Ripe Digital’s Downfall Had Obvious Cause

I was just reading about Ripe Digital, one of a slew of original digital content creators founded in recent years, filing for bankruptcy.  They follow in the footsteps of 60Frames and ManiaTV.

While I am sure their founders are blaming the economy I think the answer is far less obtuse.  According to NewTeeVee, Ripe Digital raised over $45 million in financing.

Ripe Digital was focused on creating entertainment for dudes with the online networks RipeTV, OctaneTV and FlowTV, featuring such shows as Sexy Road Test, Funk Flex TV and Pauly Shore’s America.  LINK

And there it is – one cannot hope to recoup $45 million on a slate where the biggest draw is Paul Shore.  It’s not that there isn’t money to be made in this space, it’s just that it is wildly unrealistic to think in terms of tens of millions of dollars.  Those who succeed in original online video will do so by radically reducing overhead, staffing and all the other acoutremonts of the old media world.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ManiaTV shuts (inquisitr.com)

Will Korean DramaFever Show Hulu the Way?

NewTeeVee has a profile of the recently launched Hulu-esque site, DramaFever, that specializing in bringing Korean TV shows to US and Canadian viewers.

Korean shows have proven extremely popular on video-sharing sites like YouTube and DailyMotion so it was a smart move by the Koreans to come up with a way to better-serve their growing viewership.  It sounds like they are going for innovation and quality service over suing their biggest fans.  Some of the features included in DramaFever are English subtitles and high-quality picture.

While similar to Hulu, there is a big difference:

DramaFever is pushing a free-to-subscription service (aka “freemium,” or try before you buy) that could well serve as an example for sites like Hulu. The site will offer a couple episodes of each show for free, ad-supported embeddable streaming, a la Hulu today, but it will also offer full seasons of all its shows sans advertising for a fee of $5-7 per month. Movies and concerts will cost an additional fee.    LINK

While it would be nice to believe that Hulu will remain forever free and completely ad-supported it is much more likely that Hulu will attempt to milk viewers directly.  Let’s hope Hulu understands that charging means offering more, not just putting up a paywall.  Done properly, Hulu could succeed in creating a teired system that could compete with piracy but done poorly and the only result will be an erosion in any ground that had been made in the previous couple of years.

Is “Angel of Death” a Hit or a Success?

Hey, have you heard about the redhot webseries “Angel of Death” over on Crackle.com?  Well, if you have, you are in a minority.  Still, it sure looks, at first glance, like “Angel of Death” is a hit:

During a recent interview with comic book podcast iFanboy, Brubaker said Angel of Death had been seen by “7 million people.” This was kind of vague, so we contacted the folks at Crackle who said Brubaker misspoke, and provided the more specific, yet completely different metric of 4.7 million total views.

That is certainly a lot of views in the world of webisodes, especially when it comes to dramas.  Of course, one has to take into account that the viewcount is a tally of all views over a ten-episode season.  NewTeeVee dug deeper to find these numbers:

Episode 1: 950,000 Episode 2: 675,000 Episode 3: 625,000 Episode 4: 525,000 Episode 5: 275,000 Episode 6: 350,000 Episode 7: 800,000 Episode 8: 100,000 Episode 9: 300,000 Episode 10: 200,000

Granted, there are some cable shows that struggle to pull these numbers, but the fact is that only around 20% of the audience for episode one stuck around until episode ten.

Then there is the question of that pesky ROI (Return on Investment) that just won’t leave us alone.  Well, the series cost a reported $1,000,000 to produce.  The simple math says they paid $4.70/view.  I guess, depending on how their advertising and sponsorship deals work, this could be a profitable price-point but I don’t think so…

LINK

Free Anti-Piracy Advice to NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX et. al.

According to a post on NewTeeVee:

Regardless of how many ads were shown, 90 percent of ABC.com viewers continued to say they’d rather get the show for free than pay to get it without ads.

Why aren’t the TV networks releasing copies of their shows to pirate sites complete with the ads built in?  While I do love my ad-free TV torrents, I tend to watch on Boxee even with the ads since there is simply no wait.  However, I miss being able to download and watch the show on other devices or outside of a wifi hotspot.

I think most people would be perfectly ok with downloading a show with the ads built in.  Sure, one could fast-forward past them but most people don’t bother, especially if the ads are short and varied.

Not only would the networks actually get to show advertisers an ever larger pool of eyeballs but they would be putting the pirates right out of business.

Just thinking aloud…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Boxee Gets ABC (technologizer.com)
• NBC Universal Likes To Keep Its Head In The Sand About People Watching TV Online (techdirt.com)
• A Quick Boxee Update (mymediamusings.com)
• TV on the Web Takes Off: Fox’s Strategy (gigaom.com)
• Pirates Beat Oscars Again – Suck It MPAA (mymediamusings.com)

Street Fighter on YouTube

As YouTube has expanded it’s offering to video posters, some video posters are getting pretty damn creative AND smart.

A new (probably short-lived) YouTube sensation is a clever re-imagining of StreetFighter using the “annotations” feature to turn it into a sort of “choose-your-own-adventure” and as NewTeeVee says, it’s paying off big-time.

Uploaded last week, YouTube Street Fighter videos have already garnered well over 5 million views, and counting. That’s not just due to gamer nostalgia over the coin arcade classic, or because it’s currently featured on YouTube’s home page. A lot of the views are generated by the way the videos were made.

Aside from being clever, the way in which the videos are linked creates an incredible number of views.  This is great for YouTube and the video producer who are collecting a pretty outrageous CPM:

After the first week it went online, Boivin told me by email, the videos had earned him $5,000 in YouTube advertising revenue.

Unfortunately, it is a total ripoff for the advertiser as viewers spend 10-30 seconds on each page and there is barely time for an ad to pop up, let alone be seen and absorbed.  So, while I totally applaud the creativity and the cashification I wonder how advertisers will be responding…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPQ1XrllZmA&hl=en&fs=1]

Related articles by Zemanta

• Street Fighter as a kind of turn-based YouTube game
• Play Street Fighter With Toys Via YouTube [Ready, Fight!]

Funny Web Video NOT Funny

Wow, NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht is on a tear. First, he has this rather tongue-in-cheek guide for those looking to make their own funny web videos:

“1. Use Webcams
Your show is online, and so is your character, thanks to your webcam! So meta. Sure, this method of storytelling has lost all its novelty, but what better way to dispense with showing us any action than by having the main character describe the action in their vlog?

Steal from: lonelygirl15, Dorm Life, quarterlife”

He’s got five more gems in the post.

Then Chris is on BeetTV with some more thoughts on this developing genre and let’s just say he’s not all that impressed.  His main feeling is that there is certainly a glut right now of comedy-centric sites and that this leads to a lot of scattershot content.

Check out the whole interview here.

The Force of Gravity

NewTeeVee has an interview with John Herman, the creator of the new web series Gravityland.

“With Gravityland there are so many ways for viewers to get involved that it recreates that feeling for me. It is a new level of intimacy that I don’t think is representative in a lot of entertainment.”

The idea is to give viewers multiple ways to interact with the cast and the story.  The interview is a good read but I have to say I was not especially taken with the two episodes of Gravityland that have been posted so far.  They remind me of early indie film, but not in an especially good way.

The Next Neilson

NewTeeVee is reporting about another entrant into the web video metrics game.  If web video is going to become a serious advertising venue than the metrics have to improve.

“…a raft of new companies like TubeMogul and Visible Measures have launched in the past few months, joining companies like Brightcove, which has been providing this with video delivery for several years, and Google Analytics, which recently unveiled an event model that tracks user actions such as interacting with a video player.

Now web analytics giant Omniture is getting into the game. The firm hopes that by tying video player interaction to visitor outcomes, it can give marketers back some of the visibility they’ve lost, helping them to better understand the effectiveness of online video.”

This is going to be a major part of the story when it comes to the business of web video.  Alongside search, aggregation and curating, metrics is gonna be huge.

No “World” in WWW for Eisner

Chris Albrecht over at NewTeeVee noticed that Eisner is trying to limit the distribution to his PromQueen follow-up, The All-for-Nots, to the United States, allowing him to better control later worldwide distribution.

This clearly flies in the face of the nature of the internet and leads Chris to say:

“It would just be nice if new media moguls could take the innovation they bring to developing new media shows and apply it to how they distribute new media shows.”

Amen, Chris.

William Morris Investing in Web

William Morris is one of the oldest talent agencies in the land so the fact that they’ve set up a multi-million-dollar fund to invest in online companies is a small sign that this isn’t another bubble.

According to the NYT:

“On Monday, the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, will announce that it is teaming up with the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Accel Partners and Venrock to invest in digital media start-up companies based in Southern California. What makes the combination unusual, though, is the addition of AT&T as a limited partner.”

Though, as NewTeeVee points out:

“Don’t be looking for massive money: investments will range from $250,000 to millions of dollars. The total fund size is in the “tens of millions” so they’re not going to blow it all on one company.”

I think the big thing here is that mobile companies are seeking ways to get more video to their customers.  One hopes this will push the technology forward to a place that is at least close to the sort of coverage provided in many parts of Asia, where watching video on a mobile phone is commonplace.