GigaOM » Airtime

Like Color, time for Airtime to get off the air

Om Malik — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 17:08:04 +0000

I will give Sean Parker this: he does know how to spin a phrase. Never mind the fact, it is still him trying to spin harder than a fat man (me) in a spinning class. His company, one he co-founded called Airtime (ChatRoutlette-minus-men-showing-off-their-private-parts) is essentially going nowhere fast. It has lost a lot of its team members. The offices are empty and the company is looking desperately to sublease its San Francisco office.

And yet, the man is unfazed. Here is what he told Liz Gannes:

Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. We are iterating on our approach… Airtime is finally getting around to some of the bigger ideas that got me interested in this project in the first place… Now is the most toxic time ever in Silicon Valley…Startup team are always in flux, so like all startups we’re always talking to candidates for various key roles… At this point nothing definitive has been decided….It’s only 12 weeks from launch…I’ve only been running the company since March.

I added up all those random quotes from Gannes’ post so you can see what he is saying: absolutely nothing. Airtime really is a house of cards standing on a handful of matchsticks. The company has 10,000 monthly active users — and that is generous by any stretch of imagination. There is a steady exodus of executives, co-founders and smart people. Madness, I say!

And no, it is not just an opinion. I have talked to folks intimately familiar with the company and have heard similar stories Liz has outlined in her post. Parker in the past has attached himself to working and growing concepts, most famously Facebook and lately with Spotify. His talents helped those companies, but frankly, starting a product from scratch and building into a have-to-use fast growing service is easier said than done. In other words, let’s just face the facts: growth happens, for inexplicable reasons and you can’t draw it on a whiteboard.

Airtime suffers the same malaise as Color, the other liberally-funded startup: they don’t really solve a problem that is acute or hasn’t been solved before. Sarah Lacy in a post about Color wrote:

People no longer get told what products to use in a Web 2.0 era, they use them and spread them to their friends if they’re good. Color wasn’t– as was evidenced by its two-star rating. Money and grand articulations of a vision can’t shortcut that. The Web has become too crowded and users are too smart.

She might just be writing about Airtime. If Color’s Bill Nguyen boasted about the $41 million he raised from Sequoia Capital, then Airtime talked about its $33 million in funding, celebrity launch event and bold claims that sounded hollow from day one.

I didn’t really see what Airtime was for when it launched — I am sorry, there are already many tools that do a better job than that service. Skype, Facebook and Twitter – they were like nothing before and hence they grew so fast and swept the world. They were communication revolutions and the consumers rewarded them with attention.

For now, Airtime wants to be a next generation Skype! Sure, and I want to be a latin lover. The fact is that in today’s attention starved world, if you miss the chance to make an impact, the world moves on to something new. It doesn’t matter who you were, how great your resume is and how many billions you have in the bank.

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Video chat startup Lutebox dumps plan A, goes shopping

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:00:17 +0000

What do you do when you realize that everyone else is doing what you want to do, but they’re doing it better? That’s the problem that that Ali Ahmed, the CEO of London-based video chatting startup Lutebox has been staring straight in the face for the past few months.

The service, which went into alpha last September, had been building for a while around a simple-yet-complex idea: talking with your friends while you all watch a premium video online. Then along came Google+, with its hangouts. And then came Airtime, with its idea of videochats around shared experiences.

Suddenly things looked a little trickier. Ahmed’s response?

Change direction and raise $500,000 from a syndicate of private investors to keep pushing the service into a new shape. The new, reinvigorated Lutebox — which goes into open beta on Wednesday — is no longer organizing itself around video, but instead wants to tap into another buzzy trend: social shopping.

“What we realized,” Ahmed told me, “Was that we didn’t have incredibly valuable content, and that we couldn’t afford to get it. We’re not Netflix, who can afford to pay millions to Warner Bros or Fox to get the latest movies.”

Instead he took cues from Pinterest and Fancy, developing a platform where you can talk to your friends about things you want to buy. You can see where he’s coming from: shopping in real-life is often a social experience, where you show your friends what you’re interested in and make collective decisions. What if that could apply online too?

To be honest, though, this is not actually as radical a change for Lutebox as it may seem: the core of the product is still a videochat service, where you can talk to up to six friends simultaneously about what’s on the page in front of you. The difference is what the subject of your chat can be. Now the site has added a shopping mall, where you can search for items from a range of different retailers (all U.K.-based at the moment) and discuss them with friends.

That means it’s got a better commercial model (Lutebox doesn’t have the same up-front costs as it did for video, and earns affiliate fees on every purchase made through its service) but it still faces some substantial obstacles.

The first is a broad one: is videochat really what people want to do? So many people have thrown themselves onto this bonfire, and yet — unsurprisingly — they’ve nearly all ended up being burned. While they may prove useful from time to time, videochats remain a niche pursuit. And videochats about specific topics narrow the field even more. Even Airtime, which had been hyped thanks to the involvement of Facebook investor Sean Parker and Napster creator Shawn Fanning, met with a muted response.

And then there’s the platform problem.

Lutebox is not a plugin that allows you to launch a chat on, say, an Amazon page. No, it requires you (and your friends) to be signed in to its service, and looking through its own catalog of stores. That means it has to become a destination, something which will require some serious and work to reduce the friction. The search needs a lot of work, the discovery requires some deep thinking, and the inventory needs to be carefully managed.

And if wants to follow in the footsteps of Pinterest and the like, I suspect that is going to need to appeal deeply to a specific user base, which means it is going to have to narrow itself even further to get more items in from specific, more popular stores. For example, I can see it having some use for fashion retail, but probably not for purchasing electrical equipment. Right now it’s a grab bag of items from across the board.

Still, it’s only just gone into beta — so there is clearly time and now money to work on improvements. If the site can overcome the natural inertia of videochat — perhaps by allowing people to talk not just with their friends, but also trusted guides (why not launch a chat with a fashion stylist, say, for advice on the dress you’re looking at?) it may be able to carve out a corner of the market.

And if it can partner with a retailer to produce a white label service, that may have some value too. (Ahmed says it’s a possibility, but he is not talking to retailers about it yet).

So, plenty of challenges. But I’ll give them time to take a breath: right now they’re still reeling from the decision to shift from video to shopping.

“The stress around the decision to pivot, it’s tough because you’ve invested so much time and energy and belief into something,” Ahmed told me. “We had 250 testers in alpha, who were using it a lot — but it was a realization, more than anything, that it wasn’t useful for users. It all boils down to that.”

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Airtime: not enough there to make me care

Ryan Kim — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 22:55:08 +0000

Today’s launch event for Airtime, the Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning social video chat service, was a good metaphor for the product it was showcasing: the star-studded event was poorly planned and showy without enough depth. After starting more than 40 minutes late, the press event turned into more of a celebrity-spotting spectacle with stars like Jim Carrey, Jimmy Fallon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joel McHale and others clowning around as they tried to divert attention away from demos that continued to run into technical problems.

That’s not to say that Airtime can’t succeed at some point, but I came away feeling like the service needed more seasoning and substance to be really interesting. Now, after spending more time with the application, I feel like Airtime is more of a shallow roll-up of other familiar services: there isn’t enough there there yet.

Here’s a synopsis of Airtime:

It’s a one-to-one, web-based video chat service built using Facebook as a social layer. The chats happen at Airtime.com but users can get notified of incoming chats through a message in Facebook when they’re logged in.
Airtime offers a service for watching video simultaneously: users in a chat can start playing a video that both participants can view similar to Google Hangouts. Users can share only YouTube videos for now, either the stuff they’re previously shared on Facebook or they can find other videos through a YouTube search function.
The final feature is taken from Chatroulette, allowing people to jump into random video chats with strangers. They can filter by their current location, friends of friends, shared interests or some limited trending topics or they can just look for anyone to meet. The service reportedly has humans monitoring screen shots of conversations between strangers and the system uses machine learning and computer vision to flag potential bad behavior.

Part of the appeal of Airtime is that it brings together these different video-chat features into one tool. But a roll-up really only works if people are genuinely excited about doing all these things in one application. I might not be the target audience here, but I don’t actually see myself wanting to talk with other people just because we happen to live in the same city or have one thing in common. And I’m not sure a new destination site is going to get me to stop doing video chats over Skype, Facetime or Google Hangouts. These feelings became more apparent as I used the service.

When hopping into chats with strangers, I first of all had problems with Airtime’s filters. When I narrowed my filters down to only friends of friends, it offered me people I have no connection with. When I tried to just meet people with shared interests, I got a couple people that I have nothing in common with. One time on this setting, I was told I was talking to someone who lived in New York like me. But that person was actually in India and had never been to New York.

I understand if Airtime is willing to be flexible with the filters at the start to ensure people get a match but it can lead to awkward moments where you realize you don’t even have one thing to really talk about.Another time, I was paired with someone only after I said I liked the New York Times. But sitting there with this guy, I don’t see how this connection could spark anything interesting. The conversation ended quickly.

There are things I do like about the service. The video quality is pretty good and it seems to hold a connection well. I can get up and going pretty quickly and the video sharing feature is seamless.

But after spending more time with the service, it feels like it needs more. I can understand getting something out the door, but it feels like it should have a launched with a mobile app or multi-party support. Right now, it’s a Flash-based application and it runs primarily on desktops. I’m told mobile apps are coming soon but I think it should have been there at the start considering how mobile people are these days. Or Airtime should have brought some Google Hangouts multiparty chat features to the party. That would make watching videos together more interesting and fun. Right now, I can’t imagine going through that many videos together with one person. And since the videos are only limited to YouTube videos, I can’t share anything I’ve uploaded directly to Facebook or other services.

One of the issues I’ve noticed so far is that it’s a lot of guys on the service. This may change over time, but it also brings up some of the same questions with Chatroulette. Are women going to be as eager to show their faces to strangers as men? Some might but many single women I’ve talked to said they’re not interested in meeting people this way. It’s too early to say if we’re going to see bad behavior or if Airtime’s security features will ferret out exhibitionists. But I still think that even if everything is PG, it still can be creepy for a lot of people.

A couple of other small gripes and observations:

There’s a system for awarding a fellow chat participant with stars. But there’s no limit to what you can give someone so it’s pretty meaningless.
In addition to multiparty chats, I’d like to have the ability to share files during video chats and also record conversations as well. That could be useful for conducting video interviews that I can integrate into blog posts.
I’d also like the ability to zoom in on a particular location besides my own or search for someone to talk to about one specific topic. That would be cool for larger events or to get a man-on-the-ground report from some big event. Right now, there is a ticker that runs along the chat window showing some recent trending interests so you can chat with someone about that particular topic. But you can’t pick out your own topic.
I did have some problems connecting with a couple of friends, who were on Facebook but somehow couldn’t receive my calls.
While watching shared video, there doesn’t seem to be a way to adjust your own voice separately from the video’s sound levels. I found myself shouting a little to be heard over noisy parts in the video.

I think Parker and Fanning are too smart to let Airtime stumble around for long. And I think they have some interesting ideas around real-time interaction and how video can be an expressive and humanizing medium. I’ve been thinking about video lately and how it’s become more casual over time, as people find it easier to video chat or broadcast their lives without having much to say. But what’s driving some of those trends is really mobile and multi-party interaction, something Airtime doesn’t have yet.

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Stars align behind Airtime video chat, but is it Skype or Color?

Ryan Kim — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:25:51 +0000

Despite the flame-out of Chatroulette, the idea of fostering live real-time, one-to-one video chats with friends and strangers is still intriguing, at least to Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. The two Napster founders have finally taken the wraps off of Airtime, their social video chat service that is part Skype, part Chatroulette, and part SocialCam with Facebook as the layer for matching users by their interests.

There are three features in Airtime:

There’s a simple one-to-one, web-based video chat service that doesn’t require registration or a download. You just log-in through Facebook. You can talk to other Facebook friends and get notifications for chats through Airtime’s Facebook integration.
Users can watch shared video together in real time and stay in a video chat as they view the video. For instance, you can watch a YouTube video together with a friend while also being able to see each other. Videos that a user previously shared on Facebook are listed under their Airtime profile and can be clicked on for live viewing. Or users can find new videos with using YouTube video search.
And there’s the Chatroulette-like feature that allows strangers to meet outside of their Facebook connections. Users can talk to other people in their area, friends of friends and people with common interests. And chat users can share their interests with each other easily and see what they have in common.

Sean Parker said Airtime is meant to be a network service similar to Facebook or Skype. The goal is to build a service that taps the real-time potential of the Web and lets people find others and express themselves in ways that are often constrained when relying on existing social graphs.

The live chat feature is built in with security to flag abuse and monitor for bad behavior, Parker said. Human reviewers monitor screen shots of chats between strangers, while machine learning and computer vision help aid reviewing in spotting abuse. The Facebook log-in, with real profiles attached to behavior, is also meant to keep people in line. Parker repeatedly stressed Airtime’s security features, trying to make a distinction between Chatroulette, which became known for guys showing off their junk.

A parade of stars including Snoop Dogg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alicia Keyes, Ed Helms, Joel McHale and Olivia Munn helped Parker show off the service during a very glitchy demonstration. But despite the celebrity endorsements, Airtime faces plenty of challenges. The video chat service will compete with Skype, Oovoo and a host of mobile-focused chat services. The service sounds more safe than Chatroulette and the interest-based matching is helpful, though many people aren’t clamoring to talk to strangers. As someone next to me said, “I don’t even like to video chat with my friends.”

The social video sharing feature is nice and taps into some of the popularity of services like SocialCam and Viddy with the ability to watch together live. That’s interesting but again, it requires people to be on together. It’d be nice if groups could view videos together in a group chat but that’s not available at launch. And Airtime overall doesn’t support mobile devices for now, so smartphones and tablet users need not apply.

Still, I’m interested to see how this all pans out. As I wrote recently, live “ambient” video is becoming a new form of communication, allowing people to be more casual and spontaneous with friends. Just as pictures have become a simple language of their own, video has the potential to be a much more powerful way for people to interact, share and be creative.

But I think Airtime will need to evolve some more to make it clear why people want to spend their time there. A big splashy launch event is helpful in drumming up attention and it shows that Parker and Fanning definitely have some big-time pull. But the proof will be in how many regular people show up and use the service, a factor that doomed the initial launch of Color, a photo and video-sharing app that is trying again through a partnership with Verizon.

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Fanning & Parker to launch Airtime: Here’s what we know

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:17:38 +0000

Airtime, the social video startup founded by Napster co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, is set to launch with a press event in New York Tuesday. Airtime has been billing itself as a “live video network” that supposedly offers “the most simple, fun way to connect live to people you know, and those you should.” Others have simply said that it is a little like Chatroulette, minus the nudity and with tighter Facebook integration.

Airtime has been very good at keeping things quiet, with very little information leaking out during its closed alpha test this spring. However, here are a few things we already know ahead of Tuesday’s launch:

Airtime will allow video chat both with people from your social graph as well as like-minded strangers, and it allows a bit of a blind date atmosphere by offering semi-anonymous interaction. The site’s Terms of Service were recently changed, but before revealed: “Your name is not shared when you are paired with a stranger. However, your Airtime and Facebook friends will be able to directly call you and see when you are online.”
Airtime ties any participation to a Facebook account and allow users to block others in order to avoid unwanted nudity.
The company has been conducting regularly-scheduled trials with participants of the closed alpha test every week. A closer look at the site’s HTML code reveals that people who were lucky enough to get access to the private beta were told to “come back during user test time” after a successful sign-up. At times, access was also throttled, with testers being told that “the site is currently full.”
Airtime was originally called Supyo. The company has raised a total of $33.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Google Ventures and a bunch of well-connected including Mike Arrington, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am and others.
Clear Channel CEO Bob Pitmann is joining the board of the company, according to All Things Digital.
Airtime’s artwork has been done by San Francico-based graphic design artist Shyama Golden.
Airtime acquired social event tracking startup Erly two weeks ago. The deal can best be described as an aqui-hire and brings three Hulu veterans, including the video service’s founding CTO Eric Feng, to the Airtime team.
The launch event will include appearances by a “a seemingly random group of celebs,” as the New York Post put it Monday. A-listers in attendance will include Snoop Dogg, Kristen Bell, Ed Helms, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joel McHale, Olivia Munn and Martha Stewart, according to the paper.

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Airtime, from Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, to launch in June

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:59:52 +0000

Airtime, the social video startup founded by Napster co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, is going to publicly launch on June 5, according to a tweet the company sent out Tuesday.

We look forward to saying hello on June 5th. Sign up to be first in line. airtime.com—
Airtime (@airtime_inc) May 08, 2012

Airtime has been operating more or less in stealth mode, but the company is said to take the idea of Chatroulette to the next level, pairing strangers for real-time video communication and sharing. However, it looks like the site will be less about anonymous interaction, and more about getting to know people. Airtime is currently doing a closed beta test with around 4,000 monthly active users, according to data from its Facebook app.

The company recently redesigned its website, and its terms of service include references to sharing video, text and pictures. Additionally, some bits and pieces found on Google suggest that users may be able to watch live video streams together.

Airtime received around $8 million in funding, and its website lists “Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Braun, and Michael Arrington” as investors.

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