Aswath Weblog

Pulver and Internet Video

Last week, Wall Street Journal had profiled our own Jeff. For me the noteworthy item is a quote attributed to him: "I blew it," Mr. Pulver says bluntly. "I had the juice. I could have done something." We all can question his self-critical assessment. I did. But the rest of the story talks about his future interest – “Internet video”. It is clear he is dead serious about it. So it is an interesting exercise to guess what he could be doing in this space.

The directory service and NAT/FW traversal techniques used for voice communication will suffice for visual communication as well. So there are no technical challenges for conducting real-time visual communication.

When I visited pulver.com recently, Jeff showed me his recording studio and talked to me about building up content. But in the scheme of things it is really not ground breaking. It will be beneficial if we make it easy for the general public to produce quality video. Indeed, recently New York Times had a story on this point. They talked about web based services like Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg that serve this need. This means this is already a “me too” play.

There must be a place where people can go and access all this “long tail” video. Of course YouTube and Google video and countless others are already doing that.

So what is left?

I enjoy reading many text blogs. But I am too hyper to listen to podcasts. When somebody refers to a snippet in a podcast, I can not hear that portion; I need to play the podcast linearly and wait. Instead, it will be nice if click the URL and I am taken to the specific spot in the podcast, just like “#” anchor in http html, but with an enhancement: not just the author, but anybody must be able to place the anchor. This way it becomes a social effort. Imagine reading the line “It is not personal Sonny. It is strictly business”; you click on it and you see the clip from the famous movie. The media is still accessed at the rightful owner’s site; but a third party has identified the specific location. This way it has the shades of “social networking” and it optimizes the user experience. This idea is an extension of his recent experiment – Feedcollectors.

What do you think?