[itvt] ITV Interview: Mike Folgner, Co-Founder, Jumpcut

Last fall, online video editing service, Jumpcut, was acquired by Internet portal, Yahoo!. [itvt]'s Tracy Swedlow recently spoke to Jumpcut co-founder, interactive TV industry veteran Mike Folgner, about the service and the concepts behind it; about how it is enabling wiki-like collaborative editing processes; about plans to integrate Jumpcut into Yahoo!'s other services; about the prospects for enabling interactivity in video edited using the service; and more.

[itvt]: Your background is in traditional interactive TV, correct? How did you come to start Jumpcut?

Folgner: Yes. I actually worked at OpenTV from 1999 to 2003. So I saw a ton of the major developments in that field. I started there as a sales engineer, and finished as the director of business development for OpenTV's interactive content unit. That's the unit that bought PlayJam and was responsible for all OpenTV's interactive applications. Then I went back to business school at Stanford in 2003 and graduated in 2005. I decided to go back to school with the goal of exploring digital media--specifically, personal digital media. I started looking at various trends and doing some analysis, and concluded that people were going to be creating a lot more personal media in 2004 and 2005, using digital cameras, and in particular the cameras in their cell phones. I was particularly interested in the potential of personal video. In 2004, only a small percentage--around 15%--of the regular digital cameras shipped had video-capture capability. In 2005, that rose to something like 50%. And now it's somewhere over 80%.

So pretty much everyone's got video capability now. What I predicted when I was at Stanford was that the same thing that happened with digital photos was going to happen with digital video--in other words, that all this personal content that is shot digitally was going to go online. And that led me to believe that people were going to want to have creative tools online for editing their video. After all, it takes a little bit more manipulation to make a video than to make a photo, even if all you're doing is just trimming something down. For example, you might just want to trim the first couple of seconds of a shot, where the camera wasn't steady, or you might want to add a title to it, or sequence two clips or whatever. And, for convenience's sake, you're probably going to want that sort of editing capability in the same place as where you're sharing your video.

So, when I was at business school, I wrote a business plan to build an online community around creating and sharing digital video and pictures.

[itvt]: At the time, did you see the business plan as just a student exercise, or were you already planning to start a company around it?

Folgner: I was definitely intent on starting a company as soon as I was out of Stanford. So, anyway, I wrote this business plan and graduated in 2005. I partnered up with an engineer named Ryan Cunningham, and we co-founded Jumpcut. Ryan was from Macromedia: he actually wrote ActionScript 2.0, which is the authoring language for Flash. He had worked a lot on communications servers and a bunch of different Macromedia products--he has a very deep background in video. So, with my background at OpenTV on the application side and on the business development side, and with his engineering background in building and scaling tools for video manipulation, we started the company.

[itvt]: You secured your first round of funding--and were bought out by Yahoo!--pretty soon after you founded the company, correct?

Folgner: Yes. We built a prototype of our service, and we got funding soon after. We closed our first round of funding in November, 2005. Then we launched the public beta in early April, 2006. And, when we had ramped up pretty well, we were acquired by Yahoo! in October, 2006.

[itvt]: Why do you think you were acquired so quickly? There are a number of similar services out there, correct?

Folgner: Well, if you do a blog search on Jumpcut and read the product reviews, you'll see that people think our company really stands apart on account of the quality of the tools that are on our site. Jumpcut's the only service out there that does actual real-time video editing--where you edit something and you can immediately preview what you did. Everybody else has a time delay.

Basically, we get a lot of high marks for our ease-of-use, for the intuitive way we've laid out our tools. Also, we've spent a lot of time thinking about the community. Our community is one of the more thriving communities of its kind that are out there. Members of our community can share raw assets or finished assets, and can remix other one another's assets. So I can make a movie and edit it, and we actually save the edit sessions for that movie. So another user can go in and--if the movie's owner has designated it as public and remixable--actually re-edit that movie. We have a concept of "open movies"--by which we mean collaborative video editing, where you can create a movie that can be edited by anyone, similar to a wiki.

So we've really thought a lot about how to build these tools we offer into a community; and about how to allow that community to use our tools to create things that they couldn't create before. I think that this is what really sets us apart from some of the other companies that are in this space.

[itvt]: What do people use your service most for? Which of your tools are proving the most popular?

Folgner: People use our service most frequently for sequencing. Basically, for trimming and putting together multiple clips, and then putting titles and effects on them, and then, as soon as they're done with that, they enter in email addresses, or designate various friends on our site, and instantly publish their movie to all their friends--who get notified that there's a new movie for them to look at. So that's a pretty typical usage scenario for our service.

[itvt]: What do you consider to be your biggest differentiators? Why should someone use your editing tool on the Web, as opposed to iMovies or some of the other tools that are available?

Folgner: One advantage we offer is that no download is required. You simply go to Jumpcut.com, instantly sign up for an account, and you have access to a fully functional, real-time video editor. As I mentioned, it's very intuitive to use. So this whole process is very easy, compared to having to go to a Web site, downloading software, and then having to learn how to use it.

Also, we have sharing built in. As you know, the old process for creating home movies was, "Hey. I've got some video on my camera of that party we were at that I may want to make a movie of. You were there with me at the party. So please would you burn your pictures and video onto a CD, and give me that CD, so I can use it?" So then, when my friends send me their video or pictures, I'll load them onto my computer. Then, working alone, I'll edit this movie, export the finished video, burn it to a DVD and send it to somebody, or post it on a Web site. So that's the old process, which is time-consuming, cumbersome and non-collaborative.

However, with Jumpcut, you can?well, let me tell you what I did for my own wedding--I got married last June.

[itvt]: Congratulations!

Folgner: Thanks. Well, after the wedding, I sent a message to all the guests, saying, "Hey, upload all the pictures and video that you took at the wedding to my wedding group." Everybody did so, and I made a wedding movie out of their pictures and video, not just my own. Then, as soon as I'd made that movie, I clicked on one button, and it was instantly shared. So I didn't have to worry about reformatting and doing file output for the Web, about sending it out, about picking a dedicated video-sharing site, or anything like that.

So we've taken the old multi-stage process, which involved a Web site and two different software applications, and made it into a single, simple process. And we've also added a community element, because I don't necessarily only want to edit out of my own raw content--sometimes, I want to edit out of other people's content.

I also made my brother's rehearsal dinner video, using video that had been shot by his wife's--his then fiancee's--mom, my mom and a couple friends. I just told them, "Here's the URL. Just go there and click on 'Upload.' And that way you can upload all your footage." So I had all their footage instantly at my disposal--I didn't have to wait for them to burn it to a CD and mail it to me. Then, as I was making the movie, I was able to get their feedback, asking them stuff like, "Which song do you think I should add here?" And they would comment on the process. Previously, editing was kind of a lonely process. We've added this community element to it and made it into a collaborative, open process.

[itvt]: When people upload video to your service, it is transcoded to Flash, correct?

Folgner: Yes, we transcode it to Flash.

[itvt]: Are you using On2's platform?

Folgner: I don't think I'm allowed to say, because we sign NDA's with all these companies.

[itvt]: How many people are actively using your service on a regular basis?

Folgner: We actually are not disclosing that number, right now. But I can say that the number of users is growing significantly.

[itvt]: People are using your service for projects other than home movies, correct?

Folgner: Absolutely. We've had plenty of professional types use our site. We've had real estate agents use it to make videos about houses, for example. Then there's a group, Steelyard Pictures, which is a professional film production company in LA. They organized a contest in which people auditioned for an independent film called, "The Power of Few." How you auditioned for this movie was, once you become familiar with Jumpcut, you could browse clips at ThePowerOfFew.com that they made available of various other actors in the movie saying their lines, and you could see the lines you were supposed to say yourself. Then, you'd film yourself saying those lines, and edit yourself into the movie, so that the other characters would say something, and you'd be in the movie saying something back.

But they're not just using Jumpcut to cast the film. They're also going to invite users of the service to help them edit the film: once they're shooting it, they'll upload the dailies, and invite people not only to comment on them, but to actually edit those dailies together. They'll take the best edits, and if they use your edits, you'll get an editor's credit at the end of the film. So it will be a highly collaborative process that relies on real-time feedback from users of our site. They're basically including their audience and their potential fan base in the actual making of the movie.

Also, as you reported in the newsletter, Fox Atomic, which is a division of Fox Films, licensed the Jumpcut editor from us, in order to allow people to do mash-ups. So if you go to FoxAtomic.com and you click on "The Blender," you'll see that you can do full video editing and playback using the Jumpcut technology. They've basically leveraged our public API's--our commercial API's--in order to implement our editing solution in their site.

So there are definitely a lot of opportunities for professional production companies and other businesses to leverage our tools. However, I should caution that, where we're at right now with the technology--mostly because it's online--it works better for shorter things like an audition video, or something like that. I'm not sure that it's particularly suited for editing a full-length film yet. But as bandwidth gets better and upload speeds and download speeds get faster, who knows? Right now, though, our sweet spot is really these shorter two- to three-minute movies.

[itvt]: Which presumably makes your service useful for user-generated advertising projects?

Folgner: Actually, we did a promotion called "Doritos Crash the Super Bowl," where users were challenged to make the best Doritos commercial; their entries were then voted on, and the winning commercials were aired at halftime during the Super Bowl.

[itvt]: I also see that users of your site are being invited to remix footage from various Hollywood movies. I take it that all that is also under the auspices of various promotions?

Folgner: Yes. We've done deals with Fox, Warner Bros. Independent Pictures, EA, Sony BMG, New Line and a couple of other large entertainment brands, under which they're providing footage for people to remix. Let's take the deal with Warner Bros., for example. They basically said, "Here's some content for our upcoming movie, "A Scanner Darkly." We're going to provide you with 40 different clips of the movie, and we're going to have a contest on who can make the best movie trailer. And the winner of that contest is going to go to watch the movie."

So we've actually taken this concept of remixing, and turned it into a promotional opportunity for these various movie studios. We've already got deals in place with a lot of them. We're working with a lot of television studios as well. They really like the concept of being able to have a branded environment where they can provide people with their content, and people can make their own movies with that content, but then the movies those people make are viewable only on the site.

I should stress, of course, that we comply with the DMCA: if we get a notification that copyrighted content is on our site, we will immediately verify that that person who uploaded doesn't own it, and we'll pull it down straight away.

[itvt]: I'm quite fascinated by this concept of wiki-like collaborative filmmaking that you mentioned earlier. But, if I were to upload a movie for other users to remix, would I be able to track how many times my movies has been re-edited, who did the re-editing and so on? How would I be able to watch the evolution of my material?

Folgner: It's all built into the system. If you look at any movie on the site that's been remixed, you will see the remix history. It tracks back where it came from. You also see a list of contributors. So if I've uploaded a piece of content and you've used that piece of content in your movie, I show up as a contributor to your movie, to the right of the video window. So the system tracks who contributed raw content, as well as who has done the editing, and displays that; and we give recognition to the various people who have contributed along the way.

By the way, our terms of use basically state that, if you make something public on our site, you are allowing it to be remixed.

[itvt]: Do you have any plans to monetize this remix feature, so that people would get paid if their content is incorporated into other users' movies?

Folgner: I can't talk about any future plans for us doing that, right now. But it's a good idea, and it's something we're definitely thinking about.

[itvt]: Now your service doesn't currently allow users to download their movies, correct? Which was one of the things you cited as making it appealing to studios that are providing footage of movies for remixing?

Folgner: Yes. We don't currently allow you to download your movies.

[itvt]: But don't you think that people would want to burn their movie to a DVD and, say, mail it off to their grandma who doesn't have access to a computer?

Folgner: That's something that we?re thinking about.

[itvt]: Now that you guys are part of Yahoo!, how are you working on integrating your service more tightly with their portal and its various other services?

Folgner: We have several plans for how we can integrate Jumpcut across the Yahoo! set of services. In fact, we're already pretty tightly integrated with Yahoo! Video. For example, if you made a movie for the Doritos contest in their branded area?all of those movies got RSS'd into the Yahoo! Video portal, and some of them even got RSS'd to the Yahoo! front page. So we can promote stuff that was created on Jumpcut by having it be seen throughout the Yahoo! network.

Another thing we're working on that we think is critical is this: because our editor is completely online, you can allow the user to edit in the appropriate context that they're coming from. Here's an example: if someone was on the Yahoo! Personals Web site, and they wanted to edit together a video about themselves, they could just click on a button on that site, and access a version of our editor that's perhaps specifically geared more toward making a personal video--so maybe with some specific instructions on how to do that. And they could then publish their video instantly to their personal profile. So we're very interested in this idea of putting editing technology into various different contexts within the Web. And there are certainly plenty of places within Yahoo! where this kind of thing would be applicable.

[itvt]: Do you have any plans to run promotions with broadcasters that would be similar to the one you ran for Doritos--so where your users would be invited to create short-form programming that would be broadcast on a network or a cable channel?

Folgner: The Doritos contest is the only thing like that that we've announced publicly. But the things that you describe are the kinds of things that we're thinking of. Unfortunately, I can't be more specific at this time.

[itvt]: Are you seeing any interest in your service from film schools?

Folgner: There's definitely interest in it on the part of academia, and we've seen some film schools use it for specific projects. What makes it useful for academia is that everybody uses the same tool, and they can easily collaborate and share their work with a group. We've also had a graduate student at Harvard use the API to create a Web site around video editing. And we've actually had a lot of interest from people in elementary education, who feel that it would be a useful tool for enabling children to see how video is actually made. One of the misconceptions that I think young people have is that video just somehow magically appears. It's important for them to see that you have to sequence and trim each shot, and so forth. And Jumpcut is easy enough to use that these lower age groups can use it.

[itvt]: Do you have any plans to enable users of your service to add some kind of interactive functionality to their videos?

Folgner: Well, with my background, that is something that we are definitely thinking about. It's not something that I see happening immediately, but it is something we're looking at.

However, because community is essential to what we do, we do get a lot of feedback from our users, and so we tend to build the products and features that those users are asking for. At the moment, we're not seeing a ton of them asking for, you know, the whole "Click here, to see what kind of skirt Jennifer Aniston's wearing" type of interactive TV functionality. You know, I saw that concept--or various versions of it--demo'd a million different times when I was at OpenTV, and I'm still not completely sold that it's the most appropriate model for interactive TV. But I'm also convinced that the notion that video should just be for viewing is incorrect. There are lots of different things you can do within a video that would make it interactive. For example, simply putting URL's inside of it, that you could then link to. Our technology actually works very well for that. So I guess my answer to your question is that there are many different non-linear and interactive things that you can do with video, and that we're looking at implementing some of these things down the road.

[itvt]: In light of the recent shake-ups at Revver and Guba, that followed the announcement that Google was purchasing YouTube, do you have any thoughts on the long-term prospects of the online video/video-sharing/user-generated content space? Are we about to see significant consolidation in this area? If so, which kinds of services do you think are going to survive?

Folgner: Well, I know that we're going to survive. We have a very proud owner that's going to make sure we thrive! I also think that YouTube will survive--of course!

But seriously, I think the market will definitely consolidate. There are currently several sites that are doing very similar things, and that are not getting a lot of traction. I think that any time you see companies that have a very similar service and a very similar model, you're going to have some consolidation and you're going to see some companies go away.

I think this is one of the reasons why we focused on the video-editing piece of this, and on the collaborative video-creation community. Because if you're talking about purely video-sharing, I think that there's definitely going to be a lot of consolidation. However, we can still probably say that we're the only real-time video editing product on the Internet. No-one else has been able to do what we've been able to do.

URL: http://www.jumpcut.com

Originally Published: March 21 , 2007 in [itvt] Issue 7.23

Click: http://www.itvt.com to subscribe to our free email newsletter, which contains all the news stories you see on this Web site, and additional breaking news and scoops, in-depth features, interviews, screenshots, videos, and other exclusive content you will not find anywhere else.