Steven Fruchter: Broadcasting Live Video

Sunny Gault: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony, I'm Sunny Gault. With the Internet, information is now available in an instant. You can even add video and stream that information live using only a computer, webcam and internet connection, which has a dramatic effect on how we receive our media. Steven Fruchter is the CEO of Stickam, the first and largest website dedicated to live interactive video streaming. So what's so special about your site?

Steven Fruchter: Anytime you can communicate with anyone around the world and do it for free and let them see you and hear you, that's powerful, right. And especially we can do it with thousands of people at one time and then have them interact back with you, that's normally unheard of. And only huge companies before could do that because it cost so much money. Now we're giving it away for free. If you have a meeting to do, if you have a charity to raise money for, if you have a product to sell, if you have something to promote, now you can do it and have thousands of people, not only hear about it, but talk to you and engage you about it bringing them into your world. So if you come on our site, and then we feature you on the front page, you get about forty thousand-plus views per hour. So basically we can pack a stadium for you every hour.

Sunny Gault: Who typically publishes to your site? Who are your users?

Steven Fruchter: Oh, my users are like range the whole gamut, from your average Joe who wants to talk to his friends and family, to Paramount doing a promotional event for their new movie, to G4tv bringing their audience into their shows on TV, so merging the two different types of media, to charities. Tiger Direct is Ronald McDonald's house. They have done charities there I think to raise more money.

Sunny Gault: I'm assuming when you launched your site you didn't have all of these users, right? You had to start somewhere. So who initially was using the site?

Steven Fruchter: A lot of MySpace users. So initially our whole idea for Stickam was to stick a camera on different web pages to connect all these different users together. You know how like a YouTube video, you can embed it on a website?

Sunny Gault: Yeah.

Steven Fruchter: So you can embed our player on as many websites as you want. And when you push Go Live on Stickam, anyone viewing you on any of those websites that you pasted, you embedded our player on they can now see you live.

Sunny Gault: So the people that are publishing or creating shows for your site, is there the ability for them to generate money from posting their stuff on Stickam?

Steven Fruchter: What we notice them doing is they were trying to create their own websites and monetize a live stream. We decided to do this for them. We make a do-it-yourself platform which we call PayPerLive.com which is like PayPerView and allow anybody, from somebody who wants to do guitar lessons, to French lessons to a Donald Trump in his Learning Annex, so you have to go to New York or L.A. to see this event, but you can't make it, well now you can see it live at PayPerLive.com and then after the event, talk to Donald. People can charge whatever they want per ticket and then uses PayPal, so money goes directly to them and we only take a twenty five percent fee for each ticket sold and people actually make a real living doing this.

Sunny Gault: How is Stickam a useful tool for businesses?

Steven Fruchter: A great part of Stickam is that it helps you promote your business for example, from anywhere from, for example conferences to a radio show. But then you can also for example, intermingle static media. So what I mean by that like for example you can be live right now, I can be talking to you and then you say, okay, now I'm going to show you a video and you can automatically, which you've already uploaded the video to your account go ahead and play that and you can do like a voice over and talk over live, so it's creating like a new show for example.

Sunny Gault: So what is the future of Stickam? Where do you guys wanna go? Is it just growing your business and how fast you wanna grow your business?

Steven Fruchter: So, it's definitely growing and it's to keep growing and to grow even faster. So something new that we are about to release is our mobile platform and that's the ability, it's like you're talking about news vans going sent down, so they're having to send down a news van with a satellite on top when an earthquake happens or a fire or a coup or whatever and get it out there and then try to get that live anybody with a cell phone can now push one button and stream that live to the world.

Sunny Gault: How do you guys monitor that for example to make sure that pornographic material isn't out there?

Steven Fruchter: So any kind of adult material in the first place is completely against our terms of service, but since we were the first and we are the largest, we've had a deal with the sense of abuse right away early on and since we do have such a huge community that became pretty hard at first. So we have about twelve people, twenty four-seven monitoring the site. So we kind of stop it hopefully right before it happens or if it does happen because there's always some bad apples cut it off right away.

Sunny Gault: What excites you most about your job, what keeps you coming back day after day?

Steven Fruchter: I guess the fact that I get to work with like so many different industries, so many different people. The fact that we're doing what we're doing right now at Stickam.com it's kind of changing a lot of things. So a lot of the new projects we're working with with different key industry players, they're all new things, they're new -- things that have never been done before.

Sunny Gault: Sounds like an exciting opportunity. Good luck with Stickam and Steven, thank you so much for joining us today. And as always if you have questions, comments or ideas for guests, please send us an email info@dogandpony.com. I'm Sunny Gault, thanks for watching.