Founder of E! Entertainment joins a new media technology company that offers personalized social news videos
The founder of E! Entertainment signs on with MycroNews to roll out a new technology that instantly personalizes videos and makes them socially engaging by displaying your own Facebook news to you by video.
Los Angeles(28 Apr 2014)
During the 1990s, Larry Namer was the first to introduce Western entertainment to the former Soviet Union, bringing top U.S. television shows and producing over 300 concerts and events in the region. In 2007, he played an integral role in launching Eurocinema, a video on demand film channel dedicated to foreign cinema, now available in over 36 million TV homes in North America and on its recently launched online platform eurocinema.com. He currently is focused on heading up Metan Development Group as President/CEO. Metan’s flagship series “Hello! Hollywood” is the cornerstone show on the recently launched Hollywood Channel on Tudou, reaching over one billion Mandarin-speaking viewers in China.
Last November, while Mr. Namer was a guest speaker at an event in Santa Monica, CA, he met Vince LoRusso, CEO and Founder of MycroNews, a media technology company. Vince was blunt and said to Larry, “We want to do for personal social news what you did for entertainment news. We have a technology that brings your own Facebook news to you by video in an entertaining, personally relevant, interactive way.” With such a strong history and passion for entrepreneurism, media, and technology, Larry was curious and invited Vince to his Los Angeles office to demonstrate the product. After several more interactions and advances in the product, Larry joined the MycroNews team as an advisor.
MycroNews provides the latest way to consume your Facebook news. It’s not an aggregator, like Hootsuite, nor a magazine-style converter like Flipboard. It’s video. MycroNews delivers your Facebook news to you in short-form videos on the web. How is this possible? They’ve built a special video player that instantly retrieves and displays contents of your Facebook newsfeed to you with the outputs, such as the timing, type, position, and size of the social ingredients controlled by the content owner. The content owner configures these elements using the MycroNews patent-pending web-based editor. Information like your friends’ latest status updates scroll along the bottom of the screen, while other segments include your friends’ upcoming birthdays, most popular shared photos, and top rated statuses. Even better, you can engage the video by clicking the “Like” buttons or commenting to post back to Facebook.
Online content creators can give their produced videos, with their usual content, a social edge using the MycroNews editor. The flexibility of the editor allows online channels to be creative and produce different shows for different people. MycroNews recently launched and is accepting applications from content creators who would like to use this innovative technology to attract, engage, and learn their audience down to their social profile. They will select a limited number of online channels based on their audience size and demographics to partner with and offer the use of their editor at a highly discounted rate. Not only will content providers be able to offer a very special type of programming, but they’ll be able to compete for and take their share of the $55 billion digital ad spend market as well.
Mr. LoRusso says, “We’re offering content creators a chance to deliver the most personally relevant, socially-engaging videos. Their viewers no longer have to make that choice to visit Facebook or watch an online video during lunch break or while eating breakfast before work. Content creators can please their advertisers, too, as they’ll know their exact viewer watching “X” video in real time rather than a general audience. Advertisers can literally address their viewers by name in video ads, know that person’s mood based on their latest status update, what pages they like, or if they have a work or relationship anniversary coming up. Generally, viewers do not want to see ads, but it’s inevitable if we want online videos to exist, especially in quality. We believe consumers will really appreciate the use of relevant video ads tailored to their moods or interests while consuming online videos. We’re definitely not replacing the newsfeed, but simply offering an alternative way to consume its contents. Think of it like when newspaper made it’s way to the television screen. It’s time for the newsfeed to get more dynamic and entertaining.”
MycroNews is currently offered on the web and the team is building for mobile and TV. Their plans are to offer more shows and segments for other social networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Instagram, or Pinterest in the near future. After more than a decade of social networking, will people actually prefer to watch their personal social news reported to them alongside other news or programs? The founder of E! Entertainment thinks so.