cunningham and we started Jumpcut. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen concluded something similar and did a better job of it. Jumpcut focused on video editing which ended up working for a smaller but valuable group of users that created and shared video. It turns out that this group was interested in building a community focused around their craft and that advertisers and brands could entice this community into helping them create things like Doritos Superbowl commercials and movie trailers. The remix button was born and we all did well.
I was then at Yahoo! (after Y! acquired Jumpcut in 2006) and I had the privilege of managing talented teams who had the tough task of competing with YouTube in areas like music videos. It was a tough competition because Yahoo! had a long standing culture of working with the video rights holders and did things like only put videos up that they had the rights for, even though people wanted the video that they wanted. YouTube almost always had the video (with no ads), so category by category it became tougher to compete with that. We did break new ground with things like the Nokia / Spike Lee video editing challenge where Yahoo!’s community created the assets for a feature length film that Spike Lee edited. However, it was clear that consumers wanted the video that they wanted (often what they just saw on TV) and went to the place where they could find it.
We all witnessed the rise of Facebook and Twitter and the real-time web, which is actually real time write and on-demand read. People post in real time as they see things, but others read the posts at various times after that, on-demand. This has become the new model for communication on the web, actually email is the same way, but Twitter and Facebook have created a spontaneous sharing with the expectation that someone will read it but I don’t really care if any specific person does or not. It turns out these are good platforms for people to blurt out random thoughts, celebrations, observations, expletives, etc. about the shows they’re watching on TV. I noticed this while checking Facebook a few hours after a particularly compelling American Idol episode. Everyone was talking about two of the songs. 10 of 20 messages (hold comments on what this says about my friends) were about that show. I happened to watch it, but what if I had not seen it? I went to AmericanIdol.com, no video. Fox.com didn’t have it either. Half of my feed was talking about this moment and the video was nowhere to be found online. It did get posted by the time I checked the next morning but by then the feed had moved on to burnt coffee and baby photos. What a missed opportunity.
Once I started paying attention, this pattern repeated itself. Traffic from Landon Donovan’s world cup goal earned him a fail whale and when the feed came back up the chatter was deafening but no video. DeSean Jackson returned a punt to put a dagger in the hearts of New York Giants fans everywhere. The internet explodes but almost no video. The “almost” is because I did find it by searching YouTube 90 minutes later and there it was, with 1.4 million views on one and hundreds of thousands on others. I did the same search 30 minutes later and that clip was gone but ten others of the same moment with at least 100k views were in line to take its place, all of which were summarily executed. Again, what a missed opportunity.
That brings us to now, the future of TV. People post in real time about what they watch on TV. People also want to share the best moments and talk about them afterward. Content owners should be able to benefit from this instead of trying (and failing) to stop it.
So we decided to create the first rights friendly platform for sharing clips from live television. Content owners can now take advantage of the immense conversation inside Facebook and Twitter about their shows by attaching tune-in information and branding to these show highlights as they virally spread through the web. Fans get a great way to engage with and talk about the show. Content owners drive tune-in, audience engagement and revenue.
This post was a bit about my journey but I’ve got a steller team with me including my co-founders Ryan Cunningham, Steve Weibel and Karen Nguyen. We are doing this today and we have great partnerships with Fox and Bravo (and a number of others that I can’t talk about yet) because they see the same things we do. It turns out Hollywood and Silicon Valley can work together.
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