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Pioneering a consumer-oriented video-hosting service:
Accessibility and ease-of-use are the keys to market success, says
Earthnoise.com
From Financial Times
Aug 2, 2000
Yet according to David Steward, chief executive of Earthnoise.com, an
Israeli-founded start-up that is pioneering a consumer-oriented
video-hosting service, the barrier to the proliferation of video-web
services is not web-hosting technology.
"From a technical point of view, there are some very good solutions for
hosting video for the high end," says Mr Steward. "The challenge is how do
you take this wonderful streaming video capability and make it easy to use,
friendly and accessible for everyone, from students to moms and dads and
grandparents."
For most people, the first obstacle to posting video onto the internet is
getting it into their computer. Unlike still-photo scanning technology which
is both affordable and user-friendly, the cost of digital video cameras is
still prohibitive, and capture cards used for digitzing analog video tapes
are hard to use.
Earthnoise.com has addressed the problem with a low-tech solution. Pop your
video into the snail mail, and they will digitise it and host it at a Unix
web server farm in Santa Clara, California.
The company - which has secured an endorsement from internet streaming
leader RealNetworks - provides 50MB of free video-hosting for consumers,
amounting to 22 minutes of video. A premium membership costs Dollars 5 a
month which buys 200 MB of hosting space. Commercial memberships for small
businesses are sold for between Dollars 20 and Dollars 50 a month.
Nicholas Ayre, principle consultant for media at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young,
says the business model appears solid. "The key is getting users on the
service for free and then offering value added services for a fee," he
explains. "But they should be strict about how long they keep members on
without paying."
For now, Earthnoise.com offers an array of free applications and services to
members. Users can easily implant a video into a greeting card template,
send a video e-mail message or simply use editing tools to sequence a clip,
add a text title or remove those particularly embarassing home video
moments.
Services such as these have already made Earthnoise.com a leader in its
embryonic niche. According to PC Data, the market research group, Earthnoise
.com had more than 300,000 unique visitors in May. It is the services, says
the company, that sets them apart from both high-end web-video services and
traditional web hosting sites such as Yahoo! Geocities.
"Getting into video is a huge thing, and the traditional web-hosting
companies are kind of scared of it," explains Elan Dekel, Earthnoise.com's
founder and president. "For them, video is like another cool feature, but
it's a cool feature that takes a whole company - and that's why they are
coming to us."
Venture capital has also been flowing in at a steady pace. In June 1999,
Earthnoise.com raised Dollars 1.45m in seed financing from Israel Seed
Partners, a leading Israeli venture group, and Entertainment Media Ventures,
a seed venture capital fund for new media. They were joined in a second
round of financing in March worth Dollars 7.6m by four more investors
including America Online.
Next on Earthnoise.com's agenda is making its encoding solution even more
convenient. This summer, it plans to launch a pilot in two small US cities
that will allow consumers to drop off videotapes at a local shop, much like
old-fashioned film developing is marketed.
As expanding bandwidth brings even more interest in video services, Mr
Steward believes that accessibility and convenience will be the key to the
market. "The winner," he says, "will eventually be determined by
ease-of-use."
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