Reel Pop

Galacticast: Videoblogging with like, laser beams and stuff

Growing up as a geek -- comic books in polybags, GI Joe toys, an unhealthy, imagined friendship with Wesley Crusher -- I resigned myself to the reality that jocks get the girls, while geeks get fake Spock ears and season passes to lonelyville. Of course, there was a certain honor in our ostracism. We might not date the cheerleaders, but at least we had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. And as for girls there was always, oh I don't know...Gillian Anderson?

Well now I'm all grown up, and things have changed. Last year, the most popular show on television concerned time travel, smoke beasts and a mysterious island. This year, the most popular show is based on comic books. Reviews of sci-fi TV and cinema, formerly resigned to the back pages of Asimov's and Fangoria, are popping up in Slate and The New Yorker. Of the top ten grossing movies of all time, eight are science fiction -- six of which have debuted since 1999. There's no doubt that we're experiencing a sci-fi renaissance. Like Patrick Dempsey in Can't Buy Me Love, we've gone from totally geek to totally chic.^[1]

That's where Galacticast comes in. The sci-fi oriented videoblog, conceived and produced by BF/GF duo Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan, may just represent the next geeky frontier of media. The show recently won five of the coveted "Vloggie" awards -- best entertainment, best web site design, best collaboration and two awards for special effects.

Galacticast uses geeky touchstones -- Dr. Who, Futurama, the aforementioned ensign Crusher -- to deliver a mix of social satire and comic entertainment. Think Bollywood, if Bollywood was entirely peopled by phaser-wielding Canadians.^[2]

Galacticast is written and produced in Casey and Rudy's living room in Montreal and gets 20,000 page views per week. The show first launched in May of this year. After their success at the Vloggies, McKinnon and Jahchan decided to dedicate themselves to the show full-time.

"It's really the only way to go," Casey told me, explaining their choice to quit their day jobs (Casey worked for a Japanese diplomat -- sounds shady). We were chatting in the offices of blip.tv, the New York startup that helps videobloggers, including Galacticast, syndicate their shows. "We're trying to connect sci-fi to the mainstream."

Unlike Ze Frank and Ask a Ninja -- two popular vlogs that also received awards -- Galacticast doesn't have a set format. Past shows have included everything from news reports to short skits to music videos.

For now, Casey hopes advertising will play a large role in supporting the show. "We want to do something completely unique," she said, adding that mainstream brands are starting to affiliate themselves with hip brands online. Casey thinks there are several potential business models, but is keeping her options open.

"These brands are always looking to advertise in some new way online, and we can be a part of that," she said. "We already have a dedicated audience, and that's important to them. But everything's changing so fast. You can't have a business plan that just says 'we're gonna do this one thing and only this.' You have to be open to possibilities."

One possibility, she says, is to create branded merchandising, much like Ze Frank does with his rubber duckies. Another possibility: Brand-sponsored episodes.

Casey says they've been busy forging relationships with other videobloggers and syndication portals like blip.tv and DivX Stage6. Echoing her friend Amanda Congdon, Casey said it's important to be a part of as many communities as possible.

Like other successful vloggers, Casey says Galacticast has to weigh the benefits and detriments of going mainstream. She's not ruling out an eventual move to mainstream media, but for now she's most interested in building the show's viewership and succeeding on her own terms.

A recent show has the couple trying to ignore a nine-foot tall obelisk, fashioned after the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that has taken up residence in their apartment. "What do we do," Casey asks, as the obelisk looms over their bed.

Rudy: "Ignore it. Once it believes we don't want any of its high-falutin' enlightened evolution, it should just go away."

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[1] Sci-Fi "is an extrapolated version of the present. If you're at war, or you find out the government is spying on you, or if you feel your civil rights are being abrogated, it can provoke you as a writer. Science fiction is never about paradise found. It stems from trouble in our own world. The best kind of storytelling is when writers turn a mirror on ourselves, and that mirror shows us a lot of conflict." -- Marc Abraham, producer of Children of Men.

[2] What's up with Canada and sci-fi? Of the top of my head, I count Galacticast, Cory Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood as passport-wielding citizens of the northern country.

Motionbox: Saving the Web, One Boring Vacation Video at a Time

Of the three plus hours of video I shot during my last beach vacation, there was exactly one moment -- hidden somewhere between the requisite shots of an early morning shoreline and a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit -- that I want to watch again: My friend Reid McDaniel, John Deere cap turned backwards, screaming the lyrics to "Sweet Child of Mine" into a conch shell. Truly, a thing to be amazed by.

Unfortunately, I've long since consigned the disk that holds that performance to a shoebox. Because no matter how much I want to share it, Reid's Axl-worthy opus is surrounded, literally, by hours of superfluous footage. His three minute karaoke bit would be an instant YouTube classic. But the ten minutes of sand and wind preceding it? Not so much.

This is precisely the problem that a small, 25-person video-sharing company called Motionbox wants to help you solve.

"The video sites are filled with very long, very boring clips that might only have one interesting part in them," said Motionbox co-founder CEO Chris O'Brien from his 10th floor office in Manhattan's financial district. "You're not going to watch it all, and neither is anybody else."

Since the company's public launch last July, Motionbox has been helping users not only upload their videos, but also trim them and share the relevant segments with friends, family and the Web.

Part of this technology is "deep tagging," or applying labels to specific segments or chapters of a video. Once a video has been deep tagged, any user can navigate directly to those segments of the video^[1], skipping the chaff to get to the wheat as it were.

Or, if a user prefers, they can simply drag a selection box across a video's segments (see picture, left) and crop the video down. Either way, the user can then share or embed the full clip, or just share and embed the segment they like.

As Motionbox co-founder and CMO Douglas Warshaw^[2] tells it, "the container is absolutely irrelevant to you. You want to get to the good stuff, and the good stuff is defined by what you want to watch, it's not an aesthetic or normative value."

This approach to online video solves a problem that's familiar to anyone who's ventured into the dark continent beyond YouTube's "most viewed" category. The videos populating that "long tail" of content tend to depart from the edited, narrative style that makes longer professional videos (Daily Show clips, news reports) and snack-sized amateur videos (crazy dogs, morons) successful. Most of the time, unedited videos are just plain boring.

Beyond deep tagging and cropping, Motionbox's video player can also help users make better decisions about what to watch.

The thumbnail version of the player (see photo, right) lets you preview a clip by "scrubbing" its timeline, potentially saving you the effort of actually watching the video to see if it's good.

These features apply the principles of the attention economy, in which Web users parcel out their precious time in the form of clicks, page views and time spent.^[3]

(In the attention economy, the quality of your video watching experience is indirectly proportional to how difficult it is to watch the clip. This is one reason YouTube has been so successful -- videos are quick to load and there are no advertisements -- and also why pre-roll advertising tends to alienate users.)

On the surface, Motionbox's approach to video seems similar to the approach taken by editing site Jumpcut or Eyespot. All three sites are betting that, as consumers become savvy with online video tools, they'll move from sharing and commenting to splicing and dicing.

"But people who are trying to recreate the iMovie experience online are completely going down a rabbit hole," said Warshaw. According to him, Motionbox is aiming at a much broader audience that simply wants to see and share what's relevant to them.

Warshaw is hoping that Motionbox's simple tools will appeal to lay users who don't want power-editing features. "Some of these things, you have to take a class to figure out. I don't want to take that class," he said.

As Motionbox's traffic stats suggest, the site is still well below the average user's radar. But the company isn't relying on user-edited video alone. Currently Motionbox supports video-sharing for NBC's affiliate stations. Users can upload video through, say, NBC Channel 5 in Chicago and can tag and view that video once it's approved by the station's staff. The video is also automatically added to Motionbox's servers, so the user gets the immediate benefit of interacting with the video at motionbox.com as well.

Motionbox execs are mum about future partnership specifics, but hint that they'll have something to announce in the next 60 to 90 days.

Among the types of partners they're looking at: Media companies and music labels, businesses that need to provide a place for fans to legally -- and easily -- upload videos of concerts and other public appearances. The label would provide the content, while Motionbox provides the video-sharing and editing technology, plus an online community.

"You're a media company," Warshaw said. "But I'm a mosh pit."

[1] Google Video also offers the ability to jump to a precise moment in a video. But Google's solution requires the user to type a timestamp into the video's URL. An engineer's solution to a lay user's problem.

[2] Warshaw looks like a more handsome John Turturro.

[3] Motionbox's technology potentially also addresses the problem of video findability. Whereas searching for text on the Web is relatively easy, a successful search for video requires that the video be tagged and described appropriately. I discussed findability briefly in this post.
 

Blip.tv: Farm Team for the New, New Hollywood

Anyone who followed YouTube phenom lonelygirl15 as she skyrocketed to fame, or watched as self-made stars like Brookers or the Lonely Island trio found mainstream outlets for their work, understands that Hollywood has begun to use online video sites as a new kind of talent pool. These days, talent is less likely to be found at an open audition in Los Angeles than, say, performing karaoke in their bedroom in Worcester, MA.

It's a phenomenon that New York startup blip.tv is hoping to take advantage of.

"It's definitely clear to me that the Hollywood world is beginning to see sites like blip.tv as the farm teams of talent," said blip.tv COO Dina Kaplan from her 3rd-floor loft office in Manhattan's Chinatown.

While some sites try to capitalize on the online video boom by aggregating as much content as possible -- copyrighted or otherwise -- blip.tv is taking a more personal approach. The real value, according to Kaplan, is in the videobloggers themselves.

Like YouTube, Blip.tv is a combination destination and syndication portal that helps videobloggers publish their work both on blip.tv and on other sites. Unlike YouTube though, blip.tv isn't interested in promoting music videos, network television shows, or other previously published and copyrighted work.

"We try very hard to promote a culture of sharing original content," said CEO Mike Hudack. "Don't get me wrong, there's a market for piracy, but we're very careful to steer our users away from that. We just don't need it...In some ways it does put you at a disadvantage, but there's also something very attractive about the higher quality you'll find."

Blip.tv isn't hurting for quality shows. Perhaps the most famous videoblogger using the site is Amanda Congdon, who approached Blip.tv before her Amanda Across America tour.
Blip.tv is also a second home to shows like Goodnight Burbank, Something to be Desired, and the war videoblog Alive in Baghdad.

Blip.tv works like you'd expect it would, with some additional features. Videobloggers upload their work to the site and create a subdomain. The blogger can then choose to syndicate his or her videos to blogs or other sites. Starting tomorrow, users will be able to cross-post their work directly to MySpace. The new video will then be automatically announced in the bloggers' friends' MySpace bulletin space.

The MySpace feature is just one of several new features that Blip.tv will be rolling out on Saturday. Perhaps the biggest change will be the site's new homepage, which will attempt to provide an experience more akin to a television network's site.

Hudack said they're making the homepage change out of consideration for their role as editorial gatekeepers, while trying to retain the site community's independent attitude. "We're sort of removing the heavy hand of the studios," he said.

Saturday will also mark the introduction of several new advertising models on the site.  Hudack and Kaplan said that new advertising deals will allow bloggers to choose between different types of advertising, from pre-roll to post-roll to contextual banner ads that appear alongside the videos.

They noted that on blip.tv, whether to apply advertising to a video is at the blogger's discretion.

So far, Blip.tv's traffic stats -- about 1 million page views per month according to comScore -- seem to indicate the site is still struggling to attract users. Hudack and Kaplan say, however, it's not their intent to be a destination site.

Blip.tv has also recently partnered with video mashup site Eyespot (which also recently added new features), and the company provides the underlying technology for CNN's user-generated video site, CNN Exchange.

By positioning themselves as a conduit for new voices, Blip.tv hopes to become something of a talent powerbroker in the online video age.

"The talent, they're not just going to jump at the opportunity to be on TV anymore," said Kaplan.

"I mean, I'm not saying they're going to turn down millions of dollars, but it'll take a lot more to make them jump from a medium that lets them play by their own rules."

Five Questions For: Voice-cum-Video Evangelist Jeff Pulver

Here at Reel Pop we spend entirely too much time alone. That's probably your fault, since you don't call often enough. But since we can't waste our day pining beside our RAZR, sometimes we do the dialing ourselves. Welcome to Reel Pop's every-so-often interview series, Five Questions For.

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This week we chatted with Jeff Pulver, an entreprenuer who predicted, over a decade ago, the rise of the VOIP industry (voice over Internet Protocol). He founded what would become Vonage, a broadband telephone service provider, then left the company before it floundered on its IPO.

Why are we talking to Jeff? Because these days Jeff makes his living proselytizing for online video. His popular VON conference concluded its 10th annual show last week in Boston, and the hottest topics were video quality and regulation of the online video marketplace. (Check out Rocketboom's video coverage.) The take home message: The government tried to regulate the VOIP industry ten years ago, so be prepared for the same with online video.

I caught up with Jeff the other day, and the edited transcript of our talk is below.

So at VON you said the next Rupert Murdoch wouldn't be a Rupert Murdoch at all.
I have a theory which comes down to digital popcorn. Who gets to sell the popcorn, who makes money on the concessions? The person who figures out how to interconnect the community and the advertisers, to create commerce, gets to be in a very interesting spot. Then you can have things like multiple ads per ad slot, and those ads will speak to different parts of the audience, all based on matching the demographics of the people watching. It's that opportunity. You don't need to be News Corp. to figure that out.

But aren't sites like YouTube and Revver doing just that?
There's a fundamental problem between all content created in the past and digital rights today. Until people sit down and try to understand the future of how content will be seen by current users, it doesn't makes sense to go down this road. There's more breakage of copyright laws on YouTube than anywhere else. If Hollywood wanted to they could take down YouTube tomorrow.

Here we go again, techies vs. media companies. What do these two industries fundamentally misunderstand about each other?
The tech guys don't understand what makes a hit in Hollywood because ultimately it's the people who make it happen, not the technology. The Hollywood and studios guys don't understand we're moving to a time where most people who are a fan of a show will subscribe directly to the show and it will be delivered to them in the background.

But before we get to that nirvana, you guys talked at the conference about the impending regulation of video.
Now that the internet is good enough to replace TV, watch out. [FCC Commissioner Tate] Debbie spoke specifically about protecting kids. They want to assert control in an area they never have before. That's certainly concerning me. What people are failing to understand is that it's true the Internet is a replacement or substitute, but that doesn't mean we should scare away innovation.

What form will that regulation take?
The issue is really what is content? Is this material that's gonna be rated NC-17, or rated R? Is it going to have adequate warnings? What happens historically is when you're  disrupting a marketplace, the legacy companies will look for old rules to regulate it. They'll go to their lobbyists to find some old arcane law to stop or slow down innovation. It's the fear of this that takes away the dollars.