Shapiro, 36, launched Veoh, a peer-to-peer television infrastructure that lets anyone broadcast her own TV show over the Net, in September.
"I'm very much an activist. I grew up in Russia during the height of the Cold War, a very restrictive communist society that didn't allow the individual to have a voice. Since moving to this country when I was 10, I've always had this drive to democratize the human voice. Technology is just a tool, and the Internet will be our tool to democratize television.
Today, there are three primary ways to get TV content delivered: through airwaves, cable systems, and satellites. We're building the fourth way using existing broadband Internet infrastructure to deliver full TV-grade video so anybody with a digital camera, a PC or a Mac, and a broadband Internet connection can have her own TV channel. We envision artists of all sorts--cinematographers, actors, and writers--creating their own channel, which is their digital portfolio. Companies that have never before been able to afford TV advertising will be able to buy just $500 worth of Internet-based TV advertising. On the entertainment side, the Hollywood model is unscientific: Networks gamble on a few shows, and it's hit or miss. We allow everyone to publish content and then networks can track who's most popular. Because we use peer-to-peer technology, like Skype does, mathematically speaking we can hold an infinite number of channels. But we've built it to make sure there's no piracy on the network by still maintaining centralized control. We're the first system of its kind to do that with large-scale video distribution.
I hope that Veoh will let people in the United States see what's really going on in the world. Right now there are people shooting video in Darfur that depicts atrocity, but because advertisers don't want consumers to see people dying, they just show us another rerun of Friends. I don't believe in that. I believe when you show reality, the world will rise up."
His technology lets Newnam, 33, and others create interactive-TV applications for GSN, the game-show network, and such shows as CSI and Survivor.
"In 1999, while I was at Harvard Business School, I wanted to solve the issue of how to merge TV with the Internet, and started GoldPocket. Historically, there were two challenges for interactive television to become reality. One was a technology problem: Every home had a different kind of TV and a different set-top box, so how could you create an interactive experience that would work on whatever someone had? In 2001, we began buying the other advanced technologies so we could do it.
There was also the chicken-and-egg problem. Cable and satellite operators didn't want to deploy the software to make interactive TV work without content. Programmers didn't want to spend money creating great interactive content if no one could see it. But because of the threat of TiVo, in the past year or so advertisers have been the catalyst.
One of the toughest decisions we faced was realizing we needed to be a lot more than a back-end technology company. We had to understand the Hollywood community in order to be a success, and actually live it. So in 2001, we moved our entire company from Boston to L.A. We told people six weeks before we moved, and 70% of the team came, uprooting their families. Today, our staff is two-thirds technology folks, one-third creatives, part of a new set of professional interactive-TV writers emerging in Hollywood. It's been a huge learning experience for me. I have a strong tech and business background, and discovering how much goes into creative is mind-boggling."
Dunbar, 52, cofounded the DiMA Group in 2002 to devise new advertising methods for the future of television. Clients include Best Buy and Kraft Foods.
"I've been an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. I worked for HBO years ago, created the first online banking system for Bank of America, and had my own consulting business for 15 years, working on new technologies in the interactive space. A few years ago, I ran into [DiMA cofounder] Tom Morgan, and we started thinking about the digital landscape. Video on demand and digital-video recorders were starting to emerge, and it was apparent there was a set of advertising issues that were just going to explode. The vast majority of programming today is supported by $60 billion in advertising revenue, and that advertising model is going to have to change as the new world of TV comes about.
We're trying to help the TV advertising and programming communities do just that. We can help provide new functions for placing ads in TV content, but unless people embrace how they create ad messages for those functions, they'll fall flat. For the past two years, we've run something called AdLab, a collaborative environment where marketers, their ad agencies, programmers, and technology-support companies come together to conceive of and create new advertising test models. For example, telescoping is one of the new types of ads emerging. It's when you see some kind of an overlay or icon that prompts you to drill down so you can learn more in a program. T-commerce is when you'll have the ability to take that one step further and make purchases by clicking through your TV. We've found that the collaboration aspect is almost as important as the consumer research because what's changing is the relationship between the advertiser and the programmer. They have to understand how to develop mutually relevant content. You either believe that ads will go away and become irrelevant, or you think video as a marketing medium will continue, which we do."
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