1315-Tue-062221-PR-Master the Moment Maximized Video Storytelling for a Remote, Digital World-FINAL-V2

4:16AM Jun 22, 2021

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moment

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Welcome to master the moment video storytelling for a remote and digital world storytelling is is how we connect and develop shared truths. And technology has always influenced how we produce and consume stories. I'm Rakesh Agarwal, I'm the founder and CEO of snapstream. At snapstream, we're on a mission to help help organizations leverage the power of news and media moments and how they tell stories. I'm also a news junkie and a student of the of the media. And I'm an early stage technology investor. And I'm excited to be joined by one of someone that I consider to be one of the deepest thinkers in news and media, john Battelle, john founded Wired Magazine, the industry standard and seven other companies, including John's current company, which we'll talk about recounts. And john and i were chatting earlier, I've never met john, in person, or, you know, in a live conversation like this. But I think I first came across john, when he was, I think, the band manager, so to speak for a popular blog called Boing Boing. And we were talking about how that was a really special time in, in the internet, and the development, a lot of a lot of independent media. Anyways, the recount is a snapshot in customer, and they're doing amazing work telling news stories, specifically using video moments. So I'm excited to have john here to share his insights on this work that they're doing at the recount, and more broadly, his insights and views of the world of news and media in 2021. So john, welcome, and thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Rick, do you want to add anything to your to your background that the introduction introduction that I made?

Oh, most of the, you know, let's just focus on what we can talk about, you know, I've been working on issues of technology media, and you know, the internet since God 1987. So, it's been a long time.

Yeah. Well, great. Let's, let's start out and and start with the now and talk about talk about the recounts. Are you I read somewhere that you described, the recount where I think your your co founder, john Heilemann described the recount, Palamon as, as hip hop journalism. Yeah. So can you talk more about why you? Maybe why and how you landed on the model that you've chosen for the recount, and maybe describe how you how you decide? How do you describe the recount to start out with maybe the audience, not everyone has actually watched the product of the recount?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you haven't, you should, I agree. But the problem that we set out to solve was that the power of sight, sound and motion felt to us, not entirely leveraged when it came to news that the forms and format of you know, high quality journalism in video had been sort of relegated to either kind of linear television cable news format, right? Where you have suits on sets, talking about things, every so often you get to actually see video of things that are happening, but not that often because it's mostly suits on sets talking. And they tend to be coming from a partisan point of view. You're either Team Blue or Team Red. And the other, you know, sight, sound and motion, you know, a form factor that's well established in journalism is documentary, long form. And it struck john and i when we were starting the company that You know, we were very much in a post linear moment television was going through a significant shift a major disruption, probably analogous to the shift from broadcast to cable, new forms of distribution, new formats, new, you know, uses of video. But there wasn't a news brand that meant that that was native to that. And so, you know, our mission and our ambition is to essentially reinvent television is. And in order to do that, we had to kind of, you know, start with a clean slate and say, Well, what would we make if we didn't have to follow the sort of form and rules of traditional television journalism? And that's when we came up with what john Heilemann calls hip hop news. Now, you know, that has a lot of implications. It's not like we're, you know, trying to be hip. But the idea is, the form of hip hop came by sampling. And, you know, reimagining the melodies, from a base of music across decades, and across genres and styles. And it was a remix of the culture. And so the first products that we came out with certainly not the only ones we do now, but the first products we came out with, when we launched about a year and a half ago, were remixes of all the video that you find not only on traditional, you know, broadcast and linear cable, but also social media, audio, and even text, graphics and graphical treatments. And so what we try to do is essentially not waste your time, especially in a world where people are consuming video on their phone, and they're consuming it on platforms, you know, on social and so on, how can they get high quality, you know, super dense, useful information in the format that makes sense, you know, for kind of a fractured information ecosystem that we have in a post linear world, well, that requires that you be really, really good at identifying just the moments that matter to tell the story, and putting them together in a really compact and elegant way using editing and graphics. And a lot of the tricks of the trade that, you know, people in your world recaptured, you know, very familiar with. And that's a course sort of set of muscles that we've been exercising for almost two years now. And it informs now everything we make, whether it's a longer form piece, or like, you know, recently, there was a piece that we put up on Twitter, that was only four seconds long. But as far as I'm concerned, that piece has, you know, roughly the equivalent of 10,000 words of information in it. It's so powerful if you pick just the right moments and put them together in just the right way.

Yeah, part of our insight at snapstream has been and why our mission is one of moments has been that the part is, is quite often greater than the whole. And that's especially true when it comes to this powerful medium of video. And so it's it is the four seconds versus the 30 minutes that you know, gets engagement, drives connection and increases increases reach you go back to two years ago, when you got started. I I'm curious how you landed on this as the as the product, I'm sure it's evolved over time. But did you you and john come in with this thesis of hip hop journalism from the from the outset from like, when you walk in and say, Hey, this is this is what this new company is going to be? Or was there like an a series of steps and unlocking of insights that got you to the place where an aha moment that, you know, became, you know, the trajectory for the company and the product as it is today?

It was kind of a combination of both? I mean, our first sort of hypothesis, you know, which was a question that that john Heilemann had himself, you know, john has a 30 year career 30 plus year career as a, you know, sort of op journalist covering our in America, usually politics, but also media and tech. And, you know, we're going in to the 2020 election cycle, clearly the biggest story in the United States and late 2018, early 2019 was, you know, the forthcoming election, and the choice that the country was going to make, whether it was going to continue on the path that it had been on under the last administration, or whether it was going to move to a new, you know, to a new president. That story was so big and so complicated and nuanced. JOHN asked a simple question when he suggested that we discuss whether we should start a company together. He said, you know, why is it that you know, on this device, right, this phone, why is it that there isn't anywhere I can go to see you know, sight sound mo What's happening in politics right now? To see it? Right, there's plenty of places I can go to read about it, I can browse the headlines of The Washington Post or the New York Times or Politico, you know. And if I'm a reader, I can get smart relatively quickly. But the truth is, john, of course, is well known now as a television journalist. Or video, there's just no place that I can reliably go. And that's struck him as very strange. And it struck him as an opportunity. Like, what if we could answer that question, that there was a place that reliably if you wanted to know what was happening, you want to see it with your own eyes, so that you can make up your own mind and see the power of the moving image and understand what was happening so that you could literally make your mind up about, I mean, how do I feel about this happening or that happening? There really wasn't a place to go, because if you turned on, you know, the television you heard a lot of people talking about, but you didn't see what was happening. So that was the core problem, you know, can we do that? And can we distribute it in a way where people can find it reliably. And then pretty quickly, after we agreed, that was probably one to solve, we came upon the solution of the remix, of finding just those moments and sort of stringing them together, like, you know, a string of pearls. And then we hired a team and started experimenting with form. And that team is extraordinary. I mean, the the degree that we've had so much success is because of their talents. And their sort of native ability to express video in in ways that work very well in, say, social platforms. And, you know, the we started building longer form things for us long form sometimes means two to three minutes, but using the same sets of skills until longer stories, and then we launched a podcast division as well. And our podcasts are all visual television. And what we do is take that same musculature that we developed about the ability to pop in the right graphic, the right moment, the right you know, sound on tape, and turn what might just be a relatively visually uninteresting conversation, even if the conversations interesting, of course, but and, and turn that into a visual storytelling, you know, template as well. So the core of the company is really identifying the moment worth paying attention to, which if you pull back for a minute, and I'm, you know, an old journalist, now, the role of an editor, the role of a journalist, the role of media brand, is to be the arbiter of what's worth paying attention to. That's all you're supposed to do. This is worth paying attention to, right. Your editorial judgment in determining what's paying it worth paying attention to, and then your voice and saying, Here's why. That is voice and point of view, which is that the essence of good journalism and good editorial content. Yeah, yeah.

I've been really impressed with the what I've seen of the video edits that that you guys do the craftsmanship in, in the edits, you know, where I saw, I remember one piece, where you're you show, calendar, and you're showing moments of what you're zooming into the, into the blocks on the calendar showing the, what then President Trump said about the pandemic, as you know, the crisis unfolded in February and March of last year. And it's so, so simple and powerful. And I've seen you do side by sides where, you know, you're showing, just, you know, the same person saying, you know, two different things. And the, and then also, the, it's not even, like you mentioned, like stringing pearls together, but you're, you're really, there's a transformative aspect to the integration that you have of like graphics. And, you know, putting all of that putting all of that together. It's, the final product is amazing. You mentioned a four second clip, like, for example, I think that's really powerful and interesting, that a four second clip can be so impactful and get so much so many views. Can you describe that four second clip?

Yeah, well, the one that comes to mind, you know, was now about 10 days ago. The g7 was going on the, you know, the Group of Seven nations meeting which Biden, you know, his first big, you know, international trip, and he was in the south of England with all the g7 leaders. And obviously, that's news. You know, the president united states is on a trip, that's always news. He's meeting with the leaders in the context of, you know, repairing frankly, the American image. After four years of you know, America first and you know, everybody else behind Me and our editors, you know, instead of just running a clip of Biden sort of greeting, you know, McCrone and all the various other leaders hold a clip from 2017, which was President Trump's first trip to the g7. And the clip that they pulled was him pushing his way to the front, so he could be in the front and seen by everybody. And the clip, they pulled a Biden was Biden work walking in a group with his arm around president McCrone. And, you know, and it was a bit they were so strikingly different, these two images running side by side for four seconds, that, you know, I just spent a minute describing it, right. And it's only four seconds. But it's incredibly powerful. And I got 100,000 views in the first 30 minutes that it was out. And then just built from there. And that, that that's the essence, you know, you have highly qualified journalists who understand the context of the narrative that they're trying to tell. And in four seconds of video, it says at all, and the calendar video that you referenced was a longer piece over a minute. But it was incredibly important at the moment when it came out in mid March, to basically keep the receipts of the previous two months and say, here's exactly what our president has said about the pandemic, he's downplayed it, he said, it was just the seasonal flu, he said this, he said that, and I believe the video ends with a graphic that showed how many people had died. And at that point, it was only in the 1000s. And that was terrible. Of course, you know, a year your urine some months later, you know, it's been a well over 600,000. And so that was a very powerful video, as well. And that's the kind of work that you can do if you think in sort of a remix mentality. And frankly, you have the the quality of editors and editorial judgment that we've assembled in that newsroom.

What about downsides of video? Do you have you run into you know, for better or for worse, we believe what we see. And that's, that's that's how we work as humans. You know, I read Noah Yuval Harare said, you know, we're where we become hackable animals where, you know, we can be our dopamine receptors can also be hijacked. Because we have these devices, connected devices in our pockets. What's your perspective on the potential risks with with the creation and consumption of news via the medium of video? And have you guys at the recount, ever run into, you know, situations that, you know, maybe have led you to question whether you should publish something or not publish something? Because it may not be in the spirit of, you know, your journalistic pursuits?

Yeah. You know, this is an animating force for the company for us, which is that there's a reason that journalists exist. There's a reason that journalism is the only industry mentioned in the Constitution. And in that it has an informal but well established, you know, role as the Fourth Estate, which is that our job is to identify what is true. And what is fact and if we get it wrong, our job is to say we got that wrong. That's one of the sort of bedrock principles of journalism, that principle has not been in evidence much during the rise of particularly social media platforms. And the gray dress, if you will, of journalism, the look and feel if you will, of journalism has been essentially hijacked by you know, extremely sophisticated and sometimes unsophisticated, disinformation and misinformation campaigns. And it is, as we saw with the January 6, insurrection, it has very real world implications. And you know, missing disinformation is nothing new. You know, I mean, if you go back to the time of the Federalist Papers, you know, the, the amount of missing disinformation that was published on the regular, as, as, you know, various founders and framers were arguing over, you know, what the, what the occupation should, you know, should be comprised of it, during that period, it was rife, but it was published at the speed of a, you know, daily newspaper and distributed at the speed of a pamphlet, you know, by horseback. And when you have the kinds of, you know, ability to create missing disinformation and then distribute it as quickly as that clip we were just talking about, which is, in fact journalism, that every frame of that clip has been verified is true and accurate. But when you have that kind of speed where 100,000 people can see something in half an hour, and then by the end of the day, 10 million people can see it, you have something that yes, is a very big concern. So one of the founding, you know, principles of the recount was in video in particular, there needs to be a brand that you can trust. And, and I've watched the creative economy versus media companies, pendulum swing back and forth, and back and forth throughout the entire history of the internet, oh, it's going to be the rise of the bloggers and they're going to take away, you know, the, the, you know, the monopoly of the of the newspaper, or, and, or the or the, or the editor. And, and the truth is, you need both, you don't need one or the other. But there has been in the past five years or so, I think a overweight on kind of the kind of video that just gets people to pay attention, you know, regardless of whether or not the truth has been established. And I think that credible rusted media brands in video, are really necessary, frankly, for, you know, for the, for the foundation of our democracy. And honestly, given that this is, you know, the seventh company that I've been involved in starting, and probably the last, I think this is just kind of a lifelong mission from this point forward. I can't imagine anything more interesting and important to do than to work on issues of journalism and credibility and truth in a society that seems to be at war with itself, about what the truth is. So, you know, that was a bit of a monologue. But yeah, there you have it.

Well, how does so how does the recount How does the recount, you know, ensure that, you know, what, what's being what it's putting out there is true? You know, I think probably go, I'm sure it goes beyond verifying that, you know, the video hasn't been tampered with, because you can also take, you know, a word sentence out of context to, you know, and that that happens all the time, as you were, as you were mentioning, but what what is the process that that the recount has to, to ensure that you're you're adhering to a standard? What is the standard?

Well, I mean, it's it, you know, there's actually no secret to it, it's just called editorial standards. This is what every newsroom has, and hopefully always will, which is that you want to be, you want to make sure that you're not putting things out of context, you want to make sure that you're delivering accurate information. And you have a process by which if you get it wrong, you acknowledge that and you correct it. That's, you know, those are basic editorial standards that, you know, all good journalists live by. And that's certainly what we do. You know, there is a rather, I should say, there has been a drift in a lot of newsrooms toward putting stuff out there that, you know, as the higher probability of going viral, right of getting people to click on it up getting more attention. There are many news outlets that, you know, most of the views that they get are of, you know, Zamboni is on fire on, you know, driving aimlessly around ice rinks, you know, and, and you have to ask yourself, what are you doing to your, you know, journalistic credibility, if that's how, you know, you're reporting the news. And, you know, local news, for example, you know, what's the biggest Maxim of local news, if it bleeds, it leads, right? If it burns, it earns, right. And so this is not new, this sort of tendency to go for whatever is the most outrageous video, but what we try to do is actually earn our attention by the point of view and voice that we have, as opposed to by the sort of fabulousness of the particular video itself.

Have you guys had to withdraw something that you later learned, you know, didn't tell the full story or, you know, to knock wood? Not yet? Yeah,

we're young yet I'm sure we have many mistakes ahead of us.

What are other organizations that you admire other media organizations today that you know where you you feel like they're innovating, or just we're just really sad, you know, doing solid execution that you consider, you know, peers in as at recount with what you're building?

Well, in video, I'm a fan of a lot of organizations, ITV and BBC, out of the UK, are both, you know, great journalistic organizations with a lot of resources and the willingness to try new things. I'm a big fan of vice and a lot of the documentary work that they That's been done there. As it relates to form and format, I think some of the publishers who built their, you know, base in newsletters are now in an analogous way doing in text, what we are doing to video, right. I mean, people don't have the time to read 15 or 20 long form pieces every day. But we know there are 15 to 20 really important long form pieces that are written every day, but you don't have the time to essentially read 50,000 words a day, you can just read an axios newsletter, right? Or a political newsletter. And I think that, you know, that kind of journalism, where you're aggregating, curating, adding, you know, your own voice and point of view and saving people time, that's a really important set of skills to develop as editors and journalists, in, in the era of too much information, information overload, and not enough time, time, famine, and all of us as creatures of, you know, essentially, a scarce, you know, commodity, which is attention, our attention. I think that any company or any journalist, journalistic organization that acts as a time machine, you know, that saves time for somebody has a better chance of succeeding. And that's certainly our mission, that's the mission of a lot of the great organizations that that I just mentioned.

Yeah, I, I'm interested in, you know, as you're consuming less of a person's attention, and perhaps fulfilling their their need for news consumption, just taking news as one category, how that plays into monetization and lifetime value. And and I think you're, you're in a really, you have a really great background, because you are both have a background as a journalist, but also, what have driven monetization for, you know, for journalists and independent writers, going back 20 years, so you, you know, both sides of the of that coin. So why don't we, if we could talk about monetization a little bit? How do you think about monetization at at the recount? And, you know, perhaps like, how do you compare that to the way, you know, CNN monetizes a viewer, for example?

So, you know, one of the big swings of this company is that the honest answer to that question is, I have no idea. And, and, you know, it's a, that's a bit of a, you know, maybe I'm doing a clickbait headline there to be honest with you. But the truth is, is we don't know exactly how monetization is going to shake out for video over the next five years. There, there are established models, you mentioned CNN, so let's just go there. You know, there are two revenue streams for traditional linear television. One of them is cable carriage. So cnn gets paid a lot of money by the cable operators to run cnn on their bundle that they're selling to their cable subscribers. And the SEC, whether they watch it, whether they watch or not, whether they watch or not. And the second, which is a pretty damn good business, if you can be in it, you know, you get paid just to be included, not to be watched. And, and then the second business, of course, is advertising. And those two, those two revenue streams, as with everything in media, determine the form factor that the actual product takes. And in the case of linear television, you know, gamble. That means that a product needs to hold people's attention as long as possible. Another way of putting that is waste people's time. So, you know, you're going to watch an hour of a cable news program. And honestly, if all you really want to do is know what's going on, you're not gonna find out much, you know, it's two to three minutes worth of value out of it hour spent. And honestly, what their goal is, is to only show you that thing that shows it tells you what you're what's really happening, maybe once, maybe twice in that hour at the top and at the bottom, and the rest of the time program people to stay engaged. How do you do that? You get a mad, I mean, it's time honored, get them angry, get them pissed off that the other guy is wrong, right? Make them scared that the other guy might be right, and they're coming for you. And they're gonna take away your X, Y and Z. I mean, that is Fox to a tee, right? And they just write to me that while the monetization models support that kind of programming, it's not healthy. It's not good for us. It's not good for our society. So what might the modern monetization models be for something like the recap Well, number one, perhaps we should make a different kind of a channel. The the the idea that news Chantel asked to have the format of linear cable, I think is is is dying. What should a streaming Ott news channel look like? What How can you reimagine it so that anytime someone might dip into it on their phone or on a big TV like the one over my shoulder, that they get value, and they get what they need, and they can hop off it. Usually people, particularly audiences on streaming and Ott, have more than one device near them and may have two devices that they're working at the same time and possibly three. So how do you program a channel cognizant of the new set of consumer behaviors that exist? Right, not assuming that it's always on wallpaper on the background, but rather than when people actually pay attention to you, you know that and can deliver something valuable to them? I think that's where streaming television is going. So there's, you know, is there an advertising model that absolutely, you know, is is that advertising model distinct yet probably feels a little bit more like what's developed in the last couple of years around audio? When you say, you know, Alexa, play NPR, I hope there's not an Alexa near me because it'll start banging yarn out.

But when you say it's not just,

it's not just near you, all of the listeners, if you're listening on it, sorry, guys.

You know, I won't say OK, Google. But when you say that what happens is, you know, before the NPR stream happens, there's a six second, you know, read vj read or DJ read of an app. And these kinds of models are coming for television. And in some cases are already here for television. Now YouTube comes to mind. YouTube was one of the largest distributed distributors of streaming and connected television in the world, people don't think about it that way. But it's bigger than the other eight combined, including Amazon, Roku, and all the others. So we are launching a streaming television channel on YouTube. And that will then be distributed in lots of other places that you've heard of that you traditionally think of streaming television, you know, Pluto to be, you know, Roku, all fire, Amazon Fire, etc. So that's a big push for us over the next year. But you have to be patient on the revenue question, right? You have to be patient, you cannot, you know, lock down early and say this is our business model. Because the truth is, it's all thrown up in the air right now. It's like trying to lock down a business model in the early days of the internet. Good luck with that. You what you need. And, you know, fortunately, we have is venture capital, which is risk capital that is willing to pay for the costs of making what you make, wow, the revenue models start to get established in a turbulent and disrupting market. And that's exactly what television news is right now. And that is exactly the play we're making. Now, that doesn't mean we don't have any revenue. I mean, we have event revenue, we have newsletter revenue, and we have revenue on social platforms, very proud of the partnership we have with Twitter, for example. And they have a great partnership model called amplify that allows for very short video ads to play before our content. And then we split the revenue with Twitter, it's worked very well for us. And you know, we'll continue that going forward. And I very much hope that other platforms start to adopt similar approaches to working with media companies, right now. Every platform in the world is falling over themselves to you know, create tools and services for the creator economy. Right, right. And that's all well and good. And I think individual creators should be able to make as much money as possible. But the truth is that media companies are very important players in those platform spaces. And to date platforms have done a terrible job of supporting, you know, at scale media companies. So hopefully, that will change over the next few years, we're making a bet both on streaming and on social, these are the two places where we, you know, are playing and will continue to play. And then we have a very strong podcast business as well. And that has an established model, which is evolving, and getting more and more sophisticated. And we're very pleased with, you know, the early results of our first five podcasts, which we launched last fall. And that, of course, has a business model, which is advertising driven.

So this is a streaming channel at odds though, with the with the clip based format, like how do you how do you when when I heard you describe the recount model of you know, you know, bringing somebody in taking care of their want to like see what happened and then sending them away. It reminded me of Google and you know, the transition from CPM advertising to CPC, where like Google didn't want you to stay on their site. They wanted to send you away as quick as possible from their search result or otherwise, and but if you're doing a linear, you know, 24 seven channel do you run into a challenge with, you know, you also become a place where you're trying to keep people you know, on your channel all the time.

Yeah, I think that that's going to be a very natural tension. And the question before us, this is a central question of our company is, what is the reinvention of a channel in a an environment that is rapidly evolving. The percentage of budget that is shifting from traditional broadcast and linear television to connect to television is double digit, year on year and of course, a pandemic accelerated that. But what I believe will emerge over the next few years in the streaming and Ott world are ad products, which understand that attention is bite size and sampled and not linear in nature. But do you have to learn how to play the linear game while you're establishing that transition period? Yes, you do. But our watchword for everything we do is make any time and attention that we might earn valuable for our audience answer a question of theirs. And not engagement for engagement sake, we may, you know, live or die on that, you know, central thesis, but we will not waver from it. And I'm very certain that the world of Ott streaming will not just devolve into, you know, a shittier version of linear cable. If it does, then, you know, entrepreneurs that may be listening to this will invent a better version, because that would be terrible. And what we've seen so far are really big companies launch tons of streaming platforms have been like eight launches in the last year. And then realize that that Oh, gee, this is hard. And I don't know how we keep people. And now I've got turned problems, and oh, my god, there's subscription fatigue. And maybe we need to read bundle and know like, you know, what's the business model, and this competes with my cable carriage. And, you know, there's a lot of chaos going on. A lot of dinosaurs flailing around, you know, as the comments start to, here's the atmosphere, our job is to be a mammal running around the feet of those folks, make sure we don't get stepped on, make sure we you know, understand the models we have to play in right now. But always build our product with the knowledge that the world is changing, and that we may have a chance to lead in that new world. That's the brand. That's the goal. That's the mission,

as you run around at the feet of those dinosaurs and avoided to get squashed. What's the tooling that you've had to build to to support this new kind of video journalism? How have you, you mentioned, you know, this talented team? And I've, I've chatted with Riley a couple of times. Brendan? I'm sorry. I'm getting Brennan. I'm getting apologize. Brennan. And but how do you scale that? How have you scaled that? And what are there new things that you're doing? I know, you guys are using snapstream as a part of your of your stack. But

there are other other things in your in your sort of tool stack or your processes that where you're you're blazing a new trail, we feel like you're doing something that's innovative. I'm very proud of the of the approach that our technical and editorial production teams have taken towards this, which is fundamentally lightweight. it you know, yes, we have what might be called a CMS, you know, a content management system. But it is not an off the shelf or adapted, heavy, you know, layer that slows us down. We're built for speed. And, and so that means that, you know, of course, snapstream is in heavy use all the time. But you know, what, so is slack. And as a matter of fact, we've built on top of slack, a production system, which automates a lot of our posting, publishing, archiving. And certainly all of our editorial conversations around, you know, this clip that clip this idea, that idea, you know, slack is literally at the center of how we produce. And and, you know, if you would have imagined four years ago that, you know, there'd be a company that, you know, produced nearly two hours of video a day, that was essentially done on Slack, he would have laughed, said, pitch, no way, what are you talking about? But the truth is that because of the platform nature of a lot of tools, you can do integrations that just sing, and they work very well. So we have a I would say robust, but lightweight, technical infrastructure that allows us to do what we do. And, you know, that's, to me, the future is you need to be agile force, you need to have, you know, the ability to create a database and a taxonomy of all the clips that we're looking at and you know, be able to come back and pull an archive clip and quickly make something new. But at the end of the day, we're not, you know, weighed down by a commitment to a significant technical business. That may not be able to adapt. For example, as we move into streaming, I can't tell you in my initial explorations of the tools available for streaming out terrible dayla sorry, to anyone who might be in that business. And what a big opportunity there is to think rethink the technical layer between production and publishing in streaming. It's super exciting. I think it's just as exciting as you know, HTML in the late 90s. Right before the emergence of, you know, of JavaScript and, and all the other tools that that led to the explosion on the web, that everyone called web two, oh, we're very close to television to, I would say, five years from now, it will be a completely different looking field.

So with this, you know, with this lightweight, so the key in from your perspective is lightweight and agility. And I think that's, that's awesome. We have a real deep thinker around agile at snapstream, our SVP of engineering Tom klibanski. And his is the thing that he repeats his people and people and process over tools. And, you know, so it's all about focusing on the people in the process. Do you do you have software engineers on the on your team that are part of okay? Is there you imagine ever, ever productizing, any of the any of the, you know, integrations you built with Slack,

I imagine productizing a number of the things that we've built. But right now, that's where it stays in the imagination. If you're a startup, though, unless you're like snapstream, where that is your business, you have to be very careful about whether or not you put resources towards something that is not core to your, you know, customer facing mission. And our customer facing mission is to answer important questions for our audience, not to build robust on enterprise software that might be used by other media companies or other companies in general. But, man, do I see a lot of opportunity in this space. And, you know, I'm going to be actively encouraging other companies to build the kinds of tools that we may either use or could have built as sort of a, you know, lead customer. And there are a lot of really interesting new video startups trying really cool stuff. And, you know, perhaps, you know, years down the road, we might get into that world that certainly, you know, the Washington Post has made a big business out of their CMS, for example, after Jeff Bezos bought the company, and they reimagined it. So possibly, but for now, we're focused on you know, on our core customer, which is our audience.

But let's talk about innovation. That was the the final topic I wanted to close out on. You, I think I heard in another podcast that you're, you do some investing. But But otherwise, you have a view, you probably follow, you know, what's happening in the tech world? And, and so what are what are some of the innovations that you're seeing out there? You mentioned just now that there are a lot of exciting things happening with video, what are some of those things that you're that you're seeing any products and companies or movements that you're excited about?

So, you know, I'll pull back a little bit from video. Because I think that, you know, for the things that I'm going to mention are very clearly impacting video. One of them of courses is that, you know, the broad application of machine learning and natural language processing to video. Now, when I have a conference call, you know, I can use a NLP software for free, which will deliver me a transcript of that conversation, video conversation, within minutes after, you know, the call has happened. And and, you know, think about how you transcribe and how, I mean, I used to as a journalist, when I was writing my book, I would pay, you know, hundreds of dollars to transcribe an hour long interview. And now it's something that you can using AI and NLP, you can do it for free. And what that allows is machines to understand video in a way that allows for much more facile manipulation of images, right? Because you essentially have tagged every frame with, you know, an ontology taxonomy. Code, if you will, which is words, that's extraordinary. So the one big thing that I think has only begun to impact the media world and certainly the world of video is is is AI. And the second I'll mention is blockchain and I know that that makes everybody roll their eyes. But I am convinced as a student of this space for over 30 years that that To blockchain, the impact of blockchain on media has only begun. And you know, not only in the verification of truth and the, you know, sort of trustless environment for fact, but also in the models, in particularly in the models that can be developed for support of media and high quality journalism, using what many are now calling web three technologies, which essentially come down to public Ledger's distributed organizations, governance through, you know, you know, institutions that do not look like traditional corporations, and so on. I think this is going to be a huge area of innovation over the next decade.

Any any projects in the cryptocurrency in the blockchain space that are that are already working on, you know, solutions around, you know, crypto truth tellers?

Well, we're watching everything very closely. We, you know, we're gonna dabble here and there and test the waters. But, you know, we are very fortunate than one of our first and largest investors was, is Fred Wilson, who is, you know, deeply involved in all of these, you know, markets, and a active investor in not only crypto, but crypto media. And, you know, so he's, you know, first one of the first investors in dapper labs, which brought in the world top shots, and in mirror, which is, you know, a very important new model for publishing. So we have the benefit of, of, of his knowledge and wisdom, connections and relationships. And so, I would expect that that will be an area that you'll see us lean into when the time is right. Yeah, I

put a bid in on the the Trump calendar moment, the NFT that you guys minted for?

Yes, thank you for that we, we didn't close that auction, because we just wanted to learn and we didn't want anyone saying, oh, you're making money from selling stuff. And, you know, of course, it turns out that, you know, the AP and Time magazine and everybody else then went off and started selling NF T's. You know, it's just like for them, it's just another business line for us. It's a business model that we want to understand and participate in. We don't just want to kind of make it a one off merchandise store, you know,

yeah. Hey, john, thanks so much for for joining me for this conversation. This has been awesome. There are things I want to I want to follow up with you on offline in particular, the technology tools that you guys have put together yourselves in house and I'd love to understand those better and better, but thank you, thank you very much. I'm a huge fan of you and of the of the recount. And and yeah, let's, let's keep in touch. Thanks a lot. Absolutely.

Well, thank you for having me. Thanks for the RNA and now everyone has a great conference.