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Archive for July, 2006

From my gmail inbox

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

It’s super depressing to be unemployed and looking for an assistant position in Hollywood…

Mail Delivery Subsystem
to me More options 7:57 pm (0 minutes ago)
I was unable to deliver to <hr@bellrockmedia.com> because the user is over their quota.

Below is a copy of the original message.

–

Received-SPF: pass (mx00.csee.siteprotect.com: domain of gmail.com designates 64.23….

I went to a job interview today and the first thing she said me was “do you have supplemental income? We are looking for somebody with parents or…something else?” I kid you not they wanted to pay $100 dollars a week.

Posted in survival, glitterfish.com, industry | 1 Comment »

Withoutabox adds Video Uploads

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Withoutabox gets even more functional. From their press release:

Withoutabox proudly announces its new VIDEO UPLOAD SERVICE to host all your Trailers and Clips online - plus an exciting new relationship with Google Video to supercharge your visibility at no cost to you. Add a splash of video to your Online Press Kit and Audience pages today, with two flexible levels of service, FREE or PAID.

Don’t limit yourself to just Trailers and Clips of your film, either! Get creative and add content to your Audience pages that will bring them alive - like interviews, on-set footage, festival snippits, EPKs, etc. The choice is yours, and the promotional possibilities end only with your imagination.

Sounds pretty slick. If you opt for the pay service your videos are high quality and hosted by WAB and also can be private (meaning only available to potential distributors and such).

Posted in industry | No Comments »

Monetizing Internet Video: Interview with Lulu TV

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Currently eConsultant lists 44 different internet video sharing sites. Like the competition over downloadable music, social networking, and photo sharing before it, web video is the latest exploitation of web 2.0 technology that has both start ups and established web companies scrambling for marketshare.

Market leader, Youtube.com, is clearly winning the battle but that doesn’t mean they’re going to win the war. Something nobody has figured out yet but that lots of people see potential for, is the monetization of your short films, vlogs, and stupid web clips. A couple of different companies not only want you to upload, share, and watch web video but they also want to pay you for it.

That’s a very exciting thing for short filmmakers. Lulu TV is one of those companies vying to become your internet video destination of choice by paying you for your videos.

Lulu TV works like this: for $14.95 a month a user can set a “Shareholder” account with 80% of that fee going into a cash pool. At the end of the month, all shareholders share in the pool based upon the popularity of their video. The minimum pool this month is guaranteed to be at least $5000.

One thing Lulu has going for it is its Chief Executive, Bob Young. Bob is the founder of the open source software company Red Hat and Lulu.com, a print-on-demand bookstore that pays authors 80% of the royalties after a small binding and per-page fee. Bob wanted to create a system for authors to self publish their books. Lulu TV is doing the same thing for video makers.

You don’t have to be a Shareholder to watch or upload videos. You can use the site completely free but your not included in the pool and won’t make any money if your video happens to become stunningly popular. Other video sites are also experimenting with models that pay artists. For instance, Revver.com puts 1 frame ads at the end of each video sharing 50% of the revenue with the artist.

Lulu TV’s James Mcdermott was nice enough to answer some questions for Glitterfish about the company:

Right now the pot is only $5000 dollars. That might be enticing to a dorm room vlogger but probably doesn’t mean much to a serious filmmaker. How do you see that pot growing in the future? Subscriptions? Ads?

5035.88 and growing:) We are trying to stay away from ads, but each subscription raises the pot, and as it stands right now two guys are gonna get the lions share of the thing. So think about this, what if there were 5000 users… thats 59750+5000. How about if we had 100000 users… then the pot is 1,195,000 dollars…per month… Lets just take a youtube example and say that your video is number 1, and ends up owning 10% of the overall traffic. Thats enough to buy a nice Ferrari, or a fleet of Chevys. This is the first part of it. We have some great ways to increase the cash pool with other stuff as well, this is just step one.

So many viral videos are re-mixes or in some way use copyrighted material. Does it matter if I have rights to use the music in my video? Am I going to get sued if I start making money?

Tricky question. It matters in the sense that you are agreeing when you upload that you have rights to your video, and that you are agreeing to it being licensed in a CC-NC-ND license. So people can share it all over and make you famous, but they cant profit from it, and they cant pull your creds. Technically we aren’t paying for the content, we are paying for the participation you bring to the site.

How do you ensure that the user who uploaded a video is really the person who made it?

We cant. Though obvious infringements will be purged, and any cease and desists that do not fit the fair use standards will be honored. We actually don’t want episodes of family guy (unless fox posted them), we want original stuff… Its so easy to make stuff… check out catassterpiece theatre… I threw it together to mess with timelines in flash and it took all of 2 hours. Think of what someone that actually knew what they were doing and had a bit of free time could do. Perhaps something more like our Redneck Jedi clip…. which is the awesome.

Can I do anything to get my video on the main page?

Yep, make it not suck:) We like stuff that is funny, off the wall, in your face, newsworthy (see the net neutrality stuff), and avoid porn (at least dont expect to ever see it on the public areas of the site…) and hardcore violence… we dont want to see you cut off an appendage… unless its really really really really funny… see Darwin awards. Even then animations would be preferred to the real thing.

This brings up a great point though. While everyone else is slapping whatever the most recent vomit that arrived on their harddrives on their homepage, ours is actually sectioned off. The homepage is one level… the top… the cream of the crop… the … well you get the idea. Then theres tags, and related posts, categories, and then plain old user categories drops you yet again. So anything you browse to… (notice we dont do search here) will quickly bring you to something worth watching… or should.

Also rare hardware, or good food might help… yeah bribes:)

Do videos embedded in pages off Lulu TV count as views? I’m sure you are aware of revver.com’s affiliate program where people that blog, email, or otherwise share videos can also make money. Does Lulu TV have any plans for something like this?

We have a special sauce when it comes to these videos. The short answer is that g.q. public doesn’t ever know that its in the pool unless they are really overly interested in figuring it out… so … we encourage sharing and embedding our videos in your blog and anywhere else, and it will help the creator if it increases the participation in their video. We don’t pay anyone to stick the video on their site, but we make it incredibly simple. From embeds, to ipod and psp feeds. Getting the videos out to the rest of the world in the most pain free experience is our goal. Revver is all about monetizing advertising… which is also probably a good model, we just find more value in providing direct links back for the author and trying to make them famous.

——————–

Make me famous? Make me money? Those sound like good goals for a company catering to short filmmakers. Inevitably and very soon most of those 44+ web video companies will fold or consolidate into just a few different services. Lulu TV has a challenge ahead of it in convincing filmmakers to pay to be in the pool. Nevertheless, what is exciting to me is the potential for a TV like royalty payment model based on ratings. When that happens and people are making money, sooner than you think Fox is going to start putting episodes of Family guy on services like Lulu TV.

Finally, getty up, it’s your link roundup:

DVGuru reviews 10 different web video services.
Napsterization shares some fascinating web video statistics including a breakdown of popular genres.
NYTimes covers Lulu TV.
Other monetized web video services: Revver.com, Eefoof, Panjea

Posted in web video | 4 Comments »

Glitterfish moves to Korea Town, Loses Internet Access

Monday, July 3rd, 2006

If you’ve noticed a slow down in posting it isn’t because I’ve hit the 1-month of blogging mark and am now giving up. No! It’s because my friends kicked me off their couches and out of their apartments and now I have to pay for my own Internet!

Actually my friends are awesome and would never kick me out but I did find my own place and haven’t hooked up the Internet. Unemployment really gives you time to feed addictions and I’ve gotten dependent on refreshing the youtube top ten RSS feed all day long looking for videos to post on Glitterfish. Maybe they can hook the Internet up directly into my forearm and then I’ll be steady state.

In any case expect Remix Watch and Video Watch to be back shortly. Also expect LA Watch to come back as Korea Town Watch: Where East meets Western.

Also here’s a bonus link. My good friend Nicole has started blogging and that is a very exciting thing for the hipster homemaker community. Check out CuriousJayne.com and then go buy a purse.

Posted in glitterfish.com | No Comments »

Archive for July, 2006

From my gmail inbox

Withoutabox adds Video Uploads

Monetizing Internet Video: Interview with Lulu TV

Glitterfish moves to Korea Town, Loses Internet Access

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