Catalyzing Creativity With Creative Commons

Imagine the following scenario. You go to a New Years Eve celebration. Your plan is to shoot lots of great video of all the festivities, your drunken friends, and the huge fireworks display at midnight. Monday morning you'll edit the video and send a highlight mix to all your friends to commemorate the great night you had together.

Unfortunately, the battery in your camera dies the moment the fireworks display begins.

Come Monday morning when you fire up your desktop video editing software, your commemorative New Years Eve mix will be lacking fireworks -- literally. This is one example of why we started Eyespot and, more specifically, why we chose to make Eyespot a Creative Commons site. With desktop video editing software you're limited to the media on your hard drive. You have no stock footage archive to pull from. But on Eyespot, you can search the commons for fireworks and instantly access all the footage contributed by the community.

Early in 2006 a prominent member of the Creative Commons community intimated to me: "we've really opened up a can of worms". What he meant was that all the different licenses and the various restrictions associated with each had created a real challenge, i.e. how to track and enforce it all. So we decided to use technology to help alleviate some of the burden involved with the adoption of this new licensing scheme.

On Eyespot we support the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. This essentially says that you can (for example) use the fireworks footage you find but you have to give attribution to the community members that provided the footage. To honor this requirement we built our encoding engine to automatically generate and append post-roll credits to every video created on Eyespot.

Here's a great example of the automatic attribution technology in action: this video was created by one of our users to pay tribute to the wives and girlfriends of active duty Marines. To create the video she used clips from another community member as well as a song from a popular band. The credits at the end inform us of the contributors.

This represents the transformative power of Creative Commons licensing in conjunction with innovative technology. The instantaneous and collaborative nature of the internet is fueling a rapid evolution of our relationship with media.The era of strictly passive media consumption is gone. We are now members of a culture of participation. Traditional licensing schemes worked well when the number of licensees and licensors was relatively small. But today, with an entire globe full of creators, content owners and rights lawyers are faced with A Brand New Reality.

-David

Take The Technology To The Eyeballs

When we started Eyespot we decided against creating a destination site. Competing for customers in an increasingly commoditized business (video hosting, social networking) was not something that appealed to us. It was clear at the time that there would be hundreds of video sharing sites competing for eyesballs, and sure enough that is exactly the environment we find ourselves in today.

We were conflicted, however, because we knew our differentiators (editing, mobile) would really set us apart from the competition. But that did not change the fact that we would still have to rise above the noise in this very crowded space. So we decided the best way to leverage our differentiators would be to take the technology to the eyeballs, rather than trying to bring the eyeballs to the technology.

The Eyespot business model is that of an ASP technology platform provider. All of the applications and features available on eyespot.com are also available as part of a hosted private label offering. As you can imagine, all players in the online video space are looking for differentiators. Our platform was designed to quickly and easily integrate into any online property and, within a matter of weeks, add innovative and engaging applications that enable mashups, remix contests, mobile video sharing, and more.

Today's digital media environment is vastly different than years past. Whereas discussions of digital media in past years were almost always focused on DRM issues, today's discussions gravitate around viewer participation and mashups. The savvy new media execs of today understand that the era of passive media consumption is over. Our media culture has evolved into one of participation. The new conventional wisdom among media companies is: fans are going to use our digital assets for mashups whether we want them to or not, so let's facilitate the phenomenon and create new revenue streams in the process. This way of thinking is permeating record labels, film studios, broadcast media companies, professional sports leagues, video game publishers, and others. In 2007 you will see branded mashup communites powered by Eyespot in all of these sectors.

Content Creation and Distribution in the 21st Century

Ever heard of Miles Beckett and Mesh Flinders? How about Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz?

Maybe not. But you are most certainly familiar with their work: Lonelygirl15 and The Coke and Mentos Experiment, respectively.

A year ago these guys would have been thrown out of any film studio, television studio, or artist agency they dared wander into. And who knows, maybe they would be today as well. But it doesn’t matter. As Becket points out in Wired this month: “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theatre. You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet.”

At Eyespot we’re working on making content creation easier for the millions of hobbyist story tellers who want to experiment with this phenomenal new medium. It’s easy to shoot video, but it has always been ridiculously complicated and time-consuming to edit video. So we built a video hosting and sharing platform that has easy-to-use video editing built right in. At Eyespot you just upload your video and then use our simple interface to sequence your clips, add special effects like slow motion or black and white, add transitions like fade in or fade out, and add a music soundtrack to complete the mix. This can all be done in a few minutes with an intuitive drag and drop UI.

We also enable our users to easily export the video they create on Eyespot. Our users can download their videos in DivX, Quicktime, Windows Media, iPod, and PSP formats. We support instant publishing to other video hosting sites such as Veoh and Blip.tv and blogs such as Blogger and Live Journal. There are many many video distribution channels online and we want to make it easy for our users to leverage all of them.
Our most interesting export option allows users to send videos to mobile phones. Click the “send” link under any video on Eyespot, type in a mobile phone number, and we will instantly transcode the video and send it to the mobile phone via MMS. One thing we learned after we launched this feature in April 2006 is that MMS is inherently limited by the carriers, so we subsequently built Eyespot Mobile Share, the world’s first mobile video sharing application. Once the app is installed on your phone you can receive video feeds, search the web for videos, post video to your blog, all from your mobile phone. If you’re interested in getting a beta version of the app you can sign up here.

In summary, our goal at Eyespot is to provide a powerful but easy-to-use editing and distribution platform for a new generation of content creators. In my next post I will tell you about our business model and answer any questions you may have.

-David