Backchannelmedia

International Herald Tribune

By Saul Hansell

In 1999, a mysterious Web site helped make "The Blair Witch Project" one of the most profitable movies of all time. Now Daniel Myrick, the movie's co-director, is making a television series called "The Strand of Venice," and its Web site will not only promote the series, but will also be the place where people watch it. "It is now possible to distribute high-quality programming that has been produced by much smaller entities," said Jeremy Allaire, founder of BrightCove, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, Internet company that helps small video producers create, distribute and finance video programs.

The 50-minute pilot of Myrick's series, which is set in Venice, California, is available now to watch free at http:// strandvenice.com/. Future 30-minute episodes will cost 99 cents each.

"With Blair Witch, the Internet was a force in helping us in the marketing department," Myrick said. "Now BrightCove allows us to take a show idea, produce it in the spirit of a network series, but keep everything in house and publish it ourselves over broadband."

Already, there are more than a million video clips available on the Internet that can be viewed immediately, called streaming, or downloaded for later viewing. A recent survey by Forrester Research found that half of Internet users now watch video online. BrightCove is being joined by a rapidly growing list of companies that want to cash in the trend. Start-ups like Blinkx and Akimbo also want to distribute video content. Companies like ThePlatform make software tools for Web publishing, and online advertising firms are selling video ads. Big Internet sites, like Yahoo and America Online, are rapidly expanding their video programming, buying much of it from independent producers. And Google is starting to host video clips provided by large and small producers, and it says it is developing ways for them to make money by charging fees or selling advertising.

BrightCove's twist is that it combines tools for producing and distributing video with methods for making money from it. Consciously modeled after Google, it is starting a network that will sell video ads that will be associated with independent video producers, much as Google sells ads on blogs. BrightCove provides tools to allow producers to charge fees to watch or download video, as well as a way to allow for an Internet version of the syndicated television market Web site owners will be able to place links to video content on their pages, splitting the revenue that the video generates.

This flexibility is drawing interest in the system, which will be formally introduced at an Internet conference Thursday, from media giants like Viacom, production companies and independents like Myrick. For production companies that do not own cable networks, broadband is allowing them to go directly to viewers.

Eco-Nova, which produces "Oceans of Mystery" for the Discovery Network and sells some programs to National Geographic, is producing a Web program called "Live From the Dive," which follows the company's explorations day by day. It is in the form of a blog, with text photographs and video, sometimes streaming live from cameras on the helmets of divers.

Video clips on the site will be preceded by 30-second advertisements, to be sold by BrightCove. In addition, the company is developing a $10 subscription service that will let users watch clips from the company's 10 years of exploration, many of which have never been aired on television. "That has allowed our television watchers to have another whole interaction with the television show," said John Davis, its president. "We can talk to our audience directly for the first time, not filtered through a broadcaster."

While there have been a few successful subscription services, most notably those offered by Major League Baseball, the driving force of the Internet video market is advertising. Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester, said, "The advertising model is extremely simple and very attractive: You simply put your 30-second commercial in front of the video."

Advertisers are paying $25 per thousand users that see their online commercials, more than they pay for network television.

Not every independent producer believes it needs this sort of elaborate system to help it with distribution. There is a growing range of start-ups trying to become Internet television networks, including the youth-oriented ManiaTV and ChannelBlast, which just introduced its first program, Newzviewz, newzviewz.com, a live public-affairs discussion program.

"Our distribution is the Internet," said Mark Lipsky, executive producer of ChannelBlast, who said he had no need for companies like BrightCove. "Two to three years from now, we will be able to compete with any television network, but we will be global and they won't be."