USC
Annenberg School Center for Public Diplomacy
Room 207
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
1837 Hrs
I am sitting at USC in the Annenberg School for Communication waiting for the talk by Steven Starr to begin at 1900 hours.
Cory Doctorow is holding an animated discussion with two gentlemen on the evils of DRM and what the MPAA and the RIAA in lockstep with the hardware manufacturers are planning to foist on the public in terms of DRM and your ability to do what you want with the media you pay for.
Cory just stated that if you update your Creative MP3 player to get the newest firmware, it surreptitiously disables the ability to record from the built-in FM receiver, all this under the guise of “added functionality”. This is precisely the reason I am here tonight.
- Steven Starr is the co-founder of a company called Revver.
- Revver pays MORE the MORE a media file gets played
- He just mentioned the sale of YouTube to Google
- Revver sets up technology to allow the distribution of media files
- They have developed ‘Super Distribution’, where media files fly through the Internet, reporting back to Revver “Hey, I'm being watched! Send me an Ad!”. So people get paid on those terms.
- Revver splits ad revenue 50-50 with the media creator
- The Mentos and Coke creators got:
- 5 – 6M views and
- got $70K in Ad revenue that they split with Revver, thus
- making 35K on a 2.5 minute video that cost
- $100-200 to make
- Revver has a set of tools and technologies, with an API that allows you to create your own site and become an affiliate of Revver that makes money as a re-distributor who makes 20% of the Ad revenue
- Content creators can opt out of Ad categories that they do not wish to be associated with
- Revver released its BETA 11 months ago
- They do NOT allow copyrighted video
- Revver has been seen as a company that has taken UGC to the forfront of the ‘free media conversation”.
- Revver uses CC licenses. Every piece of video flies out with a 2.5 version CC license.
- Revver is NOT a video portal destination site, per se. They differentiate themselves as a tools and services company
All in all, it was a great talk, where a lot of very good questions and issues were raised on the legalities and dangers of content creation and rights retentions/ownership in the world of UGC or User Generated Content.
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