Dovetail vs. King Kong

Another thing unique about the Dovetail software (particularly the user interface) is that it is "living room-ready," according to Holloway. "When you go to dovetail.tv, you're looking at an interface that is designed to work in a living room," says Holloway. "The text is readable from 10 feet away. It's not like a website screen with little buttons and so forth."

Holloway believes that most of Dovetail’s future users will be ordinary people sitting in living rooms with media center PCs, not web geeks at desktops. "We are aiming at being an alternative way for people to watch television and movies," he says.

"And when you download a movie from Dovetail, the quality should be like Netflix, only better," he says. "It should be faster that Netflix and with a potentially larger inventory because our costs are lower."

A TiVo-like Experience
"Right now we are like Netflix, but in the near future we'll be more like TiVo, and use pre-downloaded content like TiVo (does). So there will be content that people can choose from and get an immediate experience, instead of having to wait for the stuff to download. We'll anticipate what you might like, and you will subscribe to channels featuring types of content or TV shows you've indicated that you like. We will just download them automatically," says Holloway. "You won't sit down and have to actively select something, read through recommendations, and then wait. Instead, the videos will already be ready to go. You'll just say, ‘Oh, that looks interesting. I'll play that.’ So we will anticipate what people will want and give them more of a TiVo experience. We will give the user an experience that is more like kicking back, chilling out, and watching TV."

Business Models
There are three ways to monetize content, says Holloway. "You can run advertisements; you can charge users a subscription fee (sort of like all-you-can-eat, maybe by channel or something like that); and then you can do pay-per-view. As far as revenue goes, advertising is the lowest, subscription is in the middle, and pay-per-view is the highest. Our thinking is that at some point, we'll get into the studio content market, and at that point, we will have a pay-per-view situation, because the studios demand those kinds of revenue. But people really won't pay to experiment, and so our initial business thinking was that we would either do advertising or a subscription model and probably a combination of the two, so that people could come and use the system for free and they would experience advertisements like they do with TV. And then at some point if they don't want to have the advertisements, they'd have the option to subscribe," Holloway explains. "And potentially certain channels and certain types of content will have premium pricing, and it will be all subscription-based, no commercials."

Holloway admits that as a young company with software still in beta, nothing is yet cast in concrete. "At first, with any company, you have to feel out what consumers want," he says. "What do they like and what don't they like? And then you have to make sure good content is available to everybody, and you have to support the film community that is providing it."

Finding quality content creators and keeping them happy by treating them fairly will be the key to providing users with quality content, says Holloway. "We either find producers and recruit ones we like; or they contact us. And that happens daily now. Then we check them out to assure ourselves that they are professional. Then we allow them to access our software that creates an account for them. And the final step, once they have an account, is to hit the publish button which uploads their film, and from there it goes out to the world," says Holloway. "One thing we don't have right now is a free-for-all where anyone in the world can just come up with an account, because that's how we do a little bit of quality maintenance to make sure that they are professionals."

But before content owners get accounts from Dovetail, they have to sign a licensing agreement. "That agreement has a few things that are important from the filmmaker perspective," says Holloway. "First of all, it's non-exclusive. And second, the content is licensed from them; it is not owned by us. And third, they can take in down at will.

"So if someone becomes very popular through Dovetail (and this is very different from the YouTube-type websites out there), they are not stuck with us. All of our content is protected with DRM software, so even though it may reside on computers all around the world [this is a P2P solution, remember] those computers can't play the software without our server giving them permission. So a filmmaker can take their content down at any time," Holloway says. "If their film becomes very popular, if it becomes the next Blair Witch Project and a studio comes along and wants to put it into their distribution, we can easily deal with that.