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Talking online content with Austin’s Unicorn Media
It was lost amid the shuffle for me at South by Southwest Interactive, but a new Austin company launched during the festival and aims to be another option in the increasingly crowded online video and music market.
Unicorn Media says it wants to give artists (musicians and filmmakers, primarily) a platform to get their goods out online and make money from their work.
Why would artists do that instead of putting their own work on YouTube or MySpace and building an audience there?
Unicorn plans to split advertising revenue with its artist partners and employ a “Velvet rope” policy, accepting what it considers to be only the highest-quality content on the Web. But in the YouTube era, is a subjective set of the “highest-quality” videos and music what people really want (or are willing to sit through ads to get to, even if the content itself is free)?
Joe Bransom, vice president of Artist Relations at Unicorn Media, chatted with me by phone and talked about the young company. He said the traffic on the site so far is “incredible” since the festival, but he declined to say what “incredible” means in terms of numbers.
The festival launch, he said, was not really a push for Unicorn as a consumer experience, but more of a starting point to get artists on board. He says that video and audio will stream on the site, but that eventually artists will be able to decide what content they’d like to sell through the site (for example, song downloads) and that once an artist is accepted into the fold, they’ll be able to upload their own materials and have control of their own social media page. Artists who work with Unicorn won’t need to be exclusive to the service and retain all the rights to their work.
So far, Unicorn has signed indie record labels Silverback Records and Suburban Noise.
The quality of video, Bransom said, will be 700k HD quality and music will be CD quality. “We want to give the viewer an experience that’s much better than YouTube and other sites,” he said, “We don’t want any crappy video that’s not professionally produced.”
I asked Bransom about OnNetworks, another Austin company focused on online video. He made it clear that they’re not competitors — he said his company would more likely work with a company like that to distribute their videos to other parts of the Web.
Most notable for gadget heads: The company is looking at the possibility of a proprietary piece of hardware that could hook up to a TV or partnering with another company to bring Unicorn’s content to a service (like, maybe, Apple TV or any number of other streaming devices hitting the market to bring Internet video to the living room).
So what will Unicorn’s content focus on? Well, that’s a little fuzzy. Bransom said that as far as video, it’ll be a broad range: “We have content about elder care. We’re also getting into extreme videos like base jumping and snowmobiling off of cliffs. It could be a 12-year-old kid or a 50-year-old or older person,” he said, “pigeonholing an 18-35 (demographic) doesn’t really work with the Internet.”
But does lacking a firm target audience mean large volumes of content without a focused identity?
We’ll be watching Unicorn to see what develops. Who knows whether they have the right strategy. It seems as if there are dozens of new video sites popping up, all convinced they’re going to change the way we consumers entertainment.
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By John
April 4, 2008 5:18 PM | Link to this
AH! Silverlight!