I Have To Agree, You Said it well…

French TV production firm 2T Productions (well, the site still under construction as of today 05/25/07) is to launch kazados.tv its first television channel next week. As the iCTO, I have had the chance to participate to the adventure for…

I think this model can be easily replicated, and there isn’t much keeping the users from flocking to another site with similar features. The similarities between each of these sites proves this point. On the other hand, I believe that niche video sites will win out in the long run over YouTube and its clones.

People are getting tired of “shock value” clips of things exploding, and copyrighted clips will eventually be hosted by the TV companies themselves. YouTube has already considered this, and it shows in their “Sketchies” contest. They’re looking for well-produced content. Consistently well-produced content. Not only do the contest winners get a prize, but they also will be destined to continue uploading content on YouTube, where they already have a fanbase. Those types of videos set up future YouTube stars for the coveted LonelyGirl15 status.

I’m surprised this transition from junk to semi-professional content is coming as a shock to so many people. Did we all think stuff like numa numa would keep us entertained forever?

These guys understand this. I’m really curious to see where this goes.

Next New Networksは「マイクロテレビジョンネットワーク」という荘大な計画を持ったオンラインメディア会社だ。
同社はニューヨークを拠点に、1月にSpark Capitalから$8M（800万ドル）を調達….

Jughead hits it on the nail: you need to think about bringing people back to you.

They get that.

I think the opportunity for NNN is to hopefully capture lightning in a bottle like “Ask a Ninja”, “Tiki Bar TV” or “RocketBoom”. Channel Federator is solid and a couple of others look promising, but…..who knows? There are hundreds if not thousands of more self produced, semi-professional programs undoubtably in production right now. As was mentioned earlier, the tools for production are almost nothing and distribution is a non issue. The real key is building the audience and thus creating the brand. That is getting more difficult as deep pocket traditional media like radio, TV and film studios rush into the space. We are entering into an epic battle of small, medium and large scale content producers and the stakes are frickin’ humungous.

As of right now, if you’re a podcast producer, you have to be on iTunes and if you’re doing video, YouTube as well. But only by being a player in your niche will you ever be noticed in the exploding mass of content. But while these services are great, you still need to stand out or at least be filtered to a micro/niche site. You can either get on iTunes and hope you land on their front podcast page or conversely, try and become a big fish in a little pond in a micro-site like IndiaPodcasts.com

Also, I believe that as time passes, it is going to become more important to find ways to draw your audience back to your landing page and on to your website. This is where advertisers feel more comfortable with traditional models of CPM, etc. It also provides a venue to offer other products and services such as e-commerce in a secure environment where profits can be easily extracted by the producer without having to share revenue.

A podcast landing page is also the platform to offer blogs, widgets and other perks to strenthen the brand and truly engage in “social networking” that will provide critical audience retention. If your a producer, you must find as many ways to monetize or perish.

These cats are masters of building brands.

Seriously look at their resumes. Brands transcend the “tools” that are needed to distribute them, and thus they become a real asset that the company can continue to find value for into the future. Conversely the code we’re writing today is worthless tomorrow. Tool services have a different life cycle plan, and that is what we’re used to seeing posted to Techcrunch….. Cool Tool sites.

What makes this important and relevant is that these brands are being packaged for Internet consumption. Targeting micro-communities, they are building (what I would argue) are SIGNIFICANTLY higher value viewers than generic tool sites. Brilliant strategy, build a super high value audience by being platform agnostic and just ride the work off all the tool sites out there.

You kind of side step the infrastructure problem by ’super distributing’ it. However by going this route do you have the metrics & monetization machinations in place to really know how well the ’super distribution’ is working for a piece of content?

Will you guys apply this same ‘open-ness’ to advertisement sales?

Joost is very stern on human involvement in the sales process which is partly why I think big media has embraced them so readily.

It seems like there is a lot of life hacking and social engineering going on at NNN, which I think is the business R&D that someone needs to make a concerted effort in. So hats off to you on that. I look forward to learning more.

It raises an interesting point that from a business stand point there needs to be as much ‘Business R&D’ in this new media world as hard technical development.

It’s pretty exciting.

Duncan, at Techcrunch, points to Next New Network a “new kind of media company, creating micro-television networks over the internet for targeted communities, bringing together elements of tv programming and internet philosophy to allow viewers t…

We also have a different business model than Joost, which has raised a bit more money than we have, as people have pointed out. Joost is a platform with content from lots of partners, aiming to compete with other platforms and destinations; we cooperate with platforms and offer our programming everywhere the audience wants it to be — which could include places like Joost, and right now, we’re already on YouTube, Veoh, iTunes, and almost anywhere else that can aggregate an RSS feed. We’re trying to figure out how you develop programming and build relationships with audiences and advertisers in a super-distribution world, where the audience members are the ultimate programmers, distributors, and marketers of what we offer.

Take a look at joost’s content some of that content is from MTV and maybe a few others which is under Viacom. So once again there is a pattern of big name corps taking there positions in the game of keeping-up with the changing technology and directions that the future might have on the internet.

Now as for some of your business ideas… what plans do you have for the micro-networks to compensate as far as being assets of your partnership?
Its understandable that not just any deal like this would be worthy of some type of compensation but because you’re dealing with what I believe to be a higher quality community in relations to the type of content the quality of content and the time spent creating it. Its of higher caliber than that of majority of the users over at say…..youtube….when you compare the two together you have to take notice to that marginal gap you two have. but my question is :How do you guys plan to supplement the micro-networks?

I know you guys probably say to yourselves hey. There has been a lot of success around the net without having to compensate the original content providers. But if you ask me, if you really want to head in the right direction is to offer some type of monetary compensation to “quality content providers” in this since you promote whats at the core of making any business model as successful as it could possibly be instead of being just a “moderate success”

Mike sabat: have you taken a look at these guys backgrounds. If you havent you might want to give that a look, it might help as to how they each may play a roll. To me it looks as though they are marrying of internet and TV and what better way to do this than with having guys of strong backgrounds in different areas of TV and internet form a partnership

hopefully one of you guys have that uncommon factor that may not be present to the other 5 guys. :insight
hope you got that…in most cases its what determines a success or failure.
..hehe I wonder if there is a business for consulting companys in these types of decisions.

Plus Mike, if you havent notice everyone is tossing money to any website that can harvest a growing user community. So they’ll have that option which I doubt they’ll sell off their community because they already know what to do when it comes to marketing. But what Im thinking these guys are gonna do is hold on to this “piece of rock” that they believe to be the future of internet and tv so that they have a stake. Its kinda like saying they’ll be to the internet what Viacom is to TV Networks.(a major Player in the game).

8million was a fairly small amount to fund something that could be as big as nnn and veoh is planning it to be.Im still trying to figure that one out too.

Joost is nothing like Nickelodeon or MTV.

5 founders also has to be a problem. Sure, all of their experience can only help, the more the better, but in reality that is tough to execute.

As for some of Patricia and Sean’s questions — the only reasons JETSET wasn’t in the Veoh release were because JETSET is not technically one of our networks, but a show we’ve licensed to build out a future network with, which we’re working on now, and that JETSET was already available on Veoh as its own channel, as Steve and Zadi believed like we do they should be in as many places as possible. I agree that there’s lots of opportunity for anyone in this space, and the people who focus on their audiences will do well. It’s how we started — Channel Frederator and VOD Cars were some of the very first video podcasts, launched without any funding or fanfare for personal reasons, and have been building their audiences for coming up on two years. We won’t be in every niche — it’s not possible — and we’re not looking to dominate the space; we think those days are over. But we do hope to make it easier for our networks to succeed by allowing them to focus on serving their audiences, and consolidating efforts where it makes sense on things like technology platforms, advertising, and distribution.