Hi Everyone,<p>I am a solo founder . I have bootstrapped my start-up NewsPVR.TV and now I am launching. I will appreciate any feedback you may have.<p>This is the problem I am solving :<p>(My target customers are Web-admins & Marketing folks at Television Stations with Local News and Programming. )<p>Local TV stations promote their content by Tweets, Email alerts and Facebook posts . These posts/links are driven by their content as opposed to viewers’ interest. A One Hour news show might cover more 15 than topics -- but if a viewer is interested in 4 things --e.g. Price of Gas,Military , Football , schools -- she or he is unlikely to sit through the whole video to get to the bits she or he is interested in.<p>This is how I solve it:<p>My product, NewsPVR.TV, will figure out which exact segments of the news video corresponds to the topics each member of audience is interested in ; it creates a play-list with only these items extracted from the news video and posts it to the viewer’s wall as a video clip or emails to it the viewer. This way each viewer gets his or her own personalized new videos. We let the viewer define exactly what they want to watch and we deliver just that along with targeted video advertising. By delivering personalized video news to subscribers, we can improve open rate and click through rates -- thereby increasing revenues.<p>Sales:
I am currently using LinkedIN InMail to reach out to sales prospects. No luck yet ;-(<p>I would appreciate any help I could get with sales and business development.<p>I believe in this product so much that I have decided not to charge any money from my clients until my product starts generating marginal revenues for them.<p>I can be reached at founder@newspvr.tv.
Most stations in the US are now posting content transcribed directly to their own websites with clips of the appropriate story already. Promotion is the then directed to twitter/fb on an automatic or selective basis. Is this basically what you are talking about? In the scenario above, people find out about the content through search or directed discovery or one of the aforementioned social streams.<p>If so, then please understand that I don't think you've thought through your hypothesis and gauged demand enough. News shows purposefully put the best content at the end of a show because they want people to slog through the 15 or so commercials in the 3 breaks before consuming it. Notice this whenever there is a juicy story or big weather prediction.<p>Enmass show viewership pays more than selectively pulling out the good bits. AftEr the fact, the value of the content would be zero anyway, so it's repurposed for web use.<p>I would validate your hypothesis with both the consumer and customers. If you can't see it working, pivot. Perhaps a subscribable video playlist based on topics (like good alerts) not channels (like YouTube)<i>.<p></i> if you use this idea and it generates revenue, I want 2 percent.
You should very quickly talk to a local station and validate that your idea makes sense with regard to business objectives and content restrictions.<p>Specifically, I think you may find that stations will not let you copy content or ads to clips on your Amazon CDN account as it is not in line with how they manage content rights and restrictions, nor does it allow to them to manage ads and tracking.<p>I believe you can access segment clips on a local stations website - why not do your alerts/preferences as a marketing feature/service that alerts then direct folks to the clips on the stations' site?
I think this idea is potentially useful and having a news/tv background, I can see the value both the the broadcaster and to the audience. Have you tried offering this to a large broadcaster, such as NBC, as a test pilot, working together to refine the product and use as a case study? NBC is interested and actively integrating emerging digital tech. Local news is a very tough sell as they don't have much money and take limited risk.