Internet TV Blog

Tim Street (of the French Maid TV fame) wrote a well put article about why it is important for Internet TV producers to completely control and own their RSS feed, and to have only one video feed.

As Tim says…

It stands to reason that if you make your content available in as many formats as you can that more people will be able to choose what feed they want to subscribe to. Right? Okay, sure but when someone subscribes to your Windows Media feed they are not subscribing to your feed that is featured on the iTunes Store and they don’t count as a subscription for the day that will bring you up in the iTunes rankings. What good does moving up in the iTunes ranking do me? Well if you have content that is emotionally compelling and can really build a large audience it means a lot. It took me over a month to get listed on the iTunes Store and once French Maid TV was featured as new and notable we shot up to number one in 3 days and pick up 20,000 subscribers overnight. Then we were mentioned in Wired Magazine and picked up another 20,000 subscribers. Your feed is very important because it allows you to reach a lot of viewers quickly and the iTunes Store is a great way to get new subscribers and be noticed by business development people and media buyers who are looking for “hot” properties.

Youtube has offered subscribing to their videos for a while but that’s a separate feed from your own feed and now other sites like Revver are offering subscription buttons for feeds as well. That’s all well and good but in the long run where does that get you? You don’t control those feeds. Sure they are another way to get more viewers paying attention to your videos but if these “Partner Feeds” go away you lose all those subscribers.

Having as much information you can about your subscribers that you can share with potential advertisers is very important and moving forward I feel I need to figure out a way to get the kind of info that I have about my subscribers at YouTube on all my delivery channels but beyond that I feel the need to figure out how I can have one feed that I control that is viewable everywhere because I don’t want to dilute my feed.

So what does all that mean…

1. Register your own domain for you Internet TV Show
2. Use that domain to build an Internet TV Site
3. Put your Internet TV video feed under that domain

As reported by many other sites, Revver is for sale!

And it’s at a bargain. Only $500,000. (Although you might be able to get them down to $300,000.)

The catch is you have to take on a $1,000,000 dept! (So effectively, the price is more like $1.3-1.5 million.)

The question is, what happened? How did they burn through $13 million in venture capital?

Revver has been reported as giving large payouts they were giving to Internet TV producers. Revver even payed out $1,000,000 in their their first year.

But this is reported as coming from advertising revenue. (And not from the venture capital.)

For me, I started wondering what was going on at Revver when Ian Clarke (of the Freenet and Dijjer fame) left Revver. It was a sign, for me, that something might be going sour there.

(Discussion about this on the Video Blogging Mailing List appears here.)

UPDATE: Revver may have been purchased.