Free startup idea of the day... If I *was* going to do a new startup I would go to ZeFrank and Amanda and offer them 5-10% of the equity in a video studio, raise ~$1M in cash, find two to four more Amanda/ZeFrank-level talent, and use them as the anchors to bring in 20 more shows. Get to 10M video downloads a day and you're done--you got a huge business (10M impressions x average $5 CPM = nice size business).
No one has made the online video studio work online yet... and I'm thinking the time to strike is now. The broadband showed up two years ago, and now the talent is showing up... it's only a matter of time before someone gets this right.
Of course, I've already got a great startup to run... it's called AOL LLC.
If I was doing a new startup...
Recent Posts
Reader Comments
(Page 1 of 1)2. I think that Jason should prove that it could be done.
Posted at 1:37PM on Jul 5th 2006 by Rick
3. What's the burn rate?
Posted at 1:55PM on Jul 5th 2006 by Dossy Shiobara
4. Yeah I agree this is a hot market to be in. I'm somewhat less concerned about the bandwidth and related issues - that stuff tends to sort itself out, and there are plenty of content delivery networks out there.
The bigger issue for me is the user experience. I know rocketboom gets lots of downloads, but I think to get the truly big numbers that are going to bring in the real ad dollars, it's got to move beyond the computer screen.
While we all think of RSS and feed readers and IP video as basic stuff, most people in the world don't. The enabler needs to be a set top box to allow viewing of IP video content on a normal television by normal non-technical genius people.
Rocketboom has a deal with TiVo and that's great, but that's a one-off deal at this point. TiVo is not an open platform. There's another company out there with a set top box for their video content - the name totally escapes me. But the point is, they're not really open either.
To be an interesting business I'd want to have a way to get my content on to someone's television, but no consumer electronics companies are going to make content-neutral set top boxes...there's no content there, and it would be a financial bloodbath for them.
If you see a solution to this, I'm all ears. Living in the age of intellectual property, I'd love to start building a content library to monetize.
-m
Posted at 6:50PM on Jul 5th 2006 by Michael Ridley
5. The bandwidth is nowhere near available right now, in regards to server bandwidth.
Posted at 2:00AM on Jul 6th 2006 by Don Wilson
6. Jason. I wish you well with your new startup AOL. Showing lots of promise...
Posted at 4:16AM on Jul 6th 2006 by Ben Barren
7. It's a bitch on the local level, though.
Posted at 1:50PM on Jul 6th 2006 by Alan Wilensky
Add your comments
Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.
1. You better find sales talent as good as that video talent if you're going to bring in that many ads at that price - and that talent is probably even harder to find.
I'm still not sure even that would pay for the premium bandwidth you'd need for all that video serving. There's a good reason why companies are using Youtube and such for videos, and it's not popularity (although that helps) - why not let someone else lose all that money?
Posted at 1:20PM on Jul 5th 2006 by David