GigaOM » Turntable.fm

Chill’s take on social video: Everyone is an expert

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:19 +0000

The third time may just be the charm for social video startup Chill, which started out as a kind of Turntable.fm for video, moved on to synchronized viewing of on-demand content and finally settled on a kind of Pinterest-like curation model.

Chill launched topical collections of videos last week, allowing users to become curators around a certain topic, and co-founder Brian Norgard told me during a meeting in Los Angeles a few days ago that traffic has gone through the roof ever since.

Check out my interview with Norgard below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Norgard told me that The Ultimate Steve Jobs Collection has been particularly popular; but the site has also seen a lot of long-tail activity for video collections around subjects like track and field or underwater cinematography that are curated by people devoted to the subject. “Everyone is an expert in something,” said Norgard.

Chill raised a $1.5 million round of funding last September. The company currently employs nine people and is located in West Hollywood.

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Forecast: the future of the digital music industry

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:55:33 +0000

The music industry has been in trouble for a long time. But now, aided by smartphone proliferation, new entrants are aggressively pushing alternative business models. This report examines the U.S. digital music market’s key disruption vectors: the areas where large market shifts are occurring and where companies will position themselves to gain share and increase revenues. These vectors will take some time to play out, but the overall industry should finally return to growth within the five-year forecast horizon, as digital music spending, driven by subscriptions, will average double-digit yearly growth to total $4.1 billion in 2015. Disruptive companies include Facebook, MOG and Pandora. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Last.fm serenades users with new discovery tool

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:51:22 +0000

Last.fm is one of the grandaddies of online music services, but it’s surrounded by upstarts and rivals who keep launching new products and expanding.

To combat this, the site has just gone public with a new service of its own, last.fm/discover, aimed at helping users find independent artists and fresh music.

Music discovery tools aren’t new, but Last.fm’s betting that its huge trove of data — 40 million or so users, going back to the site’s inception nine years ago — can help uncover acts that might be unfamiliar to you. Specifically, it’s based around a library of some 2 million tracks mostly from independent artists, but also from some labels that have licensed their music for this purpose.

Unlike most other attempts at music discovery, which use the traditional iTunes-style lists or cover art, Discover uses a cute HTML5 interface to guide people through.

On loading the page, users are presented with a view of rolling hills stretching into the distance, each labelled with a tag related to a genre or sub-genre of music. Up close are the broader categories — “alternative”, “indie”, “electronic” and so on — while other less popular ones are visible in the background: like a sort of 3D word cloud.

As you click on tags and dig deeper, genres split into sub-genres, which split into incredibly specific meta-genres — fancy listening to some hiccup or kl4bb1n d0wn, anyone?

It’s all based on user data, yours and the rest of the site’s self-defined tags, and each tag represents a radio station: simply click to play a based on the tag you’re currently browsing. You can then ask for more of the same, shuffle off to something different or drag and drop tracks into a playlist for sharing.

This isn’t revolutionary, but it is fun. That makes a big difference in a market that relies, to some degree, on novelty. While I appreciate the utility of most music streaming services, the ones I tend to really enjoy are those that convey a sense of emotion or connection with music — services like The SixtyOne or Turntable.fm, for example. As Last.fm’s head of product, Matthew Hawn, told me, too often online music “ends up looking like a spreadsheet”.

That makes this an interesting move from Last.fm, which is really trying to gain back some ground and get back to its roots as a tool for helping music lovers get more out of their listening — not simply go toe-to-toe with Spotify, Pandora or the rest.

Earlier this year I met up with Hawn, who outlined in an interview how the site wanted to stay relevant: looks like this is the first real fruit of that labor, but I’m told there are more launches in the pipeline.

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Lessons from Billy Chasen’s epic pivot to Turntable.fm

Ryan Kim — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:03:37 +0000

Billy Chasen had a dilemma on his hands. One of the founding members of Betaworks and the founder of Chartbeat and firef.ly, Chasen was knee-deep in his barcode-scanning startup Stickybits and had gotten good buzz at South by Southwest with moderate consumer adoption. But it wasn’t getting the kind of traction he wanted. It wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t a success.

With $400,000 of his original Stickybits funding still in the bank, Chasen made the decision in December to take a hard turn and abandon Stickybits for his favorite idea at the time, which turned into Turntable.fm, a shared interactive music-listening service that has gained about 1 million users since its launch in June. The New York City company just raised $7 million and put out an iPhone app. Chasen spoke at an event called Venture Shift on Thursday night in New York and shared some thoughts on his pivot. Here are some takeaways from his brief chat.

It’s hard to pull the plug on a mediocre success. He said it’s easy to spot a failure, and success is equally obvious. But the hard part is in making the decisions about a middling venture. But you have to be unsentimental about it. ”It’s your baby and you still believe in the idea and others do, too. The first thing I had to do is get everyone to agree that we’re not where we want to be,” said Chasen.

You need to telegraph your pivot well to everyone involved. Chasen said he worked hard to get investors on board with his shift. All of his investors stuck with him, save one who said he couldn’t get behind a music startup. The investor was eventually bought out by the startup. Chasen said he worked to make his investors aware of the fact that Stickybits was missing its goals. But while he got all of his investors aligned, he said he didn’t do a good job with his team. He basically just laid the new direction on them without much preparation. “It wasn’t as collaborative as it should have been. Some people were taken off guard. They asked, ‘What is this random product you’re talking about?’”

Do what you love. It should be obvious, but entrepreneurs need to follow their interests. Chasen said he had actually two ideas as alternatives to Stickybits, but he made the choice to go with Turntable.fm because he was really excited about music. Though he didn’t say it, it seems like his credentials along with his passion are what have helped keep his investors on board. Howard Morgan of First Round Capital, who invested in Turntable, said it took guts to change course but he saw that this was what Chasen was excited about, not Stickybits.

Keep a lot of ideas in your head. Chasen said he’s constantly thinking about ideas and has hundreds of them going at any time. When it came time to change direction, he was able to choose from the best of his collection of ideas.

When it comes to launching, draw a line in the sand. Chasen said he’s a perfectionist, but he knew that he had to launch at some point. So he drew a line in the sand to ensure that as long as he got to a certain point, he would feel comfortable in opening to the public. The temptation is to keep adding features, but he said you will never be able to launch if you don’t stop at some point.

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Chill brings live chat to Hulu’s catchup TV

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:00:18 +0000

Chill.com launched a major update to its site Tuesday that included new content from Hulu, bringing the latest episodes of popular shows like House, Castle and Dancing with the Stars to the social video chat site. Users can then watch these shows together in a synchronous fashion and chat in groups and also through one-to-one messaging.

Chill’s take on Hulu’s content comes with an interesting twist: Chill uses a so-called social appointment TV schedule to encourage as many people as possible to tune in at the same time. Episodes of individual shows are scheduled to repeat every three hours and can’t be viewed on Chill.com outside of that schedule. Shows are scheduled to be featured on Chill the day they debut on Hulu.

During a phone conversation Tuesday, Chill founder Brian Norgard told me the site will eventually add more ways to access archived content from Hulu as well, with the end goal being to have all of Hulu.com on the site — but for now, the focus is squarely on shows that are current and in season. “This is the true water cooler effect,” said Norgard.

The site also wants to make it easier for viewers to find new TV show episodes. Fans can subscribe to a particular show to get an email whenever a new episode pops up on Chill.

Chill has long been described as a sort of turntable.fm for video, and the site has certainly taken a few cues from Turntable’s crowdsourced real-time media curation approach. Chill users can still start their own rooms and watch YouTube clips and music videos together, and the site recently announced a partnership with Vevo. “We have had tremendous success with this product, but we didn’t want to be limited by it,” said Norgard.

A number of companies have experimented with real-time social interaction around video content before, including the kind of virtual viewing parties networks like Bravo have been doing as well as Google’s recent integration of YouTube into its Hangouts video chat. Norgard said Chill’s approach is a little different: It doesn’t just try to connect you with your social graph, but instead create social bonds with like-minded strangers.

He went on to say that Chill’s big bet was about a more interactive TV future, as opposed to one that brings online content to leanback platforms. “We are really building Chill for the lean-forward customer,” he told me.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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Vevo partners with Chill for group chat

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:45:19 +0000

Ever wanted to watch Katy Perry videos with Katy Perry herself? Vevo users now have the ability to do so, thanks to a new group chat functionality that the music video provider launched on Monday in cooperation with Chill. Vevo Rooms, as the new feature is called, gives users access to a Turntable.fm-like experience around the music videos of key Vevo artists like Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne and, yes, Katy Perry.

Vevo called this first effort to bring the alive web to Vevo a “test run,” and said that the artists chosen will be actively involved. From the announcement blog post:

The best part? There’s a good chance that the artists themselves will drop in from time to time. Maybe announced, maybe not. It would be pretty cool to check a Snoop video and chat with the big Dogg himself at the same time. The more you hang out, the better your chances are.

Chill launched in August as a an offshoot of social conversation site Namesake, and it has clearly taken a few hints from the real-time collaborative music platform Turntable.fm. Users get cute comic avatars and can collectively program video playlists together.

The site isn’t exclusively focused on music videos, and in the past it has been used to stream live videos from events like TechCrunch Disrupt. However, hanging out together and watching music videos seems like a natural fit, and Snoop Dogg has actually been active on the site even before the partnership with Vevo was announced.

Learn more about the future of the alive web at the GigaOM RoadMap conference this week in San Francisco.

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How connectivity is revolutionizing everything

GigaOM Edit Staff — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:00:01 +0000

Blazing fast networks, cheap silicon, always-on devices and a torrent of data will fundamentally change everything — how we consume media, how we work, how and what we buy and even who we are. The GigaOM team took 10 areas and examined how connectivity has profoundly changed them and will continue to change them in the future. We’ll dive into these ideas in even more detail at our GigaOM RoadMap event on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

Cars	Drive the next always-on gadget Katie Fehrenbacher	Work	Work is no longer a place Jessica Stillman
Stuff	Access trumps ownership Katie Fehrenbacher	Data	Data is the new digital currency Derrick Harris
Media	We are all media now Mathew Ingram	Identity	Identity is an industry Mathew Ingram
Body	Your doctor is a chip Stacey Higginbotham	Travel	Go anywhere, instantly Colleen Taylor
Web	The future web is alive Om Malik	Location	Where is the new who Ryan Kim

Images courtesy of Tesla Motors, DaveBleasdale, Petteri Sulonen, KatBPhotography, Urban Aquarium Video and Light, xurde, guiguis, kowitz, Marc_Smith, Aperturismo.

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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Facebook teams up with Spotify, Turntable.fm to let users share music

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:26:20 +0000

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a far-reaching music integration at his company’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco Thursday that will enable Facebook users to share music with their friends and listen to songs together in real time. Facebook has teamed up with Spotify, Turntable.fm, Vevo, MOG and close to a dozen other music startups to enable this new kind of music sharing.

Here is how it works: Spotify users who connect to Facebook can now automatically share the songs they’re listening to through Facebook’s new news ticker. Their friends can then click on any of those song links, which will launch the Spotify client in the background and play the very same song in a synchronized fashion. “You discover a huge amount of new music this way,” said Zuckerberg. “Listening can spread really quickly through the graph.”

Users can also explicitly recommend songs to each other, a feature that Zuckerberg called “one of the coolest parts of the whole product.” And summaries of one’s music activity will show up in the newly launched Facebook timeline, highlighting which artists and songs are a user’s favorites.

Zuckerberg was joined on stage by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, who said that music was the missing link for Facebook. Ek compared the new type of music sharing on Facebook to the way people were sharing music on Napster some 10 years ago, but said that the music industry now was finally ready to embrace this kind of sharing.

Some of the other partners include MOG, Rhapsody, Turntable.fm, Deezer, Soundcloud, Vevo, Songza and Tunein. “I’m really excited what this next wave of music companies is doing with the open graph,” said Zuckerberg.

News about the “Listen to your friend feature” leaked Wednesday when a Facebook employee tweeted about it. Peter Kafka reported earlier this week that Facebook originally planed to let users play music without ever leaving its site, but that those plans were scaled back at the last minute. Zuckerberg didn’t elaborate on this issue on Thursday, but it’s likely Facebook didn’t want to ruffle feathers with music publishers or other rights holders who would have wanted the company to pay royalties if it had been performing music on its site.

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Where to watch Facebook’s f8 conference live online

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:52:27 +0000

Facebook is once again inviting the tech world to its f8 developer conference in San Francisco this Thursday, and the social networking giant is expected to roll out some major updates to its platform.

Music, video and news will be a big part of it, and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek as well as Turntable.fm founder Billy Chasen will join Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage to unveil some of the new features.

The event has been completely sold out for some time, but you can still watch everything first-hand , thanks to a live stream powered by Livestream.com. The opening keynote will start at 10a.m. PT (1p.m. ET), and you can watch it either on Facebook, or via the embed below:

Watch live streaming video from f8live at livestream.com

Breakout sessions will also be streamed live starting at 12:30p.m.. Make sure to also check out our preview of the event if you want to know what to expect from f8, and check GigaOM.com throughout the day for our take on the announcements.

Disclosure: GigaOM has a business relationship with Livestream.com for delivering live video content from its events.

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