US chemical company DuPont (NYSE: DD) expects to increase net annual revenues some USbn by 2015 thanks to new products that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to reach at least USbn in revenues f…
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While comedy video sites like AOL and HBO’s This Just In, NBC’s DotComedy and Turner’s SuperDeluxe have died off after suffering through corporate bureaucracy, bad budgeting and lackluster traffic, CollegeHumor keeps out putting out savvy and hilarious original videos. There’s something about web content that (profitable!) CollegeHumor just seems to understand and anticipate better than anyone else.
I went behind the scenes last week to see how the site’s original video team works its magic, this time on its first — watch out Obama Girl! — political project: a mock trailer for the imagined “really bad Disney movie” to which actor Matt Damon compared Sarah Palin’s hockey-mom-to-vice president narrative.
The folks at CollegeHumor brought me along to their Palin shoot last week at a house in upstate New York that’s totally prepped for production and is often used as the set of the commercial parodies featured on Saturday Night Live. Liz Cackowski, the star of web series The Jeannie Tate Show and a former writer for SNL, was along to star as our ambitious hockey mom in her first CollegeHumor appearance. In the video above, I interview Cackowski and the CH team about the project and show a little of what it was like behind the scenes.
The shoot was large-scale by CollegeHumor standards, which has dramatically ramped up its production quality and team over the last two years, now with three different in-house production teams. Its budget was ,000 — including ,000 for the location and ,000 for the steadicam — and didn’t account for the ten or so full-time CollegeHumor staffers who pitched in on everything from directing to picking up lunch.
Though CollegeHumor’s finished originals, including the “big budget” Palin video, never seem to include intrusive in-stream ads, the IAC-owned company recently became profitable. Why? CollegeHumor has managed to outrun the chicken-and-egg problem of funding good web content and attracting monetizable audiences. It can ride its momentum, keep upping the ante and regularly turn out hits: Four days after the Palin trailer was released, it has more than 600,000 views, 6,700 Diggs, and 273 comments.
If there’s one thing to learn from today’s little bout of blogosphere hysteria about Flash coming to the iPhone, it’s that people REALLY REALLY want Flash on the iPhone.
Adobe has said publicly for some time now that it wants to bring Flash to the iPhone, while Apple CEO Steve Jobs has grand-standed against existing Flash products as too slow or too basic for his masterpiece.
But today, an Adobe exec speaking at a Flash developers’ conference “for the first time publicly confirmed that Adobe is actively developing a Flash Player for Apple’s popular phone,” according to FlashMagazine.com.
Senior Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems Paul Betlem reportedly said that, while his team is working on Flash on the iPhone, it must wait on Apple’s approval. But should Apple approve, the player will be available shortly.
More on our new sister site The Apple Blog.
As we reported a few weeks ago, YouTube has developed a new analytics feature called Hot Spots to help video creators see, on a second-by-second basis, when they’re losing their audience and when people are especially tuned in. The tool, released today as part of YouTube’s “Insight” dashboard, compares factors like the time into a video when people click away to people’s watching habits on average YouTube videos of the same length. Another way the tool identifies a hot spot is by tracking when people rewind and rewatch a certain portion.
The resulting chart displayed with each of a user’s videos is not at all absolute, but it shows a relative curve of “hotness” over the length of a video. A Google blog post describes the feature as a focus group for video creators, and suggests that they can re-edit their clips to avoid the least popular stuff, or make trailers and highlight reels from the best stuff.
As we mentioned last time we wrote about Hot Spots, video analytics and hosting companies such as Visible Measures and Ooyala also offer such tools. TubeMogul, though it doesn’t host video, is also working on ways to get in-player viewer engagement metrics from embeds and through partnering with video sites.
YouTube also recently added a few other publisher tools, including raising the file-size limit to 1 GB from 100 MB — though publishers are still limited to 10 minutes per clip unless they get special permission from YouTube. Users can also now enter metadata while an upload is processing and upload multiple files from within a browser.
Michael Eisner’s web video shop Vuguru — which got off to a promising start with Prom Queen last year but has only done a couple not-so-buzzy series since then — is giving FoxSports.com a 12-hour exclusive on new episodes of its next show, Back On Topps, according to MediaWeek.
The series is to be a 17-episode mockumentary about heirs to the Topps Co. dealing with the arrival of new management. While the show’s characters are fictional, it borrows some elements with reality, as Eisner bought the the baseball card and collectibles company last year. “The Office meets the SportsCenter commercials” is reportedly the idea. Click here for some preview clips (which will probably resize your browser, sorry). Episodes will come out Tuesday and Thursday, starting tomorrow.
Pushing the show to FoxSports.com is an example of a strategy we are seeing increasingly frequently, where web video makers look for distribution on a site they think will align with their audience, rather than going directly to a broader site like YouTube or MySpace, where their show might get lost. Last week we wrote about how Easy to Assemble, a riff on TV shows and fame, will be distributed on TV.com.
But these deals are just for a set time period of exclusivity, after which super-distribution is the norm. After the initial 12 hours, Back on Topps will also be distributed on YouTube, Veoh, Hulu, Blip, Bebo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, MobiTV, iTunes and backontopps.com.
Back on Topps stars the former hosts of ESPN’s Cheap Seats, Randy and Jason Sklar, and will have cameos from sports stars like Kevin Love, Russell Martin, Matt Holliday, Baron Davis and Dennis Rodman. Skype is its first sponsor.
With rumors that something will change with the Apple TV this week, Alistair Croll takes the opportunity to pen an ambitious feature wish list for the perfect Apple entertainment device:
TV tuner and set-top PVR to take on TiVo, with streaming and synchronization to Apple’s mobile devices, the way Slingbox does, handled through a more reliable MobileMe
Controllers with accelerometers and a set-top App Store to rival what’s on the iPhone and iPod Touch
Taking a little stroll through my RSS feed reader this weekend, I wanted to make sure you knew about five good blogs written by online video makers about their craft and the world around them. Maybe worth a bookmark of your own.
JakeZim.com Safran Digital Group COO Jake Zim blogs about everything from company news to industry views to how to stream porn on your iPhone. Most of all, Zim understands the No. 1 rule of blogging: Be provocative. Which, of course, can be both good and bad. Sample post: “Why Gemini Division Disappoints“
Dembot: Rocketboom creator Andrew Baron thinks big picture almost to a fault. Another one who writes from the gut and isn’t afraid to go negative. Sample post: “8 Reasons Why The TV Studios Will Die“
Louderback.com: Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback’s personal blog. This one’s only about a month old, so it might be too early to call it a favorite, but Louderback can actually write. Sample post: “Old Media Still Doesn’t Grok Web Video” (Apparently I’m all about picking out the negative highlights from these sites, but hey, negativity has a way of bringing out passion!)
Kent’s Official Blog: Ask a Ninja creator Kent Nichols reflects on the news and whatever’s going on with his work. This one can be awesome, with Nichols offering strong, detailed, and informative takes on relevant issues — though his experiences may not always be as broadly instructive as he makes them out to be. Good comments too. Sample post: “00 to make a crappy video?“
Tail Slating: This one’s a little more obscure. I found online video maker Andrew Park’s blog through a trackback, and actually met him in person last week at our New York screening. On Tail Slating, Park documented in detail the making of his upcoming series The Hayley Project. The show (another one about “a cute video blogger who gets wrapped up in some sort of mystery”) is supposed to be released any day now, so the blog should liven up again. Sample post: “The Hayley Project: Day 33“
If you have any more favorites, comment away.
Recently, there has been some discussion of whether the credit crisis is helping or hurting venture capitalists.
The argument that it is helping holds that the credit crisis has made returns from venture capital investments more favorable than returns from other types of private equity. The high returns to private equity in the past few years were driven by inexpensive credit so taking away that cheap credit has brought private equity returns back into line with other investments.
Maybe. But I’m not so sure that the credit crisis is helping venture capitalists. There are several reasons to think not.
1. Exit through M&A: The main exit route for venture capitalists is through acquisition of the start-ups they fund. While some acquirers of start-ups use cash to buy companies, others use their stock or raise debt to fund acquisitions. With the stock markets in turmoil, it’s harder for companies to purchase other companies with stock (which might drop in value). And with credit getting more expensive, borrowing to purchase companies is getting more costly. So at the margin, there are probably fewer buyers of VC-backed start-ups and those buyers who remain are likely to pay less for companies, lowering VCs’ returns.
2. IPO Drought: In a recent survey of 660 VCs conducted by the National Venture Capital Association (PDF), 64 percent attributed the IPO drought, at least in part, to the credit crunch/mortgage crisis. IPOs are less in demand if investors’ appetite for risk decreases, as it appears to have done recently. They are also less attractive if the stock market is falling or gyrating all over the place, as it has been.
In addition, it’s hard to take companies public if the investment banks that do the IPOs can’t focus on normal business because they are consumed with going under or getting bought out. If the credit crisis is adversely affecting the IPO market, then VCs are losing their most attractive exit route, lowering their returns.
3. VC Firm Operations: Some venture capital firms themselves are getting hit by the credit crisis. The private equity firms that do both venture capital and leveraged buyouts are getting hit because the disappearance of cheap credit has hurt the leveraged buyout market. At companies where leveraged buyouts are a much bigger part of their operations than venture capital, the investors could face enough problems that they start exiting the market.
Venture capitalists also raise money from limited partners. While some argue that those investors will shift their asset allocation toward venture capital in their search for higher returns, an alternative scenario is that some of those limited partners, like pension funds, will lose so much money from their other investments that they will have to cut back on all their investments, including those allocated to venture capital.
4. Portfolio company performance: The companies in which VCs invest could be adversely affected by the credit crisis. A slowdown in the real economy that results from the credit crisis would hurt young companies’ efforts to sell new products and services. Also new high growth companies need debt, and if lines of credit and debt financing aren’t available to them, that could hurt their performance. Finally, the portfolio companies need to manage their own cash, and there have been some reports that they have put that money into Auction Rate Securities (ARS) rather than into checking accounts. The problems in the ARS market have kept some startups from getting to their own cash.
Maybe VCs are escaping the credit crisis unscathed. But I think there are several reasons why they won’t in the long run.
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About the Author: Scott Shane is A. Malachi Mixon III, Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of eight books, including Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths that Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By; Finding Fertile Ground: Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities for New Ventures; Technology Strategy for Managers and Entrepreneurs; and From Ice Cream to the Internet: Using Franchising to Drive the Growth and Profits of Your Company.
This is a post from: Small Business Trends
Will the Credit Crisis Hurt Venture Capital?
Brazilian power companies traded 60.5bn reais (US.5bn) in contracts at the September 30 government-run power auction in São Paulo.
Thirty-nine distribution companies bought 427TWh at the auction…
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Mexican manganese-ferroalloy producer Minera Autlán (BMV: AUTLANB) is on the lookout to snap up an integrated, producing company or project in the 80,000-100,000t range, according to analyst Rodrigo H…
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