Real Fresh TV: The Story So Far
I started Real Fresh TV in October 2005 after hearing that one of the first companies to make a video podcast available on iTunes received a million downloads in 24 hours.
To me it signalled the start of consumer awareness of today’s ‘on-demand culture’, of content delivered to anyone who wanted it anywhere on-demand, of entertainment delivered on my terms rather than on a broadcaster’s schedule.
From then onwards working in and excelling in this space became an obsession.
Every new technology needs ‘expert enablers’, people who use it to help other people use it and I set out to become one for the nascent online video industry in the UK.
The name came about because I had been sporadically organising live music events around Manchester in 2005 and wanted to hand out flyers that had ‘This is a Real Fresh event’ written on them.
Although I studied Electronic and Communication Engineering at the University of York for five years, I am also a singer songwriter and musician. When I started thinking about using video podcasting to publish live music events online, registering the domain ‘www.realfresh.tv’ became … how do I put it … self-evident.
And so in January 2006, after months of planning, we had our first event at Manchester’s sadly missed Late Room.
I hope you noticed what I did there with what we, in the UK, call the ‘royal ‘we”. It’s what you do when you refer to a single-person-run-business as an entity. Pretty much every entrepreneur I know does it when they are starting out. It… just… sticks…
Anyway, I invited the best bands I knew personally to play and the event was well received by the Manchester music community. The bands had all agreed to play for free, accepting the online promotion and short video clips of their performances as fair reward. We packed out the Late Room and at the end of the night (which you can watch on the Watch! page), comfortably covered venue hire and made a profit of around £25 from ticket sales.
We *lost* money on the cost of creating and editing the videos, however. This pattern was to repeat itself over the months that followed. More on that later. However, I was still working as a software engineer at Intel-funded electronic design automation start-up, Silistix and so took it on the chin.
Over the course of 2006, we put on 8 more events, building a buzz and building a name for more than a few Manchester bands (and a few US bands) in the process. We also covered regional music festivals like Futuresonic, Cohesion Live and the sadly missed Dpercussion.
I personally organised each event, taking on venue booking, band selection, event promotion and tons and tons of project management. I worked closely with the extremely talented team at Captured Alive, a local video production company, to plan the filming of each event, overseeing pre-production and event logistics. It was often a struggle to pay them for the fantastic work they did on a relatively small budget. However, the enthusiasm and skill they poured into capturing each event on film meant every single penny spent was worth it. Captured Alive are responsible for the fantastic live music videos you can watch on Real Fresh TV.
They also handled all post production and editing of the footage and produced well edited video clips within ten days of most of the events. I then took care of online delivery of the edited videos, managing file encoding and publishing online and editorial writing for each of the platforms used to promote the content.
The videos were initially streamed online using a bespoke Flash player in January 2006 but by June all streaming was being managed through Brightcove’s excellent Internet TV platform. Content was always made available to download in formats suitable for playback on iPods, PDAs, smart phones and 3G mobile phones. And as one would expect from the creators of Europe’s first live music video podcast, the 3 Minute Gig, each video was also available on iTunes.
I left my job at Silistix in April 2006 to focus on developing the business side of Real Fresh TV. Along with planning and organising all the events, I spent most of my time approaching businesses to sponsor the events.
It was hard.
This is in mid-2006 before Google bought YouTube. Before Joost. Before iPhones and the iPod Touch. Before itv.com, and Channel 4’s 4 On Demand. (For non-UK readers, itv.com and Channel 4 are the two largest commercial (terrestrial) TV broadcasters in the UK).
Very few people even knew what podcasting was back then. It takes about a year to eighteen months for technology that is mainstream in the US to gain public acceptance in the UK and some would argue that podcasting is still a little ‘behind public adoption’. Advertising within a video podcast (and later on, on an Internet TV channel) seemed so… I’m going to use the word carefully …out-of-the-ordinary… to the majority of the businesses I approached. That it featured largely unsigned and independent bands probably didn’t help.
All the same, we had a strong underground following with music fans from all over the world visiting realfresh.tv soon after videos from an event were available online. At one stage, we were attracting over 118,000 hits a month and serving over 50GB of content in downloads. We managed to sign up a couple of sponsors that year but the harsh, commercial reality was that few businesses back then recognised the value of online video advertising.
Being based in Manchester probably didn’t help, sadly. Being founded in London might have, arguably, but I will never know.
However, a few amazing things happened in 2006 that brings us to this point. If you are reading this because you heard that Real Fresh TV has re-launched as an Internet TV and social media consultancy and has been working with T-Mobile UK to distribute their late music TV series, Transmission with T-Mobile online then this is where it gets interesting.
A lady I met through the University of Salford’s fantastic W:ISE (Women: Investing in Skills for Entrepreneurship) programme asked me to contact T-Mobile about working with them on their Street Gigs series of spontaneous, live music events.
For the last three years, T-Mobile have been putting on a series of invite-only live music events known as Street Gigs in the UK.
The concept was revolutionary when it started in 2005. If you were a T-Mobile customer, you signed up to be kept informed about T-Mobile Street Gigs and if your phone number was picked at random, you received a text message telling you where the venue for the next Street Gig was hours before it started.
It was flash-mobbing, but for gigs.
The gigs themselves were intimate events featuring Top 40 bands in unusual venues. In the first year, The Strokes performed in London’s Natural Museum and Pharrell Williams performed in a fruit market in Glasgow.
It was a neat idea and the events were understandably well received by the music community.
However, people didn’t take too well with to the uncertainty of the flash mobbing element and T-Mobile have since developed Street Gigs into relatively well publicised live music events, informing the public about each event a few weeks beforehand. Sign up is now strictly online and is open to anyone. The concept itself has since been copied by other mobile phone operators with Vodafone launching its own ‘TBA Gigs’ in April 2007.
It took me five months to get through to someone I could speak to at T-Mobile. My mistake was wasting time (read, months) trying to convince their media buyers.
Finally, in March 2007 I met the very helpful head of communications at T-Mobile at a marketing conference in London. She referred me to a senior person in T-Mobile UK’s marketing team and over the months that followed I met with the team several times.
They turned down my pitch for sponsorship but asked me to come up with a solution for distributing T-Mobile branded content like Street Gigs online.
Initially, they were interested in a one stop solution for distributing videos from the Street Gigs events to the widest possible audience online. Over the six months that followed, my remit expanded to developing a multi-platform digital distribution solution for distributing T-Mobile’s branded late night music TV show, Transmission with T-Mobile online.
Transmission with T-Mobile was developed to promote T-Mobile Street Gigs and most Street Gigs are filmed for inclusion in the TV show. Artists and celebrities featured on the last two series of Transmission (as it is often called) include Scissor Sisters, Queens of the Stone Age, Mika, Samuel L. Jackson, Yoko Ono, Jada Pinkett Smith, Ozzy Osbourne and Pete Doherty.
I presented several proposals to T-Mobile and they finally settled on one involving digital distribution of Transmission with T-Mobile on fully branded channels on YouTube, Bebo, Joost and Brightcove, synchronised with the TV broadcast schedule on Channel 4.
T-Mobile are currently negotiating online distribution rights to Transmission with T-Mobile with Channel 4. We hope to deliver Transmission with T-Mobile online as soon as it becomes possible to do so.
The digital distribution solution developed for T-Mobile forms the core of our Real Fresh Digital Distribution service, a white label digital distribution solution that provides content owners with a one stop solution for distributing content online.
It’s been an incredible journey.
During the last six months I’ve been to the Google UK offices in London, met with Joost, visited Bebo in London and had countless transatlantic phone conversations with content acquisition managers at online video publishers Brightcove, Veoh and Azureus.
Despite the stress of juggling multiple part time jobs with writing multiple proposals, I’ve never looked back. The launch of Hulu yesterday and other online video services like Joost and Babelgum over the last few months ago vindicate my decision last year to move into online video.
However, I’ve had to learn a few lessons.
I’ve learnt that a business exists to create a customer.
I’ve learnt that change causes disruption in all industries and that those businesses nimble enough to respond quickly to the opportunities created are the ones that succeed in the long term.
I’ve learnt that technology moves very, very fast and that the best one can do is to contribute to developments by making sure one’s voice is heard.
I’ve no regrets about leaving my job as a software engineer and turning my back on the safe and secure income it provided.
It’s been incredibly difficult at times to keep going but I did, thanks to the enduring support of my family and friends and their belief that I was doing something important, something that would make an impact.
I owe any success I achieve to them and to God for making beans on toast taste so good. And for stopping me from giving up.
However, I’ve some regrets about my slow adoption of social media back in the early days of Real Fresh TV.
I regret not blogging about our progress earlier. I regret not putting Digg and del.icio.us buttons on the site earlier. I regret not signing up for a YouTube account earlier.
All these I could have done, much much earlier than most.
But I have now and you can follow our progress much better.
Welcome to the new Real Fresh TV!
In coming days we will be launching publicly.
Let us know what you think about what we are doing, any time you like!
We welcome feedback.
Leave your thoughts in the comments!
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