Video is a trending (twitterology) topic these days and so I thought it would make for a fitting topic for our first roundtable event. From streaming, hosting, licensing, advertising, distribution, animation, creation, syndication, licensing, marketing, tracking, analytics, and much more video is now more popular than ever.
This trend is due to a number of factors, but a significant portion can be attributed to flash player technology, broadband access, and sharing of video by embedding code on blogs and web pages. In fact according to a recent report by eMarketer, a recent study conducted by Lightspeed Research states that “72% of US Internet users watched video clips monthly-making video bigger than blogging or social networking”. Truly an amazing stat and one that I would say goes somewhat unnoticed as video doesn’t create the same splash as social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
That is why we have 5 startups dealing with different aspects of video at our first roundtable event. The companies are @5min, @Aniboom, @Anyclip, @Bliptv, @Flixwagon, and potentially a few more startups will be joining in. The companies range from a movie clip database, mobile video broadcasting, virtual animation, web TV, and knowledge and instructional video. On the industry side we have executives from HBO, MTV, and Sony attending to discuss what they are currently doing and share some insight with the founders. Lastly, we have people coming from the investor side as we have Raj Das an active angel investor and CEO of Pom Partners a global digital media firm along with Phineas Barnes from Firstround Capital and Jeremy Levine from Bessemer Ventures.
The inaugural event will be full of lively discussions and insights as we have people from all sides talking about video and where it currently is and where it will be in the future. The founders are the ones that are leading the innovation and the Founders Roundtable is giving them a new platform to help them succeed.
