Media Coverage 2013
TouchCast Wants You to Watch Web Video With Your Fingers By Peter Kafka | June 27, 2013 The problem with most Web video startups is that you’ve seen them before. Another compilation of cheap clips posing as the next big cable channel. Another solution for nonexistent “discovery” problems. Another “Instagram for video” that won’t be. So, at the very least, give TouchCast credit for novelty and ambition. The company imagines that it can completely reinvent the way you watch Web video by turning it into an hands-on, interactive experience.
The basic idea: TouchCast lets people create and watch videos that are layered with live Web pages, YouTube clips, Twitter streams and other digital touchpoints that viewers can expand, manipulate and turn on and off with their fingers. It’s a notion that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has watched “Minority Report.” But it’s also one that runs counter to the way we’ve leaned back while watching screens, for more than a century. No big deal, says TouchCast’s Edo Segal, who does not have modest ambitions. “We’re actually claiming that this is the future of the Web.” Alrighty, then! Segal made money during Web 1.0 by selling his Relegence financial newswire to AOL; for this project, he is joined by designer Charley Miller and former TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld.* You can play with TouchCast now, via an iPad app; you should also be able to check out TouchCast videos via the company’s website and, eventually, an embedded video player. But my hunch is that the best experience in the near term will be the app. And even then, you should be prepared for some clunky stuff: Making watchable Web video is hard, and adding widgets to a crummy video won’t change
the fact that it’s crummy. TouchCast is free, though the company plans on adding freemium upsells, and you can see obvious advertising potential if it gets real adoption. The company is also trying to sell an enterprise version, via a phone-booth sized machine, to TV networks. It’s easy enough to imagine TouchCast falling completely flat, because that’s the default odds for any startup. And this one wants to cultivate an entirely new behavior, so the odds get even steeper. But if you want to make an argument for their success, it might go something like this: Video-watching has already become an interactive experience. It’s just that we’re doing it on second screens, when we tweet about what we’re watching, or check IMDb to figure out who that actress is, or go find that “Minority Report” clip on YouTube. So jamming all of that onto one screen makes a funny kind of sense. Easier now if you look instead of read. Here’s a non-interactive version of a TouchCast video I made this morning. To see the full version, you’ll need to download the app, or find the clip on the TouchCast.com site. I’m not winning any lighting, hair or makeup awards for this one. And I am not a fan of that camera angle. But you can get the idea:
* Disclosure: I’ve known Erick for a long time, and we have mutual friends and a shared fondness for backyard barbecues. On the other hand, when he was at TechCrunch, he used to engage in all manner of jackass behavior that made me want to punch him. So I think it balances out, more or less.
TouchCast Thinks It Can Create Smarter Web Videos Than YouTube Startup pitches iPad app for creating interactive video broadcasts, which require its own media player By Todd Spangler | June 27, 2013 TouchCast is touting an app for creating Internet videos with fully interactive, live web elements far superior to what’s available through YouTube — although the startup entertains no fantasies that it can compete with the video giant’s scale. New York-based startup is pitching media companies and other content creators on the idea. TouchCast’s iPad app, released Thursday, uses a media player based on the HTML5 web standard to enhance videos with embedded elements, which can include live web pages, Twitter feeds or even related videos. “The web is evolving to look more like cable TV. But it’s the same content you are watching on television — it’s dumb video,” TouchCast CEO Edo Segal said. “This world of video is collapsing with the world of the web.”
Startup has a “freemium” model for individual content creators. The free version lets users create videos of up to five minutes each, and store up to one hour of video on the service. For more storage, TouchCast plans to charge a monthly fee; the approach is similar to online-storage provider Dropbox. For media companies, meanwhile, the company is licensing its tools based on number of producers and views in the player. Segal claimed TouchCast has inked some deals in the “seven figures.” There’s also an opportunity down the road to serve ads with TouchCast videos, Schonfeld said. Units could include preroll ads, and advertisers could create branded content using TouchCast as an advertising unit in itself.
TouchCast claims to be working with some major broadcasters (which Segal declined to identify) as well as YouTube content creators. But at least one big challenge it will face is that TouchCast-enabled videos must use the startup’s own web and mobile players, which could inhibit its attractiveness to major media firms. YouTube and other video platforms do have the ability to insert interactive elements within a video stream. But Segal said in YouTube’s case those are just annotations with links: “What we have really done is immerse HTML inside the video.” The startup, although it has created a video-sharing system similar to YouTube, says it isn’t trying to build a rival to the 800-pound Internet video gorilla. Segal noted that videos created with the TouchCast app can be uploaded to YouTube (although none of the interactive features would work). “We don’t see it as competitive with YouTube. We are trying to create a brand-new experience,” he said. Segal formed TouchCast in 2010. Last year he hired Erick Schonfeld, former editor in chief of TechCrunch, and product chief Charley Miller, a former videogame designer. Based in Gotham’s West Village, the company has about 20 employees and is funded by the founders. Segal formerly served as VP of emerging platforms at AOL, which acquired his real-time search startup, Relegence, in 2006. He also is founder of bMuse, a digital media studio startup. Among traditional media and Internet companies, Segal argued, “there isn’t enough innovation around the base product. Not enough people are thinking about the core video product.” TouchCast’s Video Apps, dubbed “vApps,” are on-screen elements that look like TV graphics but are interactive and update in real-time. Initial examples include YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, Flickr photo galleries, news headlines and stock charts. Developers can also create and customize their own vApps.
Media companies must use TouchCast’s player but can use any content distribution network provider. TouchCast uses Amazon Web Services for the application layer coupled with a proprietary solution for video delivery. Similar to YouTube, TouchCast has a process to respond to copyright-infringement complaints, as specified under the U.S.’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act. TouchCast for iPad is available free to download from Apple’s iTunes App Store. Users can view TouchCast videos on the app, or on touchcast.com via Chrome and Safari browsers. A PC-based version of the application is in the works, and TouchCast plans to eventually reach other devices as well.
Co-Founded By TC Alum Erick Schonfeld, TouchCast Aims To Reinvent Online Video With Interactive Apps By Anthony Ha | June 27, 2013
To explain TouchCast, a startup that’s launching its first product today, my old boss Erick Schonfeld argued that the Internet has’t really transformed video. Sure, with sites like Netflix and Hulu, the distribution model has changed, but he said they’re just “a different pipe” — the underlying content is pretty similar to what you’d find on TV. “The whole problem with video right now is it doesn’t really play nicely with the rest of the web,” Schonfeld said. I think that underplays the extent to which a YouTube video or a Vine is pretty different from what we’ve seen before, but I understand Schonfeld’s bigger point — that for the most part, online video feels walled off from the rest of the web, at embedded in a widget on a website but not really interacting with the rest of the site, or with any other online content. Schonfeld, along with his co-founders Edo Segal (founder of real-time search startup Relegence, former vice president of emerging platforms at AOL, and now CEO of TouchCast) and Charley Miller, are trying to address this with TouchCast — apparently this is what Schonfeld has been working on since he left TechCrunch last year. (He’s also the executive producer of the DEMO conference.) The overall vision is really big — to reinvent online video and rethink the web in a way that “looks like TV but still feels like the web.” Today’s launch isn’t quite that ambitious. Instead, it’s meant to be the first step in that direction. TouchCast is releasing an iPad app for video authoring and discovery. The idea is to offer a powerful video creation tool that doesn’t require all the work that video editing normally does (in fact, the current app doesn’t allow you to do any real post-production work at all — you just shoot and share), and to enrich the experience with what the company calls vApps. Those vApps (short for video apps) are really where the TouchCast vision comes into play, by allowing users to incorporate web content like Twitter streams, Facebook Pages, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and stock carts, into their videos. Miller stopped by the TechCrunch office a couple of weeks ago to show me the app — before he started recording, he set up a couple of vApps, including a Google Map, ahead of time. Once he started shooting, he just tapped on them to bring them into the video, and he could interact with them the same way you can with any web content — given the iPad’s touch interface, it was very Minority Report-ish.
So if you’re a reporter, it’s an easy way to enrich your video with online content. Schonfeld noted this also means a journalist can quickly get a video online without being delayed by editing. (Not that it’s just meant for journalists — the company says the app is designed for use by everyone “from veteran YouTube creators to video enthusiasts, from in-studio and field broadcast reporters and journalists to educators and students.”) TouchCast says it’s launching with nearly two dozen vApps created by the company itself, but it plans to turn this into an open platform for any developer to introduce their own apps. As for the videos , you can watch them in the iPad app, on the TouchCast website, and on YouTube. Eventually, Schonfeld said TouchCasts can be integrated with any website — in fact, he suggested that they could become the first thing you see on a website, sort of a masthead or introduction to the site, with what we think of as a normal website pushed “underneath the fold.” TouchCast is self-funded. The iPad app is free, but Segal said TouchCast can make money in a number of ways, including subscriptions for additional features and storage, enterprise licensing fees, and advertising. Update: You can see the technology in-action in the YouTube video below, though if you want the full, interactive experience you have to check it out on the TouchCast site. You can also read more about the vision in this blog post.
TouchCast for iPad brings the ‘future of the Web’ to video-authoring with interactive browsable layers
By Paul Sawers | June 27, 2013
What the world needs is another online platform for all your video-sharing needs, right? Well, maybe.
Indeed, TouchCast’s vApp library is ‘open’, so developers can create and customize their own vApps.
While it can be difficult to muster enthusiasm for yet another game-changing world-beater, there is a new iPad app in town that brings a pretty compelling proposition to the table. From the labs of Edo Segal, Erick Schonfeld, and Charley Miller, TouchCast is an iPad-optimized video authoring tool, delivering a Web/video cross-breed replete with navigable apps superimposed directly atop the footage. If that just made you splutter ‘huh?’, here’s what it looks like. TouchCast touches down Users can either ‘Touch’ or ‘Cast’ – the former meaning you can watch and interact with videos on your iPad or at TouchCast.com (Chrome and Safari only). But it’s the ‘Cast’ authoring tool that’s particularly alluring here, which obviously is an enabler for the ‘Touch’ aspect. When you first launch the app, you’ll be asked to create an account or log-in – fortunately you needn’t do any of these in the first instance. You can dip your toe in without giving over any details.
Now, you can create what’s unsurprisingly known as a TouchCast – a recorded video skit on anything you like. There are templates to get you going, such as News Cast…
…Business Cast, Sports Cast and more. Or, you can just create your own one from scratch. The templates are great though, featuring a customizable, scrolling ‘Breaking News’ banner. It really would work a treat for citizen (or professional) journos.
Things start to get really interesting with video apps (vApps). TouchCast lets you create videos that are layered with live Web pages, video clips, maps, Twitter streams and other facets of the digital world. “We’re actually claiming that this is the future of the Web,” says Segal, TouchCasts’s CEO.
Viewers can manipulate, expand and generally interact with them as they see fit. And the good news is, they can also switch them on and off with the deftest of touches. So, as a video creator, you can create pretty rich, professional-grade broadcasts directly from your tablet in seconds.
You can also browse other TouchCasts, while bookmarking your favorites.
TouchCast has some notable people at the helm too – Segal made his mark during the early days of the Web, selling his Relegence financial newswire to AOL in 2006. And Schonfeld is perhaps best known as a former TechCrunch editor. Though TouchCast is currently iPad-only, it will be rolling out a PC incarnation this fall. Meanwhile, check out the official promo video below…on YouTube.
Startup Rundown: TouchCast Makes Your Videos A Lot Less Lame, and iHeartRadio Wins Windows’s Heart By Jordyn Taylor | July 3, 2013 TouchCast touches down Check out the iTunes store for the coolest new video technology: TouchCast, the app that lets you infuse video with interactive digital elements. “[It’s] a new medium that looks like TV, but feels like the web,” says TouchCast cofounder Erick Schonfeld in an online demonstration. We have to admit, it looks pretty sweet when Mr. Schonfeld drags a live Twitter feed or an interactive Google map across his video screen, or plays a YouTube video over his own talking face. We’re certain that video podcasts are about to get a lot more interesting. iHeartRadio loves Windows Phone 8 iHeartRadio—the Pandora alternative that lets you customize your own radio stations—is finally moving to the Windows Phone 8. If you’re a Windows Phone user, you can now access over 1500 radio stations from across the country (or create your own), and easily share your musical discoveries with friends and followers on social media. We’d admittedly try it out for the sole purpose of creating a playlist inspired by Selena Gomez’s “Come And Get It.” NYC Digital is paving the way This summer, help carve out New York’s Digital Roadmap by attending a series of meetups hosted by NYC Digital. Staged in Brooklyn, Staten Island, The Bronx, and Queens, the sessions pretty much invite you to share your plans to make NYC the center of global digital domination—we imagine they’ll run along the lines of a mad scientist convention. Your ideas could go towards shaping the next annual New York City’s Digital Roadmap, which outlines the city’s progress in areas like Internet access, STEM education, and tech development. Click here to check out the dates, times, and locations of sessions. MassiveImpact gets a new teammember MassiveImpact, the world’s largest performance mobile advertising platform, has recently appointed Eyal Zohar to Vice President of Product Management. “As the VP of Product Management, he will enable the company to advance our leadership in pure performance mobile advertising and ensure that our customers will continue to profitably promote their products on mobile devices,” said MassiveImpact CEO and cofounder Sephi Shapira, in a statement. May the Facebook shares be ever in your favor, Mr. Zohar. Musicmetric picks up the tempo Good news for fans of Musicmetric, the program that charts the online trending of musical artists and newly released albums: Musicmetric’s parent company, Semetric Ltd., announced yesterday that it has invested $5 milliofrom VC funding into U.S. expansion, as well as into adding
some sweet new features to the Musicmetric Pro service. “Having the ability to collect data that measures performance is vital in today’s culture of immediacy,” said Gregory Mead, Semetric CEO and President, in a statement. “The expansion of Musicmetric Pro to include iTunes and Spotify data, along with the valuable insights we already collect from Bit Torrent networks and socials, makes our service the most comprehensive measurement tool available for the music industry.” Freelancer.com goes (even more) global Freelancer.com announced yesterday that its international service—which pairs employers with freelance workers—has reached 8 million users in 234 dialect-specific regions. The same day, Freelancer.com also added ten new languages to its repertoire—bringing the total to 30—allowing the site to accommodate an even broader range of users in the future. It’s never been so easy to find someone to design the website for your farm in rural Mongolia! Show me the Bitcoin Media showcase company Startup Debut (owned by the fun-loving Bit Angels cofounder Michael Terpin) recently announced it will hold the world’s first media showcase events for bitcoin and digital currency companies. The events are set to take place at Las Vegas’s 2014 Consumer Electronics Show® in Jaunary, and at Austin’s 2014 South by Southwest® festival in March. The jury’s still out on whether you can pay the entry fee in bitcoin.
Introducing TouchCast: Video With The Second Screen Built In
By Jeff Bercovici | June 27, 2013 The internet is increasingly being consumed on devices with touchscreens, and ever more of it is being experienced in the form of video. But those two trends haven’t really fit together comfortably. Compared to a typical webpage, with its dozens of clickable links and widgets, the average video might as well be trapped behind Plexiglass. That’s the problem that the cofounders of TouchCast — Charley Miller, Erick Schonfeld and Edo Segal — set out to solve. The new iPad app they rolled out today allows users to create videos with built-in interactive components like web pages, maps and Twitter streams. Say you’re watching a news segment about Microsoft MSFT +0.18% with an embedded stock chart, and you’re wondering how its shares have been performing versus Apple AAPL +0.56%‘s. You can look it up while the segment plays on in the background. The app enables users — including FORBES — to create their own interactive TouchCasts with the help of 16 different types of video apps, or vApps. In addition to the types mentioned above, these include apps for comments, photos, headlines and YouTube videos. “Historically we’ve always thought of lean back and lean forward,” says Segal, who earlier founded the search company Relegance and sold it to AOL AOL -1.17% in 2006. “There’s a new category and we’re calling it ‘lean back and touch.’” That locates TouchCast at the center of one of the big movements in media: the push to harness the power of the so-called second screen — what TV viewers are doing on their laptops, phones and tablets while they watch. “We think the second screen is an intermediary step,” says Schonfeld. To give you a better idea of how it works, we TouchCasted this video of our editor in chief, Randall Lane, talking about the new edition of the FORBES Celebrity 100. View it on an iPad to get the full experience.
TouchCast App Puts Pro-Grade Video Editing in iPad Users’ Hands
By Chris Dignes | June 27, 2013 Released today on iTunes, TouchCast is a new video-creation platform that places all the tools of an editing studio in one free iPad app. TouchCast has two elements: One allows users to watch and interact with videos via the service (“Touch”), the other is the studio/production features designed for creators to shoot and publish interactive videos (“Cast”). Notably, TouchCast features a new technology called vApps (for “video apps”), which are interactive on-screen elements that users can play around with while watching a TouchCast video. The vApps do not interrupt viewers’ video playback, while enabling them to interact with fully-functional web pages, maps, and polls. vApps also support YouTube videos (that’s right: video within a video). And if you’re wondering, yes, TouchCast has a patent on the vApp technology. It’s easy to see how vApps could benefit vloggers and broadcasters, allowing them to recreate the format of a cable news show, but with more interactive on-screen content and graphics. The “Touch” section is where users go to subscribe to other TouchCasters and watch videos. TouchCast videos can also be uploaded to YouTube, though that would have to be at the expense of the vApp technology, which the YouTube player doesn’t support. TouchCast has some sample videos already available on their YouTube channel if you want to check out what we mean by all of this. TouchCast is founded by Edo Segal (former vice president of emerging platforms at AOL), Erick Schonfeld (former editor-in-chief of TechCrunch), and Charley Miller (a veteran video product engineer). Initially only available on the iPad, the plan is to expand the app to other platforms, including PCs/Macs, by the fall. As for monetization, TouchCast founders say they’re considering a freemium model, which will allow users to pay in order to download additional features and storage. The company says it’s also in talks with “enterprise-level businesses” to license its technology, and expects to generate additional revenue via advertising across its various platforms.
TouchCast Launches with iPad Video Production App By adding video apps, TouchCast lets creators enhance videos with clickable elements that provide more information. By Troy Dreier | June 27, 2013 The startup TouchCast launched its first product today, and this is one to keep an eye on. TouchCast, co-founded by Erick Schonfeld (formerly of TechCrunch), aims to transform online video by making it less a siloed separate activity and more a clickable multimedia experience, like the rest of the web. The company's first product is a free iPad app called TouchCast that lets creators make interactive videos full of useful, clickable items. The company calls these items video apps, or vApps, and they can be used to add a live Twitter feed to a video or call up a web page. Viewers can then tap on them for more info. Other vApps let creators add a news feed, map, photo, or even another video. The iPad app includes green screening, filters, sound effects, and titles. There's even a handy teleprompter built-in, since it must be hard to remember a script while controlling all that interactivity. The app doesn't include any post-production editing; once the video is done, it's done.
The company says a desktop client will be available soon. The results look attractive, but time will tell if creators want to put the time into working with vApps, or if viewers respond to the interactivity. If you've tried out the TouchCast app, leave a comment below with your reactions.
Content Creators’ Newest Tool Touchcast Brings The Video Studio To iPads By Ed Carrasco | June 27, 2013
TouchCast co-founders Edo Segal, Erick Schonfeld and Charley Miller claim they have a way to improve the quality of video production using the power of the iPad. Going live today on iTunes, their TouchCast app allows creators to produce content and enhance videos with embeddable features like live Twitter feeds, live blogs and other content. Some of the interesting features from the app that creators can utilize include a built-in teleprompter, a green screen feature, customizable layouts and sound production elements. In addition, TouchCast has “vApps” that are similar to TV graphics, but allows viewers to interact with maps, web links, live blogs and other features. Viewers can watch these interactive videos through the TouchCast app or via the TouchCast website. TouchCast videos can also be uploaded to YouTube, although the interactive links and features on the video won’t work. Segal, who is also the CEO of TouchCast, told Variety about his app’s features in comparison to YouTube, whose only interactive in-video features are annotations and video links: “What we have really done is immerse HTML inside the video.” He added that while TouchCast is also a video-sharing platform in itself, it isn’t seeking to compete with YouTube but rather “create a brandnew experience.” Creators can use TouchCast for free, but only for short videos up to five minutes each and with one hour’s worth of storage. Users who need more storage can subscribe for a monthly fee. For more free video production apps for your smartphone, check out our five best here.
TouchCast Intro’s “TV Studio in a Box” for the iPad
By Andy Plesser | June 27, 2013 TouchCast, a New York-based start-up, has launched an App for the iPad that allows content creators to use the tablet to record, edit and produce multimedia video. A “TV studio in the box,” is how co-founder Erick Schonfeld describes the company’s offering. Beyond editing, the the App allows users to import live feeds into the video. We spoke with the former TechCrunch editor about his new start-up and the opportunities around content creativity in creating interactive, multimedia video for the Web. You can find company demo video here. Here is the report in TechCrunch on today’s launch.
Cult Favorite Wine Lover Gary Vaynerchuk Returns In Time For July 4th By Sam Gutelle | July 3, 2013
A few years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk was on top of his online video game; the host of the Wine Library TV video podcast had a book, a radio show, hundreds of episodes, and many traditional media appearances under his belt. After releasing the thousandth episode of Wine Library TV in 2011, Vaynerchuk announced the end of his series, and then, like that, he was gone. Now, after a hiatus of more than two years, Vaynerchuk is back. The wine lover and amateur sommelier has debuted a new episode Wine Library TV, his 1,001st. This time around, his show lives on Touchcast, a brand new platform best suited for use on mobile devices. Viewers are able to scroll around Vaynerchuk’s page while the video plays, and annotations are frequent and easily accessible through each of the four parts of the episode. So what’s changed for Vaynerchuk since his last podcasted wine tasting? Obviously, his new home is the main difference, but the Jets paraphernalia on his walls are now much more pathetic than they were in 2011. But most importantly, there are a lot of new wines for him to try. In the first episode, he tastes one from Germany, one from Greece, and one from Washington state. Episode 1,001 arrives just in time for the 4th of July. While beer is a more traditional beverage for the cookouts that will take place all over the country, a nice bottle of wine is just as nice of a way to celebrate freedom. Even if you don’t play to take any of Vaynerchuk’s suggestions, it’s still great to see one of the most colorful online video personalities get back in the game.