Blip.tv Expands Upon Its Winning Formula and Philosophy
YouTube
was not the only video-sharing website to open in 2005. In May of that
year, five resident New Yorkers likewise launched blip.tv,
an online destination for the still-infant webseries medium. While YouTube
relied on user-generated short videos of any type for its content, blip.tv
was more focused on the serialized video “shows” that had
been sprouting up on the Internet. Although the site operated on a shoestring
budget during its initial start-up, in the years since it has raised
over $18 million in funding, collected over fifty thousand webseries
and amassed over three billion views.
As impressive
as those statistics appear, the co-founders of blip.tv still believed
that there was room for improvement and thus enhanced the website in
May 2011 with a new facelift and fine-tuned vision plan for the future.
“Until now there hasn’t been a single website dedicated
to showcasing the most entertaining series on the web,” CEO Mike
Hudack announced in a press
release. “Today we are launching that site.
We’re focused on helping people discover the best original series
and allowing producers to build sustainable series for the long-term.
The launch of this site helps us achieve both of these goals and marks
a turning point for blip.tv and the emerging industry of original webseries.”
As Joshua
Cohen at Tubefilter
points out, the original blip.tv concept was good at attracting webseries
onto its website but not so good at showcasing them or making them easily
accessible to viewers. The company thus commissioned a market research
firm to suggest ways on how to enhance the blip.tv experience and discovered
the need for a more systemized approach in the website’s design.
“We asked people how they discover content,” Hudack explained.
“And what we found out was chaos and algorithms don’t work
very well. People want a curated experience. Their perception of web
video is there’s a ton of it and they don’t know how to
find the good stuff. The people we surveyed don’t want to be spoon
fed their choices, but they want to be told what’s good.”
The relaunched
blip.tv has Hulu feel to it, with the best content spotlighted on the
main page as well as new categories to collect its webseries in a more
organized fashion. Each webseries, meanwhile, has a homepage that is
custom designed by the producer with artwork and key episodes for the
newly initiated to explore. Blip.tv has also been more selective with
its content, allowing only eighteen hundred of its fifty thousand shows
to receive the enhanced treatment. According to Tubefilter, the decision
on what webseries made the cut was determined by three factors—production
values, consistent release schedule and having a cohesive brand—but
viewership played a key role as well.
“Huge
view counts are obviously hard to ignore,” Senior Director of
Network Programming Eric Mortensen clarified. “But it’s
really less about specific numbers and more about momentum. If we see
a show on the move, we want to work with it, whether it’s currently
getting five thousand views per month or five million.”
Mike Hudack
considers this new “selectiveness” as beneficial to both
the website as well as the webseries medium. “It’s the difference
between the Android Market and Apple’s App Store,” he told
Tubefilter. “Sure, you can find great stuff in the Android Market,
but not all of it’s going to work.”
Collaborating
with independent producers has been part of the blip.tv philosophy from
the very beginning. In April 2010, co-founder Dina Kaplan told the Harvard
Business Review that despite having built the best
possible platform for blip.tv prior to its initial launch, when the
website went live in May 2005 it attracted a mere two users during its
first month. “We needed to clearly identify a market we wanted
to serve, and then figure out who the thought leaders in that market
were, and talk with them and listen to their needs,” she went
on to explain. The blip.tv team thus idenitified five people in the
still small webseries community and literally asked them, “What
should we build for you?” Equipped with the answers, blip.tv was
re-released a few months later and immediately added five hundred users
while steadily increasing that number as time went on.
According
to Kaplan, blip.tv combines three services for the independent webseries
producers who utilize its site. “First, we host the videos, providing
the player, the bandwidth, the servers, and the whole backend required
for a successful online show,” she said. “Second, we help
people distribute shows. Shows have what we call a ‘Total Potential
Audience,’ and this will never be found on one site. Blip.tv makes
it easy for content creators to syndicate shows everywhere from YouTube
to Vimeo to iTunes and also to TV sets through Fios, TiVo, Sony Bravia
TVs, LG Televisions, and other distribution outlets as well. The third
leg is ad sales. We run advertisements on shows and do fifty-fifty revenue
shares with content creators on all advertising revenue that comes into
blip.tv.”
Mike Hudack
told GigaOM
that webseries creators received over a half million dollars in advertising
revenue from blip.tv in 2010 and the company expects that number to
top one million during 2011. “We have had advertising deals for
shows with very small audiences that just happened to have the exact
right combination of attributes that an ad buy was looking for, so it’s
certainly true that the highest quality shows and the most popular shows
do the best in terms of advertising, but there’s something for
everyone,” Eric Mortensen explained of the monetray approach in
a 2009 interview with MN
VIDEO PRO. “Our goal, everything we do is
help shows grow their audience to the point they can make money and
therefore blip.tv can make money. It’s a nice situation to have
all of our interests aligned.”
Part of
the philosophy behind growing an audience for a particular webseries
entails building a community around the shows themselves. Blip.tv thus
offers the ability for a particular webseries to stream their blog onto
their blip.tv homepage and enable viewers to post comments about a series
there as well. “Our community has really developed in a different
way than YouTube,” Mike Hudack told DVGuru
in January 2007. “YouTube is focused on being a digital video
repository, we’re focused on providing presence for shows.”
Not only
have the co-founders of blip.tv built an effective website capable of
showcasing the best webseries on the Internet, they have likewise developed
an approach that offers a true partnership with the creators while keeping
them engaged in the future of not only blip.tv but the webseries medium
in general. Despite an increase in the number of quality shows being
produced in recent years, that medium is still in its infant stages
but blip.tv has done its part in both the progression of the fledgling
industry and the community that has sprung up around it. The new design
and features that blip.tv constructed in May 2011 should only enhance
the presence of the webseries as a legitimate narrative device, something
that Mike Hudack, Dina Kaplan, Eric Mortensen and their fellow partners
envisioned from the very start.
“Television
is moving toward the Web and the Web is moving toward television,”
Mortensen said in 2009. “There were broadcast networks that were
very broad, then cable TV came around and it really opened things up
and allowed people to do a wider variety of shows. It allowed people
to spend less money on that wider variety of shows and I think the Internet,
it’s the logical next step in opening things up for audiences
and producers. So, providing that the viewing experience is familiar
to the viewer, I think it’s pretty irrelevant from the audience
side where the content is coming from, who’s making it. It’s
just ‘is it good or is it bad’ and can I have a relatively
convenient way to find and consume it?”
Thanks
to blip.tv, that vision is starting to become reality.
Anthony
Letizia (May 23, 2011)
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