Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 4)

SM: So, if I were a marketer thinking about how to use your  capability, and let’s say I work for a movie studio, one of the things I would want to do when a new movie is coming out is to release a whole bunch of clips on your site so that there’s lots of sharing that goes on and to aid the social media word of mouth that happens naturally. Conceivably, you as the platform provider could charge me for that. Does that make sense? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Would you give me an example?

Dvaid Aronchick: Sure. Let’s say you’re a big fan of the Most Interesting Man in the World [from the Dos Equis beer ad campaign], and you type in “I don’t always drink beer,” for example, which is from that [campaign]. It will come up as a search engine result. Or maybe you want to type in, “Did we just become best friends?” from the movie “Step Brothers.” We’re going to come up number one as a search engine result. You’re always going to move up and down on those search engine results pages because Google’s always doing tweaks on those algorithms. But the fact is people are out there searching for it, and what we want to do is simply be a search engine result for that particular content. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 2)

SM: What about formats?

DA: We’re an audio sound bite site.

SM: So, you need MP3 or WMA, those kinds of formats?

DA: Exactly. We also do like images associated with that content and any text or description as well. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 1)

If you like keeping up with what your favorite celebrity, sports figure, or even your best friend or favorite relative has said, then you’ll love Hark. Founded by David Aronchick and Fouad El Naggar in 2007, this Seattle-based company has become one of the 10 largest entertainment/movies sites on the Web, according to comScore.  Approaching 100 million users per month worldwide, content from Hark gives users an engaging entertainment experience while providing advertisers with a rich pool of potential customers for their clients.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Dave. Let’s start with a bit of context. Tell us about Hark, what you’re doing, and where the company is at this point. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: All the storage is in the cloud.

Mark Hyland: Storage is in the cloud, streaming. There are still some use cases where it makes sense to have downloading capability. So, we enable that. What we’ve done in software and replicate everything that a traditional set-top box does. It does the conditional access and the security.

SM: So, it’s a set-top box in the cloud. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in a time line? If you were to forecast a time line based on what you see inside these accounts, at what point do a large number of cable providers become credible IPTV providers? At what point does the cable alternative of Comcast, which is our current cable TV provider [become available?] At what point on a global basis, or at least on a U.S., Canada, and Western European basis does this selection turn? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s what they do.

Mark Hyland: This year, they’ll say that’s what they do. We’re different from 90% plus of those vendors because we’re doing it all from the cloud. There are many vendors that are selling encoding gear, sending network optimization, and selling application experience or different components. But there are very few that are knitting it all together to create an end-to-end service that’s delivered from the cloud. To have that capability globally puts QuickPlay in the company of five or ten other companies tops. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You took the path that you were going to sell infrastructure to pay TV people to move their video to be available on mobile devices?

Mark Hyland: Yes, and that we would do it from the cloud.

SM: This is a good point to do an ecosystem check. The “TV everywhere” value proposition has been used by a lot of different players in your market. Help me parse through that nightmare of positioning challenges that you must have faced. What about Apple TV? >>>