Imagine if your startup’s SEED funding round was for a cool billion dollars? That’s the case for NewTV, which is the online-video startup being launched by former Disney and DreamWorks exec Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay and HP exec Meg Whitman.
They’ve raised the funding from a mixture of Hollywood studios (Disney, 21st Century Fox, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate, MGM… the list goes on) and tech companies (Alibaba Group in China most notably) as well as institutional investors.
What are Whitman and Katzenberg going to do with the money? They’re going to launch a short-form video platform offering TV-quality series split into 10-minute episodes, and intended for mainly-smartphone viewing.
“We don’t consider this competitive with Hulu, or HBO, or Netflix, or the networks. It’s a completely different use case,” said Katzenberg. “For all the different formats of television, there are ways to innovate and adapt them into content you can conveniently watch in chapters on the go.”
And he added that NewTV sees the studios as its key partners. “We have built a licensed model that is highly, highly appealing to them.” With major labels all keen to explore original-content initiatives around video, NewTV could be a partner for them too.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools :: Wyng
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