"It's not just about taking television and repurposing it on the internet. It's about discovery, it's about community, it's about interactivity. There is entertainment in the community." - Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, on the future of online video.
This week, we review a site that's testing Michael Eisner's argument that the future of online video is in discovery, community and interactivity - with an emphasis on discovery. It's called Crackle.
Crackle is more tightly focused than Veoh or YouTube, and seems to like it that way. Crackle advertises that they're all about emerging talent, but there's also a bit of established talent trying original, new things to draw you in.
For example, comedian Penn Jillette (the talking half of Penn & Teller, and recent contestant on Dancing With the Stars) was given a set of high-def video cameras and told to rant into them whenever the urge strikes him, yielding a series of short videos called Penn Says.
Crackle features original web series of every genre, each regularly producing short episodes, along with a mix of short films. And the overwhelming majority of these videos are created by the emerging talent they're talking about.
The straightforward purpose of Crackle is to attract this new talent and build new content with it. The site, which is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, has run a dozen contests since summer 2007 in animation, short films, standup and sketch comedy.
Good entertainment rises to the top through user ratings and a team of editors. Those who win get to pitch their and feature concepts and acts to various divisions of Sony, for a chance at working with other artists and Sony resources to make more content. Sony gets to pick the cream of the crop.
In the meantime, contestants and users are uploading a great deal of original content. And while users can search for that content, Crackle isn't inviting you to browse through it with big lists of the popular videos of the day. That's not the specialty of the site, and the unique mix of content created by this dynamic is the result of a deliberate change in business model that made Crackle...well, Crackle.
See, Crackle wasn't always like this. It started out as Grouper, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing application. Users created groups with other trusted users, and could trade an unlimited volume of files within those groups.
And while this did allow some people to trade documents, home videos and photos with their families and other trusted peers, like a number of other P2P applications, it had a great potential for abuse, as well.
But Grouper restyled itself in late 2005 as a user-generated video site, and was part of the wave of success of that business model. In 2006, Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired Grouper. Change was coming. But as the founder of Grouper told Variety in 2007, they had already been considering a transition to something a bit more boutique:
User-generated vid has its place on the Web, but "it's not a business for us," Felser said. "The content is rarely exclusive, and it's hard to monetize," he said, noting that advertisers demand far more certainty on the type of content before they'll spent big bucks on ad buys.
So with the help and guidance of Sony, Grouper traded in its business model yet again, this time into a multi-platform (mostly Sony platforms, like the PSP and Sony Bravia) video network with a purpose beyond competing for eyes on videos that other websites also carried. And thus it became Crackle.
So Crackle is trying something different than the Veohs and YouTubes. They're attracting new content, letting the cream rise to the top, and leveraging that talent to create even more new content. They're giving little-known artists a chance to get noticed and maybe even get some backing. And the result is a unique mix of original content for consumers to try out for free, on demand.
It's nice when everyone wins.
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