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Fora.tv, an online video startup which recently raised $2 million from Adobe Ventures and Will Hearst, is something of a YouTube for the NPR-loving, Ivy League-educated intellectual. Where YouTube is the place to go for talking dogs and Filipino prisoners re-enacting the Thriller video, Fora.tv chronicles the latest lectures at the Brookings Institution or the Council on Foreign Relations. Did you really miss historian Bruce Clark lecturing at Harvard on the emergence of modern Greece and Turkey in the early 20th century? You plebe. Thank goodness Fora.tv has your back.
Fora.tv's founder, Brian Gruber, was a key executive at C-SPAN, and his newest creation is very much in the same vein. The site has an impressive video library of thinkers pontificating on thus and such, but it feels a bit like a college library: it is inspiring to browse great volumes of intellectual information, almost none of which you will ever read. The site feels like an important repository of video, if wildly uninteresting to most people. A good litmus test may be the site's name. If you didn't know that fora is the plural of forum, you might be better off sticking to monkey videos on YouTube.
Fora.tv does break each video into chapters enabling the viewer to skip ahead to the relevant section—a key feature on videos which tend to exceed an hour in length and contain limited edits. The real drawback, however, is the size of the video, most of which is two to three inches wide. (Screen shot above is the video's actual size.)
According to TechCrunch, Fora.tv plans to raise an additional $5 million within 90 days. It isn't hard to see why this investment would appeal to foundations and old money donors interested in promoting civic discourse and creating a video library of their high-minded peers. Whether Fora.tv can garner an audience beyond reference-seeking grad students is another story.
