Fora.tv, which wants to become the C-SPAN of the Web, closed a $2 million seed round from Adobe Ventures and Will Hearst. The site has about 1,500 hours of public speeches from people like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and neurologist and New Yorker contributor Oliver Sacks. It gets its videos through partnerships with organizations like the Aspen Institute, the Commonwealth Club, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Long Now Foundation, and, yes, C-SPAN. In fact, founder and CEO Brian Gruber once worked at C-Span as its chief marketer. He prefers calling Fora.tv the “thinking man’s YouTube,” but admits the comparison to C-Span is apt in that Fora.TV is “about deep unfiltered, unmediated content.” But Fora.tv covers more than just politics. It also contains speeches from the leading lights of science, business, technology, and culture. If you are into that sort of thing.
Even if you are, sitting through an hour-long speech on the Web is hard for anyone. That is why Fora.tv breaks up each video into 3-minute chapters and indexes them so that busy brainiacs can find just the clip they are looking for and move on. Each video is transcribed overseas for easy indexing and searching. As Gruber puts it: “We want to crack the code of how do you take intelligent video content and give it to the modern viewer who has some form of ADD.” His business model is selling sponsorships for specific channels, which start at $100,000 for the entire year. Pfizer is one current sponsor. Gruber is selling access to a hard-to-reach audience, not to a lot of viewers (he says the site attracts only 250,000 unique visitors a month).
Even so, $2 million is peanuts when it comes to building a Web video destination, even if it is a niche site. Gruber plans to raise another $5 million in an A round within 90 days.
And more money goes into an intangible, useless industry. Really now.
Suckers one and all.
hmmm
I wonder what patty is doing nowadays ….
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
@Omar: this is much less useless than a lot of other sites that come around. It might not appeal to you, but it is possible (IMHO) that there is a large untapped audience for web video out there: the people not interested in fun, but in serious thoughts.
Even if there is no such audience I have to applaud Fora.tv’s creators for the idea. Execution seems OK on first glance as well.
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http://viibee.com, online dating is fun again
great layout / UI
I guess that going for a niche makes a nice change from the likes of Joost, Jalipo, Babelgum, etc who all have pretty much exactly the same content and are struggling for a USP.
I hardly find any interesting news that attract a specific type of readers especially the youngsters.
This is a big concept, with a big audience.
Content like this is an excellent catalyst for building active communities and conversations. Ideas like to be shared, and their proponents heard.
Obviously their tagline “The world is thinking” is inspired by ted.com “Ideas worth sharing”.
$2 million dollars is a lot of money
As the owner of the first dotTV domain ( http://Free.TV ) , I am excited that they are taking off.
Unfortunately, the dot Com Bomb killed off our business plan, although the original site is still up. What people do not realize is that Free.TV is an OpenDomain, and anyone can use it for FREE!
If you have a working plan, feel free to contact me and I can let you use the domain.
The world is not thinking only, as fora.tv claimed, since people are watching for more and more hours per day. The internet TV industry will make the world watching more than thinking. By a system with one streaming server and 10Mbps as the uploading bandwidth, one could has his own global TV system, with the quality much better than CDN system applied by CNN/BBC/… There are many commercial system running by this way, try
http://www.mediazone.com, http://www.Euchannels.net or http://www.TVkoo.com, which seems to be verified to be green software.
I’m happy to learn that Fora.tv is getting some more backing. Fora is a refreshingly departure from the burgeoning plethora of cortically-challenged content.