Reel Pop

At 4pm today RedLasso's holding a conference call for their blogger advisory board, which I'm proud to be a member of. The topic: addressing the cease and desist order served by NBC, CBS, and Fox yesterday.

If you work in the television news industry, you're probably well aware of RedLasso, the startup vid site that's garnered 24 million uniques and 10 million video plays in April by allowing users to find and embed video snippets of news broadcasts on their blogs. The problem is that RedLasso doesn't have licenses to distribute this content.

In some ways, RedLasso's strategy is similar to YouTube: build an immense audience and ask forgiveness rather than permission. They have, after all, created an immensely useful service that helps the networks distribute in a far more efficient (and some would argue) powerful way online. RedLasso is to news as web gems is to sports highlights. On the other hand, RedLasso probably won't be able to hide behind the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, since their service is explicitly designed to repurpose copyrighted material.

So what RedLasso's left with is compromise. The networks are obviously intrigued -- they've seen how powerful the service is, and probably wish they'd developed this themselves. If past is prologue, some overzealous execs at the networks are probably clamoring to build a similar service themselves, thus reaping all the ad revenue. Meanwhile, RedLasso's ability to compromise with the networks will depend on how/whether the networks benefit from RedLasso's distribution, and how cheaply the networks can duplicate RedLasso's technology. Plus, unlike YouTube, RedLasso doesn't have a huge community of users to use as a bargaining chip. The audience for news will remain no matter who's snippetizing the clips.

For now, RedLasso's expecting $500,000 in revenue this year, and $9 million next year. They're currently venture'd up at $9.4M from Anthem Capital, Osage Ventures, Guggenheim Opportunities Investors and angels.