1Cast: Video News & Commentary

Posts Tagged ‘aggregators’

The Work We Do.

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Call it what you want – content delivery, video aggregation, audience segmentation, brand networks, blah, blah, blah.  Tons of people have given it a go, but ask any of them about what they do and if it’s working, and only a handful are able to give you a clearly defined answer.

I came across an interview of Andrew Robertson, CEO at global branding agency BBDO, where he consistently refers to what they do as “The Work” and I think it’s a fantastic concept.  By defining your efforts simply and clearly stating your focus, you will help your audience understand who you are, what you do and the value you bring.

At 1CAST our “Work” is all about making digital more personal.  We define this as a user-driven, professionally delivered video news service, built around discovery – where the content follows the user rather than waiting to be found.  We call it micro-casting.

We believe that moving from search to discoverability is a natural process and one that is more closely aligned with our needs in this increasingly time constrained world.  Yet this begs the obvious question, “is there value or worth in what we do?”  And I would argue an astounding YES!

Time is a precious commodity and it can be argued that it has a higher intrinsic value than money.  For 1CAST, one of the best measures of the “worth” of our “work” is looking at how users are willing to pay with their time to access their own personalized news through our platform.

Not surprisingly, our user engagement numbers at 1CAST are off the charts for our desktop experience, our recent iTV initiatives on Boxee and especially on our mobile applications for iPhone and Android.  We believe this points to something very special about what we’ve accomplished with our micro-casting concept.  Some have called it a paradigm shift; others have called it cracking the code.

We just call it doing our “Work”.

Anthony Bontrager

A special thanks from 1CAST

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Hi Everyone,

After nearly a year, 1CAST has successfully emerged from beta, bringing with it a completely re-designed user interface, new content and distribution partnerships, a bit of relief from our extremely talented development team, and heightened sense of purpose towards driving the most engaging video news experience across the three screen environment to our viewers.

Since our launch yesterday we’ve seen all of our metrics – from visits to unique viewers to streams per visit increase; but most important of all is the time spent viewing content, which continues to grow.  Already 1CAST has one of the most engaged audiences across the web and mobile spaces.  This trend continues and demonstrates the value of our micro-casting environment as a means for viewers to control what, how, when and where they get their video news.

Rest assured we are by no means finished.  Our team is already working on the next platform update, integrating our next set of content partners and a host of other initiatives that are sure to bring more value to our viewers and business partners alike.

So stay tuned!

On behalf of the 1CAST team, I want to extend a big THANK YOU to our content partners, distribution partners, advertisers, investors and most importantly our viewers.  Each of you has contributed to 1CAST’s ongoing success for which we are very grateful.

Now time to get back to work.

Anthony

Why content owners see Fair Use as simply “FU”.

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

This week the blogosphere was abuzz about announcements by The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal regarding sites that aggregate their news content without any distribution or syndication agreements. At 1Cast we won’t distribute one second of video that we don’t have full permission to use. But we compete in a market where millions of hours of unlicensed video are viewed daily, so we’re well-tuned to the issue at hand.

A lot of the aggregation sites defend their services with the Fair Use doctrine, an important aspect of the US copyright system that makes possible everything from book reports to Google’s massive web crawler and caching system. Fair Use is a great thing, but it does not entitle a person to financially benefit from the copyrighted work of another, and that’s important.

A TV show uploaded to YouTube is not Fair Use. A Ustream channel dedicated to showing out of market sports programming is not Fair Use. A set top box that siphons content from a broadcaster even when the broadcaster says no is not Fair Use.

It’s fun to root for small companies who are taking on big businesses and trying to provide new services and unique ways to consume content – it’s what makes the Internet great.  But it’s simply wrong for the media and the public to ignore the fact that the legal owner of this content has paid in some cases millions of dollars to produce it. Haven’t these content creators earned the right to control who uses it and how?

There are start-up entrepreneurs out there who respect this. We play by the rules everyday, making partnerships to legally license and distribute content.

I think it’s unfortunate that the media has chosen to lambaste the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal for their plans to simply enforce the rules. The Internet may have changed distribution, but it shouldn’t change the rules that let content creators make brilliant work and profit from distributing it.

I applaud content owners who have the courage to stand up and say the rules matter and we’re going to enforce them. It’s time the media and more of the Internet public did the same.

Anthony Bontrager