Six Questions: Qlipso CEO Jon Goldman

19 Aug, 2010 By: Chris Tribbey

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When social media start-up Qlipso bought Veoh.com this spring, company CEO Jon Goldman saw an opportunity to turn one of the largest online, free video portals into a site where it could integrate social media features, including Web cams, 3D animated avatars and live chat.

Now drawing 12 million unique viewers per month — putting it in the top 10 among online video sites — Veoh has become a popular site for both copyrighted material and user-generated content. Goldman took a few minutes to talk about the future of online video.

HM: What did Qlipso see in Veoh when it acquired the site in April, and what would Qlipso eventually like to see Veoh become?

Goldman: Veoh.com had a large global audience, great advertising relationships, solid technology and infrastructure, which made it an attractive test bed for the Qlipso multiuser content-sharing platform and Qlipso’s innovative social-viewing features.

HM: Piracy is rampant in online video. What sets Veoh apart from similar legal video sites, and what does Veoh do correctly or more adeptly to draw consumers to legal video?

Goldman: Veoh uses content fingerprinting and human intervention. We also provide a content take-down tool to our content partners, as we obviously respect the rights they have to not have their content pirated or reproduced without their permission.

HM: What are the biggest challenges for online video viewing, for both Veoh and other online portals? Broadband? Breadth of content?

Goldman: The biggest challenges for all content are discovery and recommendation. Video content doesn’t just compete with other video content, it competes with other popular online entertainment, which right now includes social networking and social gaming — the most popular activities on the Web. With video, there is the basic challenge of aggregating interesting content, but assuming you’ve done that, you also need to get it in front of viewers and hope they share it. With Qlipso, we bring the stickiness and increased engagement of multiplayer and social gaming to the content experience: By bringing people together both live and asynchronously, we allow the influence of tastemakers to spread naturally.

HM: How do you monetize user-generated content, and what can content creators learn from user-generated video?

Goldman: We place ads against user-generated content, and that is how we monetize all of the UGC that is available on Veoh.com. In terms of what others can learn, the data paints a pretty clear picture: You can see exactly how popular something is and how rapidly it became popular. Successful UGC often shows that professionals focus too much on production values, whereas consumers are primarily concerned about viewing engaging content. That content can be low-def on their cell phone screens or a high-def video made with a Flip HD hand-held camera, but people connect with videos that in some way feel more “authentic” because of the homemade and genuine quality that content typically has.

HM: Lay out how Qlipso is integrating aspects of social networking into Veoh. How does social networking improve the online video viewing experience?

Goldman: Regarding how social networking improves the online video viewing experience, I’d like to flip the script — video enhances socializing, not the other way around. For connoisseurs of a particular type of content or genre, the media itself is the core experience, but most people enjoy music, sports, movies, etc. as a way to connect with other people. The movie Dinner for Schmucks is not an arthouse movie best savored in silence; it’s a social experience with friends, and that’s what’s missing on the Web and what Qlipso fills in. We bring the shared conversation back to content on the Web, the same way people experience media offline. On Veoh, thanks to Qlipso, users can get together in media-sharing rooms and see a video at the same time with each other, frame-by-frame. They can talk with voice chat or type with text chat. They can see each other on webcams or express themselves as animated 3D avatars. Most important, this all happens in a browser-based environment — you and your friends don’t need to download a client or plug-in to enjoy the experience of social viewing. To get friends involved, all you need to do is send them a URL to click on. Even if you’re not online at the same time, all the media in my media room stays in that room, so that friends can check it out whenever convenient for them.

HM: Why are certain countries, such as Egypt and Thailand, blocked from accessing Veoh, and what would need to happen for the site to be available worldwide?

Goldman: We incur bandwidth costs in these countries, but don’t have advertising sales. When we can find revenue in a region, we can easily make Veoh accessible.

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