Well that’s a pretty crazy question. Or is it?
YouTube made the world of online video go from highly pixilated vignettes of animation to full-blown native HD live streaming almost overnight. This video explosion also increased the innovation demands on companies that deliver bandwidth, the ability to move bits from one place to another, the “dump truck” behind the “pipes” if you will. However, with the video explosion there were no equal innovations on content providers’ side of the ledger and, as a result, a lot of the online video developers are now struggling to find a profitable balance between creating great content and their cost of delivering it to consumers.
For example, if you have a video with a fixed product placement fee of $1,000, and the video goes viral and costs $10,000 to deliver, the content creator just lost $9,000. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and carriers are all designed to allow this to happen and as a result the content creators put less video online, put lower quality video online, and are severely held back from creating their visions.
This begs the question, “what would the world look like if delivery bandwidth were near free and limitless?”
The first major change that comes to mind: more content would become instantly available. Great content would be even better and the creative people restrained by the price of delivering content would be unleashed. Everyone would be focused on how to create superior content, instead of the operating costs of delivering it.
At 3Crowd, we just received a $6.62 million venture investment from our partners at Storm Ventures and Canaan Partners. With that investment (and maybe some more later) and a lot of hard work, we plan to execute this vision: we think we can change the economics of the content delivery systems and make widespread distribution of video more financially feasible. And we think we can make a substantive and positive impact on Internet along the way. If we can help provide tools and subsystems that can enable “the crowd” to harness resources in a new way, we may be able one day to realize a content economy where bandwidth is no longer a restrictive line item on businesses’ operating budgets. If we do our job right, scalable and affordable data delivery will no longer be a pipe dream.
