A new video site featuring big thinkers from the worlds of politics, academia, science, and business launched today in beta. Called BigThink, it counts Peter Thiel and former Harvard president Larry Summers as investors. It raised an angel round in the low seven figures from South African VC (and lead investor) David Frankel, who invested personally, as well as Summers, Thiel, entrepreneur Tom Scott of Nantucket Nectars and Plum TV, and TV producer Gary David Goldberg (Spin City and Family Ties).
The site is set up to as a place to find intellectual video snacks. Typically, each video shows a public intellectual or pundit against a stark white background answering a single pointed question in three to five minutes. Big Think launched with 2,000 clips from 85 “guests”, including Senator John McCain on the two-party system, psychologist Steven Pinker on human nature, and economist Paul Krugman on whether future generations will hate us. Summers and Thiel have their own videos (hey, they paid for the site). Even Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Engadget’s Peter Rojas have videos. (I’ve embedded Uncle Walt’s below, in which he debunks the notion that the Internet is a game-changer in politics).
Even with 2,000 clips, the site can feel spare right now. But it should fill out fairly quickly. Founder Peter Hopkins tells me that he has another 100 hours of video already captured that needs to be edited, and the startup will soon commence a daily interview schedule. The quality of the videos is generally good, although the lighting makes some people like Mossberg and Richard Branson look pink. And some public intellectuals just should not be on camera no matter how smart they are. The site’s design does a good job of avoiding clutter, but the navigation needs work. It is hard to find all the videos from a particular person, for example.
The whole site is designed to spark intellectual debate. Each video is designed to convey one important thought, and the audience can rate each video, vote on whether they agree or disagree, add their own comments, or suggest new ideas they would like to see discussed. “Going forward,,” says Hopkins, “we will be soliciting questions from the audience for invited participants and will be asking selected guests to respond to the feedback they receive from users.” Audience members can submit questions in writing, in video form, or as audio slide shows. The quality of this back-and-forth debate is what will make or break the site. Either people will find the debate stimulating and keep coming back, or they won’t.
BigThink is competing for the same audience segment as Fora.TV (see our earlier post), which gathers a lot more video of public intellectuals, politicians, and business celebrities from conferences and other public-speaking venues and presents them in three-minute clips on its Website. Hopkins sees his effort more as YouTube meets Fora.TV. He says via e-mail:
I’m a fan of Fora and think they have a good approach to one aspect of making more high quality content available online. They saw the potential of capturing content as it’s made and making it available in that raw form. This gives them an incredible ability to scale their offerings. On the produced content front, we compete by offering content produced specifically for the 8-inch viewing experience. But, we don’t intend to match the scale of their produced offerings any time soon.
Where we differ and hope to distinguish ourselves is in the ability of the user to contribute actively and in the same manner as our invited participants. Whereas Fora is about delivering lots of high-quality content in one direction, Big Think is about using some high quality content to begin an exchange of ideas in two directions.
Fora has some interactivity built in as well in the form of forum discussions for each video. I think the real difference is that Fora’s content tends to be culled from longer speeches, whereas BigThink starts with the three-minute clip as its primary unit of production and consumption. One question is whether that is enough, or whether BigThink can come up a way to string its video microchunks together into long-form videos when warranted. That might not matter on the Web, but if BigThink ever wants to package its best videos for other formats such as DVDs or regular TV, it should figure out a way to do that now. Just a suggestion.
A bigger question is the ever-present YouTube factor and whether we even need a niche site for “smart” videos. Yes, you can find smart videos on YouTube, although they tend to have a different style. What would you rather see, this British professor blather on about the history of America or this “Drunk History” of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (embedded below) that is currently a top video on YouTube? That’s what I thought.
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Sounds a bit like Ted.com too.
So they reinvented youtube channels? This sounds more like a 20% project that could have rode on the youtube infrastructure and support.
Yet another video site?
I can’t take it anymore. The future is still in LIVE tv!
http://rsslivetv.com
I think it is great that we can finally start learning from web video, somebody should bring back Bill Nye the Science Guy!
A place to meet the pontificators…
This comic immediately comes to mind:
http://xkcd.com/202/
Hopefully BigThink can overcome the “YouTube effect” here.
Drunk History was actually pleasantly entertaining.
Big Think is probably a good idea, but my problem with it is that it assumes “celebrities” have smarter things to say, and us little people are regulated to the smallish comment area.
To the good folks behind “Big Think” — think egalitarianism, you know, like those hippies at YouTube.
@8 - well said.
Down with that i-worry tower, clown
@8: I agree, the internet is what it is because it limits or eliminates barriers for expression.
Regarding the interface:
I think this is a clean, intuitive design and the lack of clutter allows the viewer to actually think clearly about what the speaker has to say. If this site does not limit publishers to celebrities it could be a big thing.
To the comment of whether there is room left for other players besides YouTube:
My Answer is “yes”, youtube is for amateur entertainment not philosophical thinking as with BigThink. I think they could uses blogging and social bookmarking technology to build a screening process. Let the users decide what makes it to center stage.
“We choose experts on the basis of one simple criterion: they are among the best of the best at what they do. Of course, that’s not so clear-cut, so we look to a range of factors, including a person’s body of published work, peer recommendations, professional honors, and popular interest. Fame is by no means a pre-requisite to be an Expert, however. If you think you qualify, we invite you to apply to be one of our experts and share your knowledge with the world.
Suggestions? Email your ideas for experts or your own credentials (resume, publications, references, description of expertise) to experts@bigthink.com”
- BigThink.com
Spent about an hour on the site, and it’s overwhelmingly underwhelming. What many of the experts have to say isn’t even that deep. What a rip off…
Everyone wants to recreate the next TED. I was suitably interested in the site till I clicked on Science & Technology and there was Deepak Chopra (sadly we share the same first name) listed as an “expert” on aging. There goes the sites credibility. Sorry, I will get my expertise elsewhere.
The more interesting story, the one I would have liked to have seen here or in the NYT piece, is the trend story. BigThink is an example of a company carving out a quality-content business in a post-YouTube, post-Digg world. Whether or not BigThink’s model is the right one, or if they’ll execute, remains to be seen. But they’re doing something interesting, and I can’t help but applaud the effort.
More here: http://brijit.wordpress.com/20.....ger-trend/
Congratulations on the launch and good luck to Peter Hopkins and his crew.
Jeremy Brosowsky
Founder and CEO, Brijit
Prediction: DOA
think big crashed my Mac - it’s obviously not used to ‘thinking’ much… there’s a Mac/PC ad in there somewhere.
I think there is a big opportunity to create communities that have a “center of gravity” different than YouTube’s. For instance, compare the average stream of comments on Flickr to that of YouTube and you’ll see that the communities are pretty different there. It’s possible that BigThink could be a place where conversation takes place that is of a different caliber than that of other online video sites. If that happens, this has a chance to be successful.
Great to see companies trying to raise the bar of expectations and knowledge of society instead of going for the least common denominator.
here’s a Facebook group promoting Big Think that I started if interested in joining:
http://cmu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8395958427
best regards,
-Ivan
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For as much as I like intellectual anything, the drunken video is pure genius.
Erick, please check out my blog posting for a critique of BigThink’s use of “experts.” I am very hopeful that the site will evolve to include perspectives from non-elite experts (rather than just pundits, captains of industry, Big Names, and politicians) because, if it does, it could be a powerful agent of change.
P.S. You and I both selected the drunk history video for our comparisons!
If you like Big Think, you should check out another newly launched site, TheFinalClub.org.
Although lacking video content of famous academics, TheFinalClub.org has a much more thorough engagement with intellectual ideas. The site includes comprehensive blogs of Harvard courses, including Social Thought in Modern America and another extraordinarily popular class, called Justice. The site also includes in-depth annotations of great works of literature, philosophy, and history with an innovative linking system.
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