Cutcaster selected as top 5 Start up in NYC by InSITE

We got some fantastic news this weekend. For the last month, we have been preparing for our presentation/pitch to InSITE. InSITE is an entrepreneurial mentorship program that brings together the best and brightest students from Columbia and NYU Business and Law schools to support New York entrepreneurs in the development of their businesses and pursuit of venture capital and angel investments. They select 5 NYC based startups to help each semester out of a large pool of candidates and we were selected as 1 of the 5. Gooo Cutcaster!!!

InSITE fellows meet with these companies over a three-month time period, providing consulting services that include:

* Overall Business Review
* Business Plan and Exec Summary Analysis
* Business Model Analysis
* Pitch/Presentation enhancement and Story Practice
* Management Review & Recommendations
* Strategic Analysis (timing, competition, and alternatives)
* Deal Analysis (including valuation potential)

We are really excited to be working with InSITE and Vikram, our team leader. It will be interesting to see these students take on the licensing world we are in and what business models are the best to pursue. We also get a chance to meet with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who have asked to set up a meeting between our two companies. At the end of the semester we get to pitch Cutcaster to a room full of Venture Capitalist and Angel Investors so it is very exciting. I can't wait to have InSITE on board and have to thank Molly Siems (she made the introduction), Hugh Dornbush and Kyusik Chung, who all three are on the InSITE board and really helped us along throughout the process..

I'll keep everyone updated on how it is going ;-)

Cutcaster offers royalty free images, stock photos, stock footage and stock photography for advertising, publishing or web design.

Is there a market for advertising templates?

Is there a market for selling people video and picture templates which they can use for advertising, they can customize and then turn into advertisements for their own local businesses?

Would businesses who wanted to advertise but not have the resources for a big agency to work with them use templates instead?

Should Cutcaster offer templates for people who want to use them for advertising?

Culture Catch Film Salon Series - Kevin Bacon

Last night, I was invited to a pretty cool screening of The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon starring in a role as a pedophile reentering society. Culture Catch presented another movie screening in their Film Salon Series. If you haven't seen the movie or heard about it, it's a powerful but I thought a bit slow at times. Bacon does a great job bringing this difficult role to the little screen. After the movie, Kevin spent about 30 minutes speaking about the role and how he got into character and dealt with playing the role. You can check out some of the footage over on Culture Catch.

I went to the screening with my friend, Sabine Anton, who is an internationally renowned film producer and news documentarian and was nice enough to invite me. She has worked in New York for the past 10 years for Europe’s largest Television network RTL and does some really great work now bringing peoples' lives and biographies to life over at "Your Life on Film." Check it out.

What does Royalty Free stock licensing mean?

Royalty-free pricing means the cost of a stock photo or video is based on it's artistic and technical qualities, not the specific use. You will not have to buy any additional rights for any subsequent usage of the images or photos you purchase via Cutcaster. By selling a royalty-free photo, a photographer permits you many uses of the photo, including any alterations like, but not limited to cropping, color alterations, creating derivative work from it, etc. The photographer will always remain the copyright owner of the photo.

Got $300k? Revver could be all yours!

CNET is reporting that video sharing site Revver is trying to sell itself for $300-500k, a pretty crappy price given its total funding of $12.7M. As most of you know already, Revver is a video sharing site that shares advertising revenue with its content creators. It also appears that Revver is in over a million dollars of debt and over half its staff has left.

According to TechCrunch, the company has had no luck finding a buyer even at such a low offering price. Both LiveUniverse, a “network of entertainment Web sites”, and Microsoft’s Soapbox (i.e. MSN Video) have considered buying Revver but neither has bitten.

Is Revver about to dance its swan song? Say it ain't so, Joe. It's never nice to see other's fail and we are sorry to hear about this but please let us know if anyone has any information.

Media Request Submitted-Fireworks

media_type : video
project_type : needed for RF use
description : fireworks scenes or shows. 15 to 30 seconds. finales!
priority : normal
deadline : July 4th
project_title : Fireworks

Sharing vs. Selling

Would you rather share your work with others or do you want to license it to them? What drives you more? Getting some notoriety or getting some money? How can you do both at the same time?

How we generate Revenue at Cutcaster?

We believe that Cutcaster’s sales will be primarily derived from the marketing of video and image reproduction as well as broadcasting rights to a range of business and individual customers. The site will employ a micro-payment model for this type of licensing and will tier the pricing of the content based on the resolution size of the file.

Revenues will arise from two principal types of licensed sales through the Cutcaster website:

1. Royalty-free sales or sales in which the user pays a one-time fee for unlimited use, are recognized from the time the video or still image is downloaded by the customer.

2. Rights protected sales or “extended licenses” are recognized when an agreement has been completed with the customer for the use of the video or still image (the “content”), and the “content” has been made available for use. Rights protected pricing terms do not call for additional fees beyond the agreed fee, and the buyer is contractually obligated to pay the invoiced amount upon agreement of the usage terms and delivery of the image for use by the seller.

The price is generally determined by resolution size and the extent of the rights granted over the use of the image or video clip. This can vary significantly across geographic markets and customer groups, i.e. how it is used and who is seeing it.

Digital Stock Footage Market

Stock footage is estimated to be a $300 million market(US), according to BBC World-wide, and is poised to grow to $1 billion by 2010(US) as more clips make their way into Internet ads, cell-phone snippets and digital billboards. ‘Thought Equity’, based in the US say its revenue grew by 500 percent in the first six months of 2006, very similar growth experienced by dedicated footage companies in the UK.

Just some interesting tidbits on the day ;-)

A Small Part of Cutcaster's Value Proposition

Similar to the benefits a stock exchange brings to an otherwise un-transparent stock market, a centralized, organized and regulated environment would provide a number of basic services for registering members and processing transactions in digital media that do not currently exist in one online package. Oversight, efficiency in execution, transparency, listing standards, asset protection (DRM; copyrights), centralized billing, transaction history, and most importantly the ability to quantify demand to determine fair value pricing, are the primary components.

Moreover, when all trading activity occurs in one location, the transactions themselves become easier to monitor, track, and analyze. Together, this valuable “market data” can be consolidated and then transmitted to both the internal community or sold to outside third-parties. This information dissemination should help create a fairer trading environment, as sellers can control their inventory by segmenting the market to achieve the highest sales prices, while buyers interact with the creator community by bidding for and requesting content.

Currently, there are a hodgepodge of different systems, services, and web platforms that make connecting content creators and media buyers in an effective and dynamic way all but impossible. There have been some attempts (Mochilla.com, for example), but these have tended to only focus on the professional space (i.e., connecting professional artists with major film studios and media companies). Cutcaster will instead focus on the entire spectrum of amateur and profesional buyers and sellers; we simply want to be a home for the monetization of user-generated content.