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TotalVid in the Press
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Title: All you have to do is pick up a video
Date: October 2, 2005
By: William Hageman
Manly men, come out of that closet. Forget that metrosexual stuff. Buy a guitar. Start mixing concrete. Strap on a tool belt.
And thank Karl Quist.
Quist is president of TotalVid, a company that lets you download instructional videos--manly instructional videos--that'll teach you how to rewire your home, how to perfect card stunts or how to learn whitewater kayaking. The company has some 1,400 videos, a chunk of them instructional.
His most downloaded video: "12 Shots to Escape Any Street Fight."
Quist started TotalVid (totalvid.com) just over a year and a half ago, heavy on action sports and instructional videos.
"Within a few months it became really obvious to us that the big hits on our site were instructional-type content," Quist said from the company's Norfolk, Va., headquarters. "That made a lot of sense to us. There are certainly other alternatives for learning martial arts or how to do a home-repair project. But they're all pretty expensive and pretty time consuming and not convenient to get."
Matt Robins of Chicago got clued in about TotalVid while playing cards with buddies.
"Once in a while we get some new members, and one of the guys wanted to learn how to play," Robins said. "And they said they found this really good instructional video tool, and, you know, poker table talk, and there was other stuff. So a couple days later I looked at the site."
Robins has downloaded about half a dozen videos, including one on boxing and one on how to make a table.
"Instead of going out to Ikea and putting in the hour to put together one of their tables, I figured I'd save a little money," he said.
So he now has a table that he uses to play cards on, of course, and for meals.
There's no subscription fee; downloading a video for a week costs $1.99 to $3.99, or you can get three for $5.99. You can also purchase the videos.
"If you just want them for a week--I don't need to make too many tables--one week is enough."
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Title: Gadget Freak: 'Must-See TV' Hits the Web? Finding Great Online Video
Date: Monday, August 29, 2005
By Dan Tynan
Sure, the Web may one day become the repository of all human knowledge. More important, though, is that it may also turn into the ultimate TiVo. Before long, you might be able to watch any show ever recorded with just a few simple mouse clicks.
AOL, CBS, CNN, Yahoo, and many others are already flooding the Net with video. The trouble? As with regular old TV, the challenge is to find stuff worth viewing.
Search Me
I started my hunt by visiting Google's and Yahoo's new video search engines. Unfortunately, neither one is really ready for prime time.
Google's beta video search indexes clips based on their closed-captioned text. So a search for episodes of The Simpsons turns up any clip that mentions "The Simpsons" (many featuring morally righteous types trashing the program on C-SPAN). When you find an actual Simpsons episode, you can't watch it because Google doesn't have the right to rebroadcast it. But you can use Google's downloadable viewer to watch homemade or public-domain material, like footage of the always-thrilling Milpitas City Planning Commission.
Yahoo's video search is a bit friendlier than Google's and produced more bona fide hits. But most clips I tried to play no longer existed--possibly because they'd been pulled off by the copyright police. As with the Google search, I had better luck with home movies and video blogs (vlogs).
A slightly better option is Blinkx, which pulls brief clips from well-known sources such as the BBC and HBO, along with podcasts from various sources and vlogs from Mefeedia.com. You can tell Blinkx to search for videos and stash them in a folder on your desktop or feed them to your RSS reader. But no matter what I searched for, most of my hits came from C-SPAN--likely because there's a ton of C-SPAN content online. Playback via RealPlayer or Windows Media Player was hit-and-miss, depending on the source of the feed.
A Few Good Sites
While video search will get better over time, the best way to find stuff worth watching today is by tuning in to various niche Web sites. Here are a few of my favorites.
You say you never got to see Jon Stewart dress down Tucker Carlson on Crossfire? You'll find that clip at IFilm.com, along with movie previews, news reports, and parodies. Some material is R-rated, but it's all 100 percent legal--and free. AtomFilms.com is also chock-full of short free films worth seeing (well, most of them). Note that both sites make you watch short ads before showing you the goods.
Feeling reckless and hormonal? Surf over to Totalvid.com, where you can download videos about paintball, motorcycles, snowboarding, anime, and more for $2 to $4 a pop. I downloaded one titled "Questionable Tendencies" ("Find out what happens when you mix drunken idiots with gasoline, explosives, and too much horsepower!"). It's unlikely to win any Emmys, but I have never felt so good about being old. That's worth four bucks.
If you're fascinated by all things digital, you'll probably like NerdTV--a 13-part series hosted by Robert X. Cringely that's available as a free download from PBS. Of course, you can also view clips of PC World's Digital Duo for free.
Video on the Web will get really interesting as more people offer their own feeds alongside cable and broadcast fare. Who knows? Maybe one day you'll be able to choose between The Daily Show and The Dan Show (the adventures of a grumpy middle-aged tech columnist). Meanwhile, Web video is mostly 5 million channels of not much on--and way too much C-SPAN.
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Title: Riding the wave of video downloads
Date: May 11, 2005
By Richard Shim
Sick of watching the same two windsurfing videos over and over, Karl Quist decided to make his own waves by producing daredevil content aimed at his kind of people--avid sports enthusiasts.
"I was the target customer--someone with an interest in a specific topic but starved for content," said Quist, general manager of Norfolk, Va.-based start-up TotalVid. "So starved, I was driving my wife nuts by watching the same videos like 1,000 times. I figured if someone is that immersed in a topic, they'll go crazy when they find a place that offers content they're looking for."
So a little more than a year and a half ago, Quist started TotalVid. The 10-employee company owned by Landmark Communications sells specialty videos--extreme sports, anime, martial arts and home improvement--for download to PCs.
Though not as ambitious in breadth of titles as more mainstream movie download services CinemaNow or MovieLink, Quist's service targets niche markets with customers who have fewer channels to turn to for content. At the same time, it taps into the increasing number of home-broadband customers eager for content and the growing consumer interest in easily distributed downloadable video.
"There a big trend toward more people producing video for smaller audiences--locally produced video for whatever target audience you're looking for," said Gerry Kaufold, an analyst with researcher In-Stat.
As consumers become more familiar with video off the Internet, services such as TotalVid could be on the cusp of a big swell. The download video service market is expected to grow in revenue from $1 billion in 2004 to about $5 billion by 2008, according to In-Stat. And though that number pales in comparison with the nearly $50 billion in annual revenues enjoyed by the movie industry, the download video market's growth is happening faster.
As home broadband connections proliferate, digital-content companies are chomping at the bit to offer broadband customers content such as movies. The challenge? Many consumers are used to buying their content through other avenues.
"I figured if someone is that immersed in a topic, they'll go crazy when they find a place that offers content they're looking for." --Karl Quist
"There are already so many ways--DVD, VOD, P2P, cable TV, broadcast TV, satellite TV, pay-per-view, home video rental--1,001 ways to get the same mainstream movies easily and cheaply that the services are offering," said Todd Chanko, an analyst with Jupitermedia.
TotalVid's advantage is that it provides obscure content, such as movies on mountain biking, to a neglected part of the market. TotalVid offers more than 1,000 titles, which cost up to $4 and expire after seven days. In a classic up-selling move, consumers can also purchase a DVD and permanent digital version of a movie and have the rental cost subtracted from the DVD buy.
"TotalVid addresses an underserved market in a fairly accessible manner (downloads over the Internet)," Chanko observed.
But can "sustainable" be used to describe a business that offers titles such as "Concrete Secrets--Sidewalks and Driveways"? And can TotalVid set itself apart enough to make it a site consumers come back to?
"Nonconsumption is our biggest challenge," Quist admitted.
Speed is another. Downloading a movie to a PC can take about as long as viewing the film over a broadband connection--not exactly a big draw.
Partnerships will play a significant role in helping alleviate that problem. TotalVid recently signed a deal with Comcast for the cable operator's high-speed Internet service. Starting this summer, Comcast subscribers will be able to download one free video per month from TotalVid's library. The deal benefits both companies: Comcast shows off its high-speed bandwidth--download is 4 megabits per second and upload is 384 kilobits per second--and TotalVid's library reaches a large audience.
Quist also expects to make content deals with producers, focusing on content that's not available for free download elsewhere.
Negotiating with producers can be tricky, especially since TotalVid and downloadable video content are relatively new services. The company shares revenues with producers on a per-download basis, but Quist declined to offer more financial details.
"We're bringing them a new slice of the market, and for them it's incremental," Quist said. "They view this market as a pyramid, with DVD buyers at the top and viewers of stuff like XGames (an extreme games event) at the bottom. In the middle are those who will pay for limited access to content...We're more of a complement (to DVDs) than a substitute."
Quist wouldn't reveal the number of customers who have used TotalVid's services, but he said growth has been in the 50 percent range month-to-month and about 25 percent of customers are repeat users. The majority of the start-up's customers fall into a key demographic for advertisers: 18- to 35-year-olds, and more than 95 percent of them downloaded video for the first time when they came to TotalVid, Quist said.
A subscription business is on the way.
"We will do a subscription offering, but we wanted to build up sufficient depth in our catalog to offer a compelling service," Quist said. The subscription service will be available in the coming weeks with fees in the $5- to $7-per-month range, according to Quist.
TotalVid's sports content will be a popular draw in the market, according to In-Stat's Kaufold.
"Over the next two to three years, sports-related content sites stand the best chance in the content download business," Kaufold said.
With the right wind at its back, TotalVid may have found a wave it can ride for a while.
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Title: It's Web first, other media later
Date: April 18, 2005
By Chris Marlowe
Action sports fans can take advantage of an unusual digital distribution opportunity thanks to a business idea from TotalVid. Beginning May 2, the specialty online video source will make "The Globe 2005 World Cup Skateboarding" available for download a month before it can be seen or purchased any other way.
Traditional windowing has little relevance to this market because TotalVid's catalog of action sports, anime, travel and instructional titles usually doesn't get theatrical releases. But this marketing concept seems to be a first even within the company's niche.
TotalVid.com will offer photos from the event, competitions, giveaways and a live chat with the title's executive producer, Brett Hardy. Response from the skateboard community and content provider Whyte House Prods. has been positive, TotalVid general manager Karl Quist said.
"The independent producers who make these kind of films are eager to pursue new opportunities for distributing their content," Quist added. "They have more to gain and less to lose than the major studios. We bring them an audience they're just not reaching."
Renting "Globe World Cup" will cost $3.99, the high end of a price scale that starts at $1.99. All rentals allow unlimited viewing for seven days.
"The type of content we carry isn't available through traditional distribution channels such as TV, video rental stores and DVD retailers," Quist said. "Fewer than 1 million people buy an action sports DVD, but 60 million people watched the X Games. There is a huge number of people interested in the content but who don't want to pay the price of a DVD."
The rental fee can be deducted from the purchase price should a customer choose to buy the download or DVD in the future. Quist said this "try before you buy" was particularly attractive to enthusiasts who were reluctant to risk the $20-$25 these specialist titles generally cost.
"If you buy it, you get the rights to download it first so you can start watching right away," Quist said. "We offer that as a bonus with every DVD we sell. We were very surprised when we found that in most cases our DVD buyers are taking advantage of that."
In addition to what TotalVid is calling its "virtual red carpet premiere," the company recently announced a deal with Comcast to offer the cable operator's customers instant access to full-length video downloads.
As part of the arrangement, Comcast High Speed Internet subscribers that sign on this year will be able to download one free video rental each month from TotalVid's library for 12 months. Existing Comcast High Speed Internet subscribers will receive one free video download.
Landmark Communications' TotalVid also will provide action sports video clips for use on the Comcast.net portal, where they will be included in Comcast's "The Fan" broadband multimedia player.
TotalVid's partners include Microsoft Windows Media, ThePlatform and Akimbo Systems.
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