Dovetail vs. King Kong

Just a few months ago, there were more than 85 video-sharing websites, all on nearly equal footing, all jockeying for market position. Since then, some big online conglomerates and media giants have cherry-picked their favorite video sites and thrown huge amounts of money at them. Most notable (and incredible) was Google's acquisition of YouTube for a staggering $1.65 billion. Of course, that deal was merely a stock swap. But Sony’s acquisition of Grouper was for $65 million in cash, and it instantly legitimized this industry.

All the recent market consolidation has resulted in the emergence of a handful of 400 lb. gorillas that are poised to quickly brush the riff raff aside. A few months ago, YouTube was already a 400 lb. gorilla; today, thanks to Google, it is a 50-ton King Kong. This doesn't seem like the best of times for a new kid to enter the competitive fray, yet that's what happened in September when San Francisco-based Dovetail announced the beta launch of dovetail.tv, a new "online destination for independent film, television, and music content." Dovetail essentially said: "Hey, look at us. We're here too." But has anyone heard them over Kong's roar?

Back in the old days of video-sharing sites, the also-rans struggled to differentiate themselves from YouTube. Some touted their different business models; others said they were addressing different niches. It was hard to differentiate then, and it's even harder now. What sets Dovetail apart from YouTube? Well, in a word, quality, says Jason Holloway, co-founder and CEO. "It's the quality of the content that we carry and the quality of the resolution and the experience," he says.

"YouTube and the host of MeTubes out there have focused on user-generated content," says Holloway. "We are focusing on professional content, and as such, we are at the beginning of what will be the next generation of video over the internet—using the internet but delivering high-resolution, high-definition video to the home."

Holloway provides a somewhat confusing description of the "long tail of the content popularity curve," saying that Dovetail is aimed at the "torso of content," meaning the middle of the curve.

"On the right side of the popularity curve is user-generated content, where there may be many millions of videos, like on YouTube. But each video is only desirable to a relatively small population. So YouTube is on the right side and movie studios are on the left, and what's been left behind is the middle of the curve, which is all professionally-made, professionally-edited content. It is the work of serious filmmakers and artists. But it wasn't created by a studio and therefore doesn't have ready access to distribution. This is where we are, and that is the part of the content story that makes us different."

When Holloway talks about quality, he is referring to both the quality of Dovetail's content, as well as the quality of the video itself, he says. "People in this business make a strategic decision. They are either going to be a streaming website and deliver immediacy among their entire library, which is what someone like YouTube does. Or they make a decision to have a high-resolution experience. By and large, most players in this space have made the first decision.

"It seems that what the consumer wants right now is a quick two-minute clip, and what we are saying is that that's great and it works for someone like YouTube. It works for video one-liners. It works for a couple of minutes and you're momentarily amused and you kind of smile when the clip is done. But it's hard to imagine that kind of experience for a 90-minute film. So we chose the other path. We're going to deliver a high-definition, DVD-quality experience. We're going to deliver a gig or 2 gigs of data. We're going to download it, perhaps pre-download it, so that when you go to watch it, you can play our videos on a 50-inch plasma screen in a living room."

So even though Dovetail is currently delivering short-form content (music videos, etc.) as well as long-form content, everything right now is downloaded, says Holloway. Well, actually everything is both downloaded and streamed. A small portion of every video is available as a stream so that users can preview each video. "Anything can be watched in a preview mode, which is streaming," says Holloway. "You click on content and the preview starts in a low-resolution stream. You watch on your PC monitor, and if you like the preview, you can hit the download button and download the whole thing in high resolution."Dovetail offers users the option of watching shorter-form content like music videos as streams, but with longer form content (such as feature films), only the first 10 minutes are available as a stream. The stream cuts off automatically when it reaches the 10-minute limit. "It used to be two minutes, then we increased it to 10 minutes," says Holloway. "We're still trying to feel out what the right number is."

P2P-Powered
Like some other video-sharing websites, dovetail.tv essentially creates a peer-to-peer network of common users, much like many music-sharing sites from Napster onward. And the software is meant to be simple and efficient. "It runs in background and tries to be polite with your bandwidth and not interfere with your other applications," says Holloway.

Of course, being P2P comes with certain pros and cons. It can seem a little frightening to a content owner because he or she is essentially "giving anyone who has Dovetail software the right to view their film and pass it on to somebody else," Holloway admits. "But they can't pass it along to just anyone, only to someone else who has the Dovetail software." And inherent in the Dovetail system is DRM. "We don't allow content to go out without DRM, because that's what we need to have to protect the filmmakers," says Holloway.