4 ms·

Movie Studio As a Service (MSAAS) - Tech Co-Founder Wanted

64 points by fapi1974 16y ago

fapi1974 16y ago
Would love feedback on this post - no mercy expected!
- icey 16y ago
  It's great to see an idea that isn't just a clone of some other popular tech service. This looks pretty original; what are your plans for success? How does this scale up?
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    Thanks! The product is designed with a couple nice little ratchets in mind. People see videos they like, then recognize they can participate. When they participate they invite their friends to watch them - it's instinct. That's the first cycle. The second cycle is that when people don't see a video on a topic they like, they can create one - and invite their friends to contribute. Success is premised on growing the user base through those two cycles, and then selling things like premium editing subscriptions for people who create a lot of content.
    - icey 16y ago
      This is the part that would worry me regarding scaling: "The pieces get plugged in to the appropriate areas, combined and narrated into beautiful product that you can share on all your favorite outlets" Who does the combination and narration? The quality of the final movie is going to be a strong driver perception of your product - how do you ensure the quality stays high as you grow? Is it the users that do the narration? That might make it easier, but then your value proposition drops since they could use iMovie, right? I think it's a cool idea though; definitely sounds interesting.
      - fapi1974 16y ago
        "Narrated" might have been an inexact choice of words. Most of this will be webcam and mobile footage - what will drive much of the quality will be the words that are said and how they are arranged in sequence, both before and after production. So - narrative just means that unlike a shared photo or video album, or slideshow, there's people talking and it makes sense...
      - fapi1974 16y ago
        I fixed the wording to make it a bit more precise, thanks.
- gridspy 16y ago
  Exciting idea. I'd jump on board if I was "single" and in the US. I love the viral nature of the service - you have to tell your friends about it so they will contribute their clips to your movie. It would be cool if you had some great placeholders and the author of the clip could edit and cut a placeholder full version. That way as each friend drops their clip in they can view the whole and adjust their part. Making the system modular so you could collaborate on a large movie would also be cool. You could have an import tool that accepts a script as a text file. It finds definitions of characters, scenes, dialog, direction, etc. It then breaks the script into acts, scenes, shots and creates the corresponding data-structures on your end to present same. You then use chunks of dialog as placeholders for the rendered imagery and presto, instant placeholder movie. Author then replaces dialog with storyboards, early renders, then finished content. It could be truly social, like a movie creation wiki with many users. Each user might have different permissions to edit, add content for (some subset of) scenes, etc.
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    I just addressed this with Keyframe. The shining light on a hill is a full toolbox that could be used to create a full on movie. We'll start simple - but my sense is that people will be able to take it quite far within the constraints we establish. All of the above will make awesome premium features...great feedback!
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    Also - and obviously - let me know if your "single" status changes :-)
- Keyframe 16y ago
  I'm actually in real movie studios and around that world every day. I realizes this is a consumer product, not a directorial production. I'm having trouble grasping this concept: 'You provide an outline of topics for each clip you need'... are you suggesting your client (average consumer, I guess?) would be well prepared to have an entire editing session in their mind and prevized the whole montage in their head before they hire your service? Because that's a bit..er far fetched. I feel I don't understand it - can you explain it a bit more? My first idea when I heard about consumer oriented MSAAS as you call it, was that you would provide them with guidelines about story structure (however simple it may be - because it can be made formulaic), offer them a slew of templates like digital juice and, on top of that, list them required material to be shot for a given project... and in the end you auto-magically comp and edit it with a sound sheet and they take of their product.
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    You know, I have stayed away from the "MSAAS" tag in any consumer facing concepts because I feel like that will scare away the average user. The right level of complexity to consider is a wedding tribute video. Ten friends of the couple speak on a topic each: when they were young, how they met, why they're good for each other, etc. We then take those clips and put them together with great transitions, overlays, and copy, and what you have is something that is not fully scripted but far more linear and story-like than, say, an Animoto project. We'll be doing these on all kinds of topics, of course - the wedding thing just gives you a sense for the structure.
    - Keyframe 16y ago
      Yes, of course. Wedding, anniversaries, birthdays.. There are A LOT of template companies out there (like digital juice), comping/editing for a user is a challenging task (and might be fun to make :)), but IMO if you could provide them with a layout tool for story structure, it would be a killer. Like that imovie thing mentioned. I purposely called it a layout tool, since you need only a basic structure to hold it through, not a full blown script (at least not for initial kickoff). I'm sure you've sen Syd Field's workshops and stuff like that. If you could hook up with some template guys (to cut down costs of making them yourself - both money and time wise), maybe hook up with guys like dramatica to devise a simpler version of structure process, and you do the tech part for comp/editing... you'd have something that nobody currently has, and online... I bet youtube guys would be interested if you lose interest in the business along the road. Of course, you could do all the steps without partnerships, but it would take a long time. Just my 2cs.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  I see that your actual business model is 'templates + talking heads = a nice video,' and that the examples you cite are things like wedding tributes, or little opinion pieces. This is an attractive idea, because it's true that there is a lot of demand for this sort of thing, and most of it is pretty generic. It has potential. But...'movie studio as a service' is a terrifying prospect, because there are a ton of people out there with scripts and a ton of people out there with cameras, and a tagline like that is guaranteed to attract the very worst of both groups. Same thing with the domain name - 'cine' puts people's brains into art mode, and when people are disappointed they often blame their tools. This is the sort of hump that besets products like MovieStorm and XtraNormal. I am overstating it a bit to give you the pessimistic angle, but after about a decade of working in indie film and video doing everything from narrative to commercials, it's very hard to work around the inevitable quality problems in the post pipeline - the worse the input material, the less realistic the expectations of the customers about the ability to 'fix it in post' may be. The people who can shoot quality video don't really need a product like this, and the people who really need a product like that may be the trickiest customers to deal with. There's an industry joke to the effect that if the sound is no good, people will say there was something wrong with the lighting; the ability to manage expectations is going to be key to how the public receives it.
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    This is really good insight. "Movie Studio as a Service" has been used nowhere other than in this job posting because of the likelihood of attracting HN interest. I'm actually really happy with that particular result! As for Cine - that's a tough one...I often use "video" instead of "movie" because of different connotations. Naming took forever though - finally I got to the point where I just had to make a call. I don't think there's a good answer to the sweet-spot customer question until we get out there - my personal hunch is it will be more about sharing opinions and being seen than cinematography. And...the cinematography stuff offers great premium opps!
eggnestceo 16y ago
Wow, offering an equity split when you are already so far along. Makes me think, why start my own company. I could just jump on a promising startup that has already done a good deal of hard work. Easier and less risky.
- fapi1974 16y ago
  A really good point. Much risk has been taken out, but I feel pretty strongly that a really strong core team is created when there is real equity in play. I've put in plenty of time and money, but they're not worth anything until we win. I like my chances of winning better with a well incentivized team!
  - myoung8 16y ago
    Very little risk has been taken out until you've found product/market fit. Unfortunately, ideation and fundraising don't eliminate risk, they're the easy parts.
    - fapi1974 16y ago
      Touche. Hence the equity :-)
      - myoung8 16y ago
        You're already ahead of the pack just by realizing that, though. Good luck to you. Feel free to reach out if you want any help.
        fapi1974 16y ago
        Thanks for the offer - I will.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
tjarratt 16y ago
This sounds an awful lot like the business model in "Be Kind, Rewind". That said, it's also a lot more promising. Good luck finding a partner and growing the business, I've been saying for years that the movie industry needs some disruption. Just make sure that if you sell, you sell for enough to make yourself not feel bad when the studios inevitably kill your product.
- fapi1974 16y ago
  You know, my major motivation for doing this isn't so much about the disruption, though I can see that - it's about enabling group creativity. I am not creative myself, but I the idea that you can get awesome social art by making the tools so simple...gets me very stoked indeed!
OstiaAntica 16y ago
I worked on a similar startup back in 2000 in San Fran called Red Zeppelin, so I can say definitively that movie studio as an online service is not an original idea. That project even had local news anchor Stan Bunger as a founder. However, the cost of developing this kind of platform today is easily 20 times cheaper, with powerful UI tools that didn't exist in 2000, and there is now a broad mass social market that didn't exist in 2000. Good luck!
- fapi1974 16y ago
  Would love to talk to you about the experience - can we go offline?
- fapi1974 16y ago
  Your email isn't in your profile - but definitely ping me - would love to talk!
  - OstiaAntica 16y ago
    I didn't have a major role. RedZep had a great team, some funding, and vision, but the tech was really hard and they were ahead of their time. They set up a storefront digital studio, and the idea was that you'd do all the preproduction work online (script, music, backgrounds, transitions), and then go into the physical studio for an hour to do the shoot in front of a greenscreen. The plan was to disrupt traditional video production by using the web to squeeze all of the labor out of that process, and to make it easy to publish and host that video online. (Back when hosting video was EXPENSIVE). Then go nationwide with the model. Again, this was years before YouTube and webcams, when it was kind of hard to publish video online. It obviously failed, I don't know those details, I was working for a tech partner that failed first in early 2001. Yeah dotcom bust! You can google Red Zeppelin Digital, there's still some web mentions and press releases. The principals are all local so you might reach out to them, heck you might find your cofounder!
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    Ahhh - yes, definitely quite different. What was it the man said? "I'd rather be lucky than good." Go 1999!
marcamillion 16y ago
Sounds like an awesome idea...definitely tech/infrastructure heavy. I can see you easily burning through a ton of cash on this. If done properly, could be an awesome service...but it seems so easy to mess it up and end up flaming out. Don't mean to be a downer, just encouraging you to be cautious and make sure the product is extremely easy/straight-forward to use for the consumer. Done right, and priced right, I would definitely use this.
- fapi1974 16y ago
  I've thought about the infrastructure issue a lot. The nice thing is that our value add is in the "create." We can hand off the "host" on videos that aren't profitable by just posting them to youtube or elsewhere...where they will still have value for the user, and where we can still generate some ads from them...
  - marcamillion 16y ago
    I was really talking about the creation side. For instance, say someone wants to create an hour long video. From the little that I know of rendering video on my desktop machines - to render a small 5 minute video can take a few hours. So it just seems that a long-form video will churn up CPU cycles that you are paying for. Although, now that I think about, I guess you could just charge per CPU hour or whatever. But I was more thinking of the creation - than the distribution/hosting.
    - fapi1974 16y ago
      Definitely good insight. I am initially limiting the number of contributors and the segment length - so the processing could actually open up another premium feature.
    - jcr 16y ago
      There are a few outfits working on the resource intensive encoding problem. The only one that comes to mind at the moment is zencoder.com but I'm sure there are others out there if you look. http://zencoder.com/ http://zencoder.com/
dfheer 16y ago
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yakto 16y ago
My first recommendation as your pro-bono interim CTO: edit the meta description tag on http://cinecandy.com http://cinecandy.com so it doesn't say "Capture email addresses with this coming soon template. Suitable for companies in a beta or pre-launch phase or anyone wanting to build an email list around an upcoming site or product/service," because that's what's showing up in the first result at http://www.google.com/search?q=cinecandy http://www.google.com/search?q=cinecandy
- fapi1974 16y ago
  Thanks (sheepish grin)!
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    Also - I'm open to discussing extending your interim status, as you might imagine...:-) The pro-bono status would change, of course.

64 points by fapi1974 16y ago

fapi1974 16y ago

Would love feedback on this post - no mercy expected!

icey 16y ago
It's great to see an idea that isn't just a clone of some other popular tech service. This looks pretty original; what are your plans for success? How does this scale up?
- fapi1974 16y ago
  Thanks! The product is designed with a couple nice little ratchets in mind. People see videos they like, then recognize they can participate. When they participate they invite their friends to watch them - it's instinct. That's the first cycle. The second cycle is that when people don't see a video on a topic they like, they can create one - and invite their friends to contribute. Success is premised on growing the user base through those two cycles, and then selling things like premium editing subscriptions for people who create a lot of content.
  - icey 16y ago
    This is the part that would worry me regarding scaling: "The pieces get plugged in to the appropriate areas, combined and narrated into beautiful product that you can share on all your favorite outlets" Who does the combination and narration? The quality of the final movie is going to be a strong driver perception of your product - how do you ensure the quality stays high as you grow? Is it the users that do the narration? That might make it easier, but then your value proposition drops since they could use iMovie, right? I think it's a cool idea though; definitely sounds interesting.
    - fapi1974 16y ago
      "Narrated" might have been an inexact choice of words. Most of this will be webcam and mobile footage - what will drive much of the quality will be the words that are said and how they are arranged in sequence, both before and after production. So - narrative just means that unlike a shared photo or video album, or slideshow, there's people talking and it makes sense...
    - fapi1974 16y ago
      I fixed the wording to make it a bit more precise, thanks.
gridspy 16y ago
Exciting idea. I'd jump on board if I was "single" and in the US. I love the viral nature of the service - you have to tell your friends about it so they will contribute their clips to your movie. It would be cool if you had some great placeholders and the author of the clip could edit and cut a placeholder full version. That way as each friend drops their clip in they can view the whole and adjust their part. Making the system modular so you could collaborate on a large movie would also be cool. You could have an import tool that accepts a script as a text file. It finds definitions of characters, scenes, dialog, direction, etc. It then breaks the script into acts, scenes, shots and creates the corresponding data-structures on your end to present same. You then use chunks of dialog as placeholders for the rendered imagery and presto, instant placeholder movie. Author then replaces dialog with storyboards, early renders, then finished content. It could be truly social, like a movie creation wiki with many users. Each user might have different permissions to edit, add content for (some subset of) scenes, etc.
- fapi1974 16y ago
  I just addressed this with Keyframe. The shining light on a hill is a full toolbox that could be used to create a full on movie. We'll start simple - but my sense is that people will be able to take it quite far within the constraints we establish. All of the above will make awesome premium features...great feedback!
- fapi1974 16y ago
  Also - and obviously - let me know if your "single" status changes :-)
Keyframe 16y ago
I'm actually in real movie studios and around that world every day. I realizes this is a consumer product, not a directorial production. I'm having trouble grasping this concept: 'You provide an outline of topics for each clip you need'... are you suggesting your client (average consumer, I guess?) would be well prepared to have an entire editing session in their mind and prevized the whole montage in their head before they hire your service? Because that's a bit..er far fetched. I feel I don't understand it - can you explain it a bit more? My first idea when I heard about consumer oriented MSAAS as you call it, was that you would provide them with guidelines about story structure (however simple it may be - because it can be made formulaic), offer them a slew of templates like digital juice and, on top of that, list them required material to be shot for a given project... and in the end you auto-magically comp and edit it with a sound sheet and they take of their product.
- fapi1974 16y ago
  You know, I have stayed away from the "MSAAS" tag in any consumer facing concepts because I feel like that will scare away the average user. The right level of complexity to consider is a wedding tribute video. Ten friends of the couple speak on a topic each: when they were young, how they met, why they're good for each other, etc. We then take those clips and put them together with great transitions, overlays, and copy, and what you have is something that is not fully scripted but far more linear and story-like than, say, an Animoto project. We'll be doing these on all kinds of topics, of course - the wedding thing just gives you a sense for the structure.
  - Keyframe 16y ago
    Yes, of course. Wedding, anniversaries, birthdays.. There are A LOT of template companies out there (like digital juice), comping/editing for a user is a challenging task (and might be fun to make :)), but IMO if you could provide them with a layout tool for story structure, it would be a killer. Like that imovie thing mentioned. I purposely called it a layout tool, since you need only a basic structure to hold it through, not a full blown script (at least not for initial kickoff). I'm sure you've sen Syd Field's workshops and stuff like that. If you could hook up with some template guys (to cut down costs of making them yourself - both money and time wise), maybe hook up with guys like dramatica to devise a simpler version of structure process, and you do the tech part for comp/editing... you'd have something that nobody currently has, and online... I bet youtube guys would be interested if you lose interest in the business along the road. Of course, you could do all the steps without partnerships, but it would take a long time. Just my 2cs.
anigbrowl 16y ago
I see that your actual business model is 'templates + talking heads = a nice video,' and that the examples you cite are things like wedding tributes, or little opinion pieces. This is an attractive idea, because it's true that there is a lot of demand for this sort of thing, and most of it is pretty generic. It has potential. But...'movie studio as a service' is a terrifying prospect, because there are a ton of people out there with scripts and a ton of people out there with cameras, and a tagline like that is guaranteed to attract the very worst of both groups. Same thing with the domain name - 'cine' puts people's brains into art mode, and when people are disappointed they often blame their tools. This is the sort of hump that besets products like MovieStorm and XtraNormal. I am overstating it a bit to give you the pessimistic angle, but after about a decade of working in indie film and video doing everything from narrative to commercials, it's very hard to work around the inevitable quality problems in the post pipeline - the worse the input material, the less realistic the expectations of the customers about the ability to 'fix it in post' may be. The people who can shoot quality video don't really need a product like this, and the people who really need a product like that may be the trickiest customers to deal with. There's an industry joke to the effect that if the sound is no good, people will say there was something wrong with the lighting; the ability to manage expectations is going to be key to how the public receives it.
- fapi1974 16y ago
  This is really good insight. "Movie Studio as a Service" has been used nowhere other than in this job posting because of the likelihood of attracting HN interest. I'm actually really happy with that particular result! As for Cine - that's a tough one...I often use "video" instead of "movie" because of different connotations. Naming took forever though - finally I got to the point where I just had to make a call. I don't think there's a good answer to the sweet-spot customer question until we get out there - my personal hunch is it will be more about sharing opinions and being seen than cinematography. And...the cinematography stuff offers great premium opps!

eggnestceo 16y ago

Wow, offering an equity split when you are already so far along. Makes me think, why start my own company. I could just jump on a promising startup that has already done a good deal of hard work. Easier and less risky.

fapi1974 16y ago
A really good point. Much risk has been taken out, but I feel pretty strongly that a really strong core team is created when there is real equity in play. I've put in plenty of time and money, but they're not worth anything until we win. I like my chances of winning better with a well incentivized team!
- myoung8 16y ago
  Very little risk has been taken out until you've found product/market fit. Unfortunately, ideation and fundraising don't eliminate risk, they're the easy parts.
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    Touche. Hence the equity :-)
    - myoung8 16y ago
      You're already ahead of the pack just by realizing that, though. Good luck to you. Feel free to reach out if you want any help.
      - fapi1974 16y ago
        Thanks for the offer - I will.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

tjarratt 16y ago

This sounds an awful lot like the business model in "Be Kind, Rewind". That said, it's also a lot more promising. Good luck finding a partner and growing the business, I've been saying for years that the movie industry needs some disruption. Just make sure that if you sell, you sell for enough to make yourself not feel bad when the studios inevitably kill your product.

fapi1974 16y ago
You know, my major motivation for doing this isn't so much about the disruption, though I can see that - it's about enabling group creativity. I am not creative myself, but I the idea that you can get awesome social art by making the tools so simple...gets me very stoked indeed!

OstiaAntica 16y ago

I worked on a similar startup back in 2000 in San Fran called Red Zeppelin, so I can say definitively that movie studio as an online service is not an original idea. That project even had local news anchor Stan Bunger as a founder. However, the cost of developing this kind of platform today is easily 20 times cheaper, with powerful UI tools that didn't exist in 2000, and there is now a broad mass social market that didn't exist in 2000. Good luck!

fapi1974 16y ago
Would love to talk to you about the experience - can we go offline?
fapi1974 16y ago
Your email isn't in your profile - but definitely ping me - would love to talk!
- OstiaAntica 16y ago
  I didn't have a major role. RedZep had a great team, some funding, and vision, but the tech was really hard and they were ahead of their time. They set up a storefront digital studio, and the idea was that you'd do all the preproduction work online (script, music, backgrounds, transitions), and then go into the physical studio for an hour to do the shoot in front of a greenscreen. The plan was to disrupt traditional video production by using the web to squeeze all of the labor out of that process, and to make it easy to publish and host that video online. (Back when hosting video was EXPENSIVE). Then go nationwide with the model. Again, this was years before YouTube and webcams, when it was kind of hard to publish video online. It obviously failed, I don't know those details, I was working for a tech partner that failed first in early 2001. Yeah dotcom bust! You can google Red Zeppelin Digital, there's still some web mentions and press releases. The principals are all local so you might reach out to them, heck you might find your cofounder!
- fapi1974 16y ago
  Ahhh - yes, definitely quite different. What was it the man said? "I'd rather be lucky than good." Go 1999!

marcamillion 16y ago

Sounds like an awesome idea...definitely tech/infrastructure heavy. I can see you easily burning through a ton of cash on this. If done properly, could be an awesome service...but it seems so easy to mess it up and end up flaming out. Don't mean to be a downer, just encouraging you to be cautious and make sure the product is extremely easy/straight-forward to use for the consumer. Done right, and priced right, I would definitely use this.

fapi1974 16y ago
I've thought about the infrastructure issue a lot. The nice thing is that our value add is in the "create." We can hand off the "host" on videos that aren't profitable by just posting them to youtube or elsewhere...where they will still have value for the user, and where we can still generate some ads from them...
- marcamillion 16y ago
  I was really talking about the creation side. For instance, say someone wants to create an hour long video. From the little that I know of rendering video on my desktop machines - to render a small 5 minute video can take a few hours. So it just seems that a long-form video will churn up CPU cycles that you are paying for. Although, now that I think about, I guess you could just charge per CPU hour or whatever. But I was more thinking of the creation - than the distribution/hosting.
  - fapi1974 16y ago
    Definitely good insight. I am initially limiting the number of contributors and the segment length - so the processing could actually open up another premium feature.
  - jcr 16y ago
    There are a few outfits working on the resource intensive encoding problem. The only one that comes to mind at the moment is zencoder.com but I'm sure there are others out there if you look. http://zencoder.com/ http://zencoder.com/

dfheer 16y ago

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yakto 16y ago

My first recommendation as your pro-bono interim CTO: edit the meta description tag on http://cinecandy.com http://cinecandy.com so it doesn't say "Capture email addresses with this coming soon template. Suitable for companies in a beta or pre-launch phase or anyone wanting to build an email list around an upcoming site or product/service," because that's what's showing up in the first result at http://www.google.com/search?q=cinecandy http://www.google.com/search?q=cinecandy

fapi1974 16y ago
Thanks (sheepish grin)!
- fapi1974 16y ago
  Also - I'm open to discussing extending your interim status, as you might imagine...:-) The pro-bono status would change, of course.