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From pizza museums to Sundance films: Kickstarter projects collect $274M in 2012

Eliza Kern — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 23:14:44 +0000

In a big year for self-funding and crowd-funding, it’s hard to imagine 2012 without Kickstarter. The company revealed some stats on how it is used in a presentation posted Tuesday, highlighting just how big the platform has grown — and what it wants to emphasize about its success.

Kickstarter backers pledged more than $300 million for a variety of projects, from an app that tells you when it will rain to a bus stop construction in Athens, Georgia. But as my colleague Ki Mae Huessner pointed out in GigaOM’s post on our favorite Kickstarter projects of the year, there are certainly some questions about the platform’s success.

Plenty of projects don’t hit their deadlines and entrepreneurs have sometimes struggled to meet the demand for scale from backers. However, as Om Malik wrote in his interview with founder Perry Chen, Kickstarter is a visual representation of the crowd funding movement that’s providing new ways for entrepreneurs and makers to access capital. At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, Chen said he has no interest in selling Kickstarter or taking it to an IPO.

Here are some of the most interest pieces of information from the Kickstarter year in review, which can be viewed in full here:

More than 2 million people pledged $319,786,629 and successfully funded 18,109 projects
More than $274 million was actually collected via funded projects
Of the more than 2 million people who backed a project, 452 people backed more than 100 projects
Music had the most projects funded (5,067) but games had the most money pledged ($83 million)
Only 17 projects raised more than $1 million
10 percent of films at Sundance were funded through Kickstarter, and a Kickstarter-funded film was nominated for an Oscar, and a Kickstarter-funded opera came to the Kennedy Center
Kickstarter funds the world’s first pizza museum

And here are the categories Kickstarter used to break down the funding:

And here’s Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen speaking at our RoadMap 2012 conference in November:

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Vimeo debuts Focus Forward, a film series about the big ideas in tech

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:00:08 +0000

There’s no time like the present to be using technology to make something really big. Of course, a lot of people and companies are already doing just that — but unfortunately, they don’t always get the kind of wide exposure they deserve. That may be partly because the media coverage of such big-picture, highly technical projects is not as accessible and absorbing as it could be.

So it’s awesome that video sharing site Vimeo has joined forces with General Electric and video publisher Cinelan to launch “Focus Forward” – a micro documentary series that aims to showcase big, world-changing technology innovations in a compelling way. The project’s website describes its mission thusly:

“In the span of three minutes, these films will encompass everything from medical advances to economically viable ‘green’-powered homes to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries, not to mention innovations in transportation and healthcare, gene therapy and waste management, or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires them.”

In all, it’s a very cool mission. The series launched in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking — including Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica and Objectified) and Jessica Yu (who won an Oscar for Breathing Lessons), among others –are signed up to make Focus Forward films that will premiere online and at film festivals throughout the year.

But to me the most exciting thing is that the project, which is hosted on Vimeo, will also be open to submissions from the general public. People who submit videos to the contest, which is called the “Focus Forward Filmmaking Challenge,” will be up for $200,000 in cash prizes, including a $100,000 grand prize. Submissions will open during the Tribeca Film Festival this April, and the prizes will be handed out next year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. This is what Focus Forward says it’s looking for:

“We’re looking for professionally produced, three-minute end-to-end stories about people or organizations whose innovative efforts in medicine, computer science, robotics, engineering, green energy, or other fields of applied technical knowledge have had a significant positive impact on humanity. Recent, cutting-edge inventions that are changing how we live today are of special interest.”

With how inexpensive digital SLR cameras with video capabilities have become in recent years, and the huge amount of innovative tech projects out there, there is a lot of opportunity to create awesome films that fall into the Focus Forward mold. It’ll be exciting to see what people come up with.

Here’s a video explaining what the Focus Forward Film Challenge is all about:

Focus Forward – Short Films, Big Ideas: Filmmaker Challenge from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

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Oscar Monetizes the Two-Screen Experience, But Is It Too Soon?

Liz Shannon Miller — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:36:02 +0000

Creating a second-screen experience to accompany a live broadcast has become a requisite part of putting on any live event, whether it be the Emmys, the Grammys, or even the Super Bowl. So this year, Academy Awards broadcaster ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are truly stepping up, providing unprecedented access to behind-the-scenes material to be enjoyed online while also watching the telecast. But what’s also unprecedented? The fact that there’s a price tag.

Oscar All Access begins its coverage during the red carpet pre-show, with multiple “360 cams” giving users the option to thoroughly examine the gowns and tuxes. Then, coverage shifts to inside the Kodak Theater, where users can switch between 15 cameras of access to the action backstage, and concludes with a live stream from the post-show Governor’s Ball.

It all sounds pretty cool — for one thing, the ability to select camera angles gives the experience an edge on last year’s Emmy Awards, Here’s the catch: All Access costs $4.99. Meanwhile, the Oscar Backstage Pass app for iOS users contains identical content except for the “360 cam” technology, but is priced at $0.99.

Which leads me to ask: Is it too early to start monetizing the two-screen experience? At this stage of adoption, the idea seems completely counterintuitive to the reason for creating that experience for the awards show audience, which is to get more people watching live, and improve the show’s ratings.

Live event broadcasts have become huge ratings hits for networks thanks to the use of multiple screens — the most recent example being the Super Bowl, where social media engagement helped lead to the game’s highest ratings since 1987.

That leads to the disconnect: If the purpose of creating a two-screen experience is to get more people watching, then why would you charge for it, which ensures less engagement than a free service?

It’s not that the Academy and ABC charging for this premium service is a bad idea — it’s just that it may be too early, and it distracts from the primary way that awards shows generate revenue: ad sales. If 100,000 people sign up for All Access, that’s a nice $500,000 for ABC and the Academy to split — or about a third of $1.7 million, the cost of one 30-second ad spot during this year’s broadcast.

It’s worth noting that there is plenty of free content that will be available for Oscar fans switching between screens, including basic red carpet and behind-the-scenes coverage on Oscar.com, as well as fun experiments like the “mominees” selected to Twitter about their nominated offspring during the show. Between the Franco factor and Twitter usage during live events only growing and growing, it seems like a safe bet that ratings this year will be up. But we’ll never know if those ratings could have been even higher, if all of the coverage were available for free.

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Vid-Biz: Cord-Cutting, IAB, Kyte

Chris Albrecht — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:06:23 +0000

Report: Video Cord-Cutting a Myth; Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett says television subscriber additions grew by 441,000 in the fourth quarter of 2008. (Telephony) Bernstein’s research follows LRG’s data showing online video is not impacting TV subscriptions.

IAB Working to Develop Best Practices for Ads in TV Shows Online; issues to be discussed are the number and placement of ads in TV long-form programming. (TVWeek)

Kyte Launches iPhone Apps Framework; allows Kyte partners to create an app that includes video, live chat and monetization. (TechCrunch)

Oscar Video on Oscar.com Only; ABC keeps clips off YouTube. (MediaMemo) (And this isn’t the first time, either.)

History Channel Launches First Web Series; Great and Telling Tales with Timothy Dickinson offers up interesting nuggets from the past (like the extraordinary death of Rasputin). (The History Channel)

SAG Rejects AMPTP Offer; 73 percent of SAG’s board voted against the proposed contract. (The New York Times)

Vizio Takes No. 2 Spot in Fourth Quarter Flat-Screen Sales; company’s value-oriented sets catching on with cost-conscious consumers. (The LA Times)

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Where to Watch the Oscar Nominations

Chris Albrecht — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:30:36 +0000

Awards season enters the home stretch tomorrow as the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards will be announced at 5:30 a.m. (ET). Unlike last year, the nominations won’t be live-streamed, but video of them will be available on Oscar.com at roughly 6 a.m., along with trailers for each of the films. But Oscar isn’t entirely leaving video out in the cold.

Oscar.com will feature The Road to the Oscars, a hosted daily show that will cover all the events leading up to the events. Backstage at the actual Academy Awards ceremony there will also be a “Thank You Cam,” which will let long-winded stars continue their appreciation after they’ve been booted offstage; the “Backstage Cam,” offering exactly what you think a backstage cam would; and the “Press Room Cam,” capturing all the excitement of hearing the question “How does it feel to win?” being asked over and over and over.

The Academy Awards show happens on Sunday, Feb. 22 at 8 p.m. (ET).

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