A survey of WaterView's properties shows a new entertainment empire under construction.
Over the past year, Frank Biondi and his WaterView Advisors have covered their bets by investing in an array of media startups, from a leading Gen Y site aimed at high school- and college-age users (Bolt) to a heavy-duty network infrastructure company (Edgix). In the months ahead, Biondi & Co. will have the opportunity to knit these startups and others like them into larger media companies, say observers like industry recruiter Dana Ardi of TMP Worldwide. Meanwhile, she adds, Biondi's friends in the traditional entertainment business "will be looking to him to bring them new Net opportunities." Here's a quick hit on six key players in the emerging sectors of content (AtomFilms), distribution (SightSound.com), ecommerce (WhatsHotNow.com), business-to-business media services (Creative Planet), convergent content (CNX Media), and Webcasting (Yack.com), plus a few other startups in WaterView's portfolio.
AtomFilms
CEO and founder Mika Salmi first met Frank Biondi last April in West Hollywood at the Mondrian. Salmi showed up first and waited in the hotel's stark white lobby: He was surprised when Biondi arrived without an entourage. "There are no one-on-one meetings in Hollywood," Salmi observes. The two men skipped the hotel's high-visibility Skybar and instead grabbed a couple of white-cotton-covered chairs in a corner.
Salmi - who was a music-industry executive before he went dot-com (he signed Nine Inch Nails) - recalls that Biondi was a little skeptical about short films on the Web: "Do you really think there's a market there for shorts?" he asked. "I know people at DirecTV; they have lots of channels to fill." Biondi was proposing a shorts channel. But after an hour and a half of comfortable conversation, Biondi agreed to invest in the company and sit on its board. "For better or worse," Biondi says, "if the numbers are half-reasonable, I tend to base most of my investment judgments on the people."
Many entertainment industry insiders assumed Biondi was dabbling in the Internet business while waiting for his next real job. Salmi had the same concern when he asked Biondi his "trick question": Was he looking for a smart investment to attach his name to, or did he have a more active role in mind? "Look," Salmi told Biondi, "I understand I can't be a shorts distributor forever. I've got to evolve. What I'd like to be is the functional equivalent of a large independent or a studio on the Net, and I'm going to need people like you to help me."
"I'll be as active as you want me to be," Biondi told him. In the months since that meeting, Biondi has been as good as his word. "He's willing to get right in," says Salmi, who consults Biondi about twice a week on average, particularly on "Hollywood political questions."
In turn, Biondi seems to be pleased with his investment. "Who would have predicted Salmi would turn out to be this super salesman for his company? He's elevated the whole shorts arena."
SightSound.com
"We're digital truckers, not movie stars," says CEO Scott Sander, explaining why his startup is located in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, rather than Hollywood. Last spring, Sander's company became the first to offer a feature-length film for downloading over the Web (Darren Aronofsky's Pi). "Our goal from day one has been to make obsolete the physical distribution of plastic videotapes," Sander says. For now, SightSound.com targets college students with fast Internet connections - a demo that Biondi became familiar with a few years ago when his daughter called him from school: "Dad, I'm watching a movie on a PC in the language lab. It'sso cool."
SightSound.com's claim to hold exclusive patents for downloading video and music over the Web has raised eyebrows in Hollywood - especially among the major studios that Sander says are key to his business. He consults Biondi weekly. "His insight into how the studios would react to our proposals is uniquely valuable," Sander says.
WhatsHotNow.com
The 3-year-old company bills itself as the "Internet's premier site to find, buy, and influence pop culture." WhatsHotNow.com is like three online entertainment businesses organized around a core licensed-merchandise operation. First there's the online store, where fans can shop a huge inventory of products - from Stan Lee Mongorr's Minions lithographs to Pikachu beanies. Visitors can nominate trends for the Hot List of movies, TV, and lifestyles. WHN Solutions, another business line, handles ecommerce - from site development to order fulfillment - for licensed-merchandise property holders. WHN BizNet is a business-to-business operation that creates a multimedia environment where suppliers and retailers of licensed products can interact. All in all, it's a pretty aggressive business lineup for a company that, little more than a year ago, was just another design shop building Web sites for movies and TV.
Creative Planet
"What's evolutionary is watching short films on the Internet," says Creative Planet CEO Allen DeBevoise. "What'srevolutionary is making them." The LA-based startup aims to be the ultimate business-to-business site for professional media creators (with a community DeBevoise estimates at about 800,000 moving-media makers) and, eventually, a larger community (upwards of 6 million) of general content creators and people who would make media if they had the tools.
Creative Planet seeks to recapture the efficiencies of Hollywood's traditional studio system by essentially creating an intranet for media professionals. DeBevoise and his partner, John Valenti (son of MPAA president Jack, who's on the board), are building vertical Web communities for directors, cinematographers, editors, and other creative types in the industry. They've purchased applications like Movie Magic Budgeting and Movie Magic Scheduling with an eye toward offering these communities an integrated set of services further down the road. "When you talk to the VCs," says John Valenti, "they ask, 'Isn't this a business controlled by seven studios?' Frank understood right away that creating media is a worldwide phenomenon."
CNX Media
In January 1999, Preview Travel spun off its television business, the core of which was one of the largest travel-video libraries around. Allan Horlick, a 24-year veteran of NBC, came on board as president and CEO, and CNX Media (the name was changed from NewsNet Central last January) was born. Horlick describes the firm as "a pure content company that creates convergent media" for TV and the Net. Teams of television and Web producers in the company's San Francisco offices develop reports for local TV stations, partnering with major Internet companies to produce such offerings as a series of personal finance reports with Quicken.com and medical reports with HealthCentral.com.
"From a pure dollars-and-sense point of view, if wecreate our own content, weown our own content," says Horlick. "We're building video libraries that can be used on cable, the Internet, and radio." Biondi has helped open doors and do due diligence on deals. "The real payoff wasn't the financial support" from WaterView, says Horlick. "It was being able to tap into Frank Biondi's brain."
Yack.com
"Yack.com will be to live, cached, and streamed Web events whatTV Guide is to television," says CEO Jeff Morris, a 15-year veteran of Showtime Networks who joined the startup last July. Morris says Yack.com is the "most comprehensive Web event directory in the marketplace." The site aims to satisfy three constituencies: consumers who want an easy-to-use link to live Web events that interest them; event producers looking for a way to increase their audience for live events on the Web; and platform providers and distributors searching for a cost-effective way to provide live online events. Founded in 1996 by Sean Malatesta, Farhan Memon, and Jasbir Singh, Yack.com lists up to 15,000 live events a week, organized into 11 categories, including books, technology, living, money, sex and dating, sports, and TV and film. The company's Yack Guide is syndicated to other online destinations, such as TV Guide Online, AltaVista, and iWon.com, and is also distributed through offline media. Recent visitors could catch up on the doings at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, hearPenthouse Pet of the Year Juliet Cariaga's observations on sex in the film industry, or immerse themselves in the world of mutual funds with theMorningstar Mutual Fund Show.
Biondi joined the company's board in November. "I try not to bother him more than I need," says Morris, adding that they usually check in with each other weekly.
Other startups in WaterView's portfolio:
Bolt A Web site providing content and services for 15- to 20-year-olds.
Broadband Sports Provides online content and commerce to hundreds of individual sports communities.
Broadway Digital Entertainment This startup is accumulating the rights to many of the great televised dramas of the past for distribution via the Internet and traditional media.
Classic Media Acquires the rights to classic television and film characters and licenses them to producers for use in feature films, television and other media.
Cypress Communications A company that manages communications (e.g., high-speed Internet) for office complexes.
DealTime.com An Internet comparison-shopping service whose visitors can compare goods and prices of online merchants, group buying sites, auctions, and classifieds.
Edgix An Internet network infrastructure company that uses caching and broadband satellite technologies to bypass congestion.
edu.com An online shopping destination for college students.
FiberNet Telecom Group A fiber-optic network company in the "smart building" business.
Footage Now A stock footage company that is taking its business to the Internet.
Fusient Media Ventures An incubator and online studio that finances and distributes content on the Web.
Globe Wireless A maritime telecommunications provider.
Hollywood.com Producer of the Hollywood.com site, which bills itself as "the world's biggest online entertainment studio store."
James Cable Partners Owner of cable television systems in rural districts in Oklahoma and other states.
Loudeye Formerly encoding.com, this company digitizes and encodes audio and video content for Internet-playable formats.
Massive Media This startup manages digital rights in advertising and entertainment.
Online Media Marketplace An Internet service that acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers of media time on TV and radio.
