European Streamers Hit the Road

The "new economy" may be fighting for air, but the entrepreneurial spirit rages on. A European business media company is taking to the road to prove it — and to provide a way for entrepreneurs to reach an audience of potential investors, via streaming.

Tornado-Insider last week launched the first edition of its European Road Tour. Tornado is sending a fully equipped touring coach across the continent to select interesting entrepreneurs and place them in front of a camera to present their "elevator" pitches to remote audiences of investors, from Tornado-Insider's Web site www.tornado-insider.com.

The Road Tour also intends to prove that high-quality streaming video content can be produced on a very low budget, using equipment that fits in the overhead compartment of an airplane, says Torben Takle-Jensen, managing director of Tornado-TV, the multimedia production division of Tornado-Insider.

"Using off-the-shelf Web streaming technology, we are going to bring Europe's most talented startup entrepreneurs straight into the offices of our worldwide audience of new economy investors, venture capitalists and business executives. That's Web streaming put to good use."

Throughout March and April, the editorial team of Tornado-TV will visit London, Dublin, Barcelona, Sophia Antipolis, Milan, Paris, Zurich, Prague, Berlin, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. At each stop, Tornado-Insider will choose local companies to be profiled, and then host the webcasts for an entire month on Tornado-Insider.com, an online community cluster of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. One finalist from each Road Tour "pit stop" will proceed to the final round where a jury consisting of Tornado-Insider editorial and research staff, senior executives from sponsor companies (Microsoft, Intel, and GorillaPark) and established Internet entrepreneurs will vote on the "European Super Nova" — Europe's most promising startup for the year 2001.

Low-Budget, High Tech

Video capturing, editing and compression on the Road Tour will be performed on two portable non-linear editing solutions. According to Takle-Jensen, the mobile editing studio will consist of two Apple Macintosh Powerbooks (500MHz) with 18GB hard drives, Final Cut Pro and Cleaner 5 editing/compression software, and an additional LaCie 20GB Pocket Drive. For video shooting, the crew will use two Sony DV cameras, and a basic lighting kit. The Road Tour vehicle will also act as the interviewing/editing studio.

"After an evening of filming and editing, we will hook the laptops up to the Internet using an Ethernet connection in our partner's offices and upload fresh streaming content to our pre-developed Web site running on our Web server in Amsterdam," Takle-Jensen said. "We have standardized on Windows Media as the streaming platform and will compress to broadband only, as our target audience is business users, normally with at least ADSL or T1 connections to the Net."

All of this will be handled by a crack team of two. "The new streaming technologies make it incredibly easy for almost anyone to be a streaming producer/editor," Takle-Jensen said. "In fact, there will only be myself and a cameraman running this entire show from end to end."

Using Terran's Cleaner 5, Takle-Jensen can transfer video straight from the DV cameras for compression and publishing. "We are going to benefit greatly from this application, which will save us a lot of time," he said. "No longer do we need to edit, compress to QuickTime, and then compress to Windows Media. We will go straight from DV to Windows Media compression using Cleaner 5 and only now and again resort to Final Cut Pro if we need to do some finer editing work."

The project promises to yield a wealth of content. "At each of the 11 stops throughout Europe over the six-week period, we will video-profile 10 startup entrepreneurs who will do a quick 'elevator pitch' of about two minutes and a sit-down interview with tough questions that an investor would ask, for about three minutes," Takle-Jensen said. "That is five minutes per entrepreneur, 50 minutes per stop, 550 minutes in total — about nine hours."

But Takle-Jensen hopes the benefits will be measured in terms beyond numbers of hours — both for Tornado and for its subjects. "Streaming video is a fantastic medium to use, when the target audience is very focused. Our customers are mainly high-tech investors and high-tech startup entrepreneurs, so it's a very well-defined target audience which is Web savvy by definition," he said. "Before investing in a new startup company, it is necessary to identify the right targets with the right ideas in place, the right business plan and the right management team. That could be found anywhere in the world."