by Scott Bass
August 29, 2000
|
The FeedRoom (http://www.feedroom.com) hopes to be the site to seize that opportunity, and they’re positioning themselves to do exactly that.
The FeedRoom is an aggregator of news, business, sports, weather and traffic videos. It takes news feeds from networks and local TV stations and packages them onto the Internet. The site sports a graphic-rich interface that's targeted exclusively to broadband users. Plus it has the news pedigree of old-world professionals working with them--it hired journalists from NBC, CBS and ABC. Although the company's still in pre-launch mode, it recently got an important round of funding from NBC and Tribune and is gearing up to launch nationally.
Streamingmedia.com contributor Scott Bass caught up with President and CEO, Jonathan Klein to discuss the strategy of this ambitious content play.
Klein founded FeedRoom and was a former executive vice president of CBS News, where he worked at "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours".
Q: I guess the big news at The FeedRoom is the NBC and Tribune partnership. Can you explain the significance?
Right. We are excited about that. We are going to be rolling out broadband websites for 32 TV stations in the top 50 markets over the next several months and that gives us coverage of about 45% of the country, which makes us by far the dominant provider of local news and information online.
Q: Is the deal that you make for these guys, “Let us have access to your content and we’ll build you a state-of-the-art site?”
Pretty much, yeah. That’s the swap.
Q: It seems like a reasonable exchange.
Yes, their interest is in getting into broadband as soon as possible and our interest is getting them there. We want to demonstrate that this is a viable medium, a viable platform that is as different from narrowband as the internet itself was from television. We are firmly convinced of that. Once you add video into the mix, the whole formula changes because it’s a whole different way of communicating.
Q: And you're pretty much ignoring the narrowband audience right now just because they can’t consume what you’re serving up, right?
I wouldn’t say that we are ignoring them. We’re hoping to get them to become broadband.
Q: So you’re just waiting for them to get to where you are.
Right. We have no interest in providing a crummy 56Kbps streaming experience. We really want to show viewers how rich and rewarding broadband can be. There’s no point in putting out a video-centric website if you’re then going to invite people to abuse it.
Q: Obviously, you want people to have the best experience they can and it’s a big difference between the two. And as you guys are creating, or pretty much purveying new ground in the online news world, you’re doing that with a staff of executives that, are, almost exclusively from the real world TV market. Can you explain the importance of old world experience?
We’re stocked with experts in the art of communicating with video and most of those experts come from the world of television where you get daily experience working with pictures to tell stories and engage an audience. Although to deliver that video to the audience, you need experts in streaming, networking, coding and programming and so we have our fair share of new media expertise as well. I mean, we’ve got senior architects from major financial institutions. We’ve got IT experts from international advertisement conglomerates. So we’ve got a wealth of new media experience as well, but we have much more traditional media expertise on board than just about anybody who has ever ventured into the internet waters.
Q: What’s the specific advantage?
They know how to tell pictures with video. They know how to use video to engage and communicate with an audience. That’s a skill that takes years and years to develop. It’s not something that you wake up to overnight. They know what works and what doesn’t, how to take video and craft it so that it fits the platform that you’re on. You approach telling a video story differently to a table audience than to a broadcast audience and you use video differently at a local TV station than you do at a network. Likewise, you use it differently on a computer than you would on a set top, on a hand held device or in a wired home. We want people who have cut their teeth on video for the last decade or two.
Q: Thinking of getting news from the new media of the computer and by the Internet, can you just for a moment explain for me the significance of the metatag for news delivery?
Well we’re able to tag any particular video clip dozens of different ways so that we can retrieve it from our database management system and create basically a tailor-made suit for each individual user. News viewers are like fingerprints: no two are exactly alike. My range of interests is different in some way from yours. I like to see the Yankees. I like to read the gossip column. I like to know what’s going on in the world of politics and I’m into music, so I would like to get that information. Now that’s different from the guy next to me in the office and the guy next to him. So, we’ve got to cross-reference our video in as many ways as we possibly can so that each user can call it up in the way he or she wants to. So we’ve got an extremely sophisticated database management system that has been created by Artesia Technologies (http://www.artesiatech.com) and it incorporates best of breed features from a range of suppliers. That way we’re not married to one particular type of technology. We’re light on our feet and can go with whatever is working best at the time.
Q: The site supports extreme personalization which I assume is the trend of the future for the web, but at the same time, people are still accustomed to regular television where it’s kind of pushed at them. I understand your site has a “sit back and watch” option. How important is that and do you think there’s a significant amount of people that are just too lazy to put the thought in and initiative into personalizing their news?
We have no hard data as to how people might use this site, so it’s a grand experiment. But just from looking around the office, I can see that the people who do the most streaming, tend to let the streaming take place and let it do its thing and keep their hands free for other stuff. That’s exactly how we want this site to work if that’s the way you want it. Otherwise, you can certainly pick up the mouse and start clicking away. So we want it to work either way.
Q: Okay. You’ve described – I’ve heard you talking on the Fat Pipe program, for example, you guys have a number of different revenue streams. Can you describe for me a couple of the ones that seem to be most substantial?
It boils down to two main trunks. One is technology and one is content. On the technology side, we can license the technology and we can take that database which contains stores of digitized video and reams of data about how that video has been used and we can modify that in many ways.
Q: Have you sold that technology yet?
We haven’t yet sold it, but we are using it to – put it this way, we’ve had a lot of interest in it. We haven’t made any deals yet.
Q: Pretty much the site is showing, “Hey, look what we can do?”
Yes. And then the site itself, the content side, [is where] you can sell advertising, you can do e-commerce, [or] highly contextual commerce motivated by the emotions that the video itself contours. So a person can watch a full motion video ad for the new Nike sneakers and then you can click on them and buy them. That’s what advertisers are finding attractive about us.
Q: How far away are we from streaming of that nature?
We’ll be doing it within a month or two. Keep in mind, it’s no different than looking at a news story, clicking on it and getting more information about it. So that’s the foundation of our business is the ability to do that with news. There’s no reason you can’t do it with an advertisement as well.
Q: You guys are moving towards the portable market or wireless devices for news delivery a little bit down the road. What do you see as the opportunity in this area?
Well the predictions are that wireless is going to overtake broadband terrestrial delivery by many factors and we want to be poised to take advantage of that. We don’t care how you get your news video. We just want to be there however you’re getting it. There have been some very interesting developments in wireless and we want to be – we’ve got the content to fill those wireless pipes because we’ve got the content to fill the broadband pipes which is why the people who provide those pipes are interested in talking with us.
Q: You sound hesitant to provide many specifics.
We’re in the A-B, exploratory phase of a number of different options. We leave ourselves a lot of options open.
Q: Okay. Ultimately, can you explain for me, is online news suppose to eventually replace traditional news or is it always going to be complimentary or supplementary experience for people that want to dig deeper into a story?
Well, as you look at the microforces, you see that traditional anything isn’t going to be exactly the way it is today for very long. There is more choice. Consumers want more choice. They have more of an ability to get choice and to tailor the media to their needs. So I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now, very few people show up at 6:30 to get their dose of the daily evening news. I can’t see there being that much of a need for that particular product as the price points for desktop boxes come down, for example. So I don’t know if you will see anything that’s very much like traditional video media. I think you will always have newspapers because those are highly portable and they contain an awful lot of information, but as far as electronic delivery of news and information, I think that technology is just offering many, many more options than people are going to want.
Q: As a final question for you, I wanted to kind of step a little bit away from the specifics of FeedRoom and just ask you with your experience as an executive producer for CBS News, you’re used to creating and now you’re in a bit of a different kind of role. I guess you are still creating, but not necessarily developing content. So my question is: What do you expect to come along? What kind of things do you expect to see develop for the net or if you were producing news content for the web right now, what kind of things would you be looking into?
I would be exploring more choice, more interactivity, showing the relationships between stories. The world is a non-linear place. Events don’t simply happen in a vacuum for no reason. Everything is interconnected. On television, a linear environment, you’ve got to show there’s one story, then another story, and then another story so that those connections become lost. Online, you can show the web of connectedness. That’s what we’re trying to do in the FeedRoom. We’re going to be rolling out some very interesting applications that will enable viewers to understand how the headline of today was actually an outgrowth of the headline from the past. So it’s a multidimensional chess game you start to play, which makes the job much more fun and it makes the consumption of news much more interesting because you’re really going to get true value, a real understanding of the world around you. We’ve been painting ever more perfect pictures of the world around us since the beginning of journalism, with greater and greater clarity and more and more immediacy.
The web is the next step in the development of that. It’s got far more immediacy than television and yet not as much immediacy as if you could put the viewer right in the thick of the action. With the press of a button and with miniaturization and with higher and higher processing power, I think we are starting to find that we are getting even closer to presenting viewers with an extremely compelling picture of the world around them. Don’t forget, the job of a journalist is to increase understanding the world around them and these are, the web and broadband and wireless. Those are just tools to enable us to convey that sense even better.
Q: And to portray the news as accurately as possible in the long run…
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s going to open up a whole world of possibilities and, really if you think of it as a tool, then the technology itself doesn’t become too daunting and you start to really explore the possibilities of it.
