All this noise about Joost and Maven

To Whom It May Concern (mostly journalists) -

I find all this noise about Maven and Joost to be just that, noise.  We are aware that in any new market, like Online Video (OV), there are phases of growth.  Gartner calls it (gulp) the “hype-cycle curve.”  The Internet was no different in 1995, which was why people thought the world had changed.  Let’s look back on all the road kill.  Tons of companies challenging the status quo at the time, all the time.  Most of them failing, but some succeeding spectacularly: Amazon, Google, EBay, SaleForce.com, PayPal, Skype, Akamai, etc.

Here we are again, over ten years later, with a next generation opportunity - rich media, video, HTML5 and very, very fat and fast pipes.  YouTube appeared to come out of left field and I, for one, was surprised at how many people wanted to tell their stories.  Millions in fact.  Amazing.  So being innovative types, many entrepreneurs leaped into the fray with many new ideas about how to improve the experience.  This is what entrepreneurs do - they innovate.  But they also do something else inside the innovation cycle - they fail and fail often.  Vinod Khosla has a video on the web right now about this and his view is that the winners win because they never stop fighting, which allows the luck to hit: http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-06-26-vinod-khosla-vision-is-bumbling-around

The innovators are committed people who believe passionately in what they are doing.  Moreover, and this is the wonderful thing about innovation and start-ups, failing is not synonomous with being a failure.  Failing is part of the process of creative destruction.  Some models work, others don’t.  But what gets built in the process is an ecosystem that supports the best implementations and then an infrastructure evolves that encompasses and supports the innovation.  HTML5 is an example of this ecosystem, wherein all the best ideas for dynamic rich media are applied to the widest possible group.  Dynamic rich media, coupled with video, didn’t come out of a book.  It came out of people trying new ideas and trying these ideas out in the market.  The best ideas bubble up and the bad ones fade away.  But the power is in the trying.  Einstein said that creativity was more important than knowledge.  He was right.  Sometimes those of us competing in the same or similar markets views the other as the ‘competition.’  For me, especially in the early days of a market, I view these people as kindred souls innovating in a similar direction; the thought leaders.  People thinking about the next cool thing: iPhone, iPod, Skype, Twitter, Social Networks, Crowds, Immersive Video, etc.  In the OV space, this means that BrightCove doesn’t have all the right answers, nor does Ooyala, Kaltura, Veeple or Joost.  It means that the OVPs and the CDNs will continue to innovate in, around, and sometimes over the edges.  Some will make it, some won’t.  But we celebrate the creative innovation process.

Certainly, IMHO, it is sad that Yahoo plans to shut down Maven and that Joost is struggling to find their footing.  But it is this creative destruction that makes innovation so powerful.  After about 1,000 trys, Edison (and his team) learned how to make a light bulb.  After about a 1,000 tries, the right business models, technologies and businesses will solve the problems of getting the best OV experience to the market.  Let’s celebrate the wins along the way and not focus so intently on the loses.  It is hard enough for those losing their jobs, but is often harder to lose the dream.

Respectfully,
Scott Broomfield
Veeple / CEO

Tags: http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-06-26-vinod-khosla-vision-is-bumbling-around