Evolution

By Devon Brooks

For centuries the only method to convey information that wasn’t spoken was the written word, which in the past few centuries has been dominated by books, newspapers and magazines.

In the 1990s the Internet was able to combine printed information with enormous choice, or interactivity, almost instantaneously. The birth of the Internet required a retreat from the audio and video formats of radio and TV to the written word because of technological limitations. Today, anyone who spends time online knows graphic images and video are on the ascendant.

Peter Matejcek is the president, and Peter Callaghan is the CEO, of Hustream, a Kelowna-based company that believes it has what it takes to lead the way into the next evolution of the Internet, which will be interactive video. Matejcek says, “It has to be high end. It has to be engaging.”
Hustream is the vehicle, they say, to do that.

The company creates videos allowing viewers to interactively walk through a website. On screen a viewer meets a host, who poses questions to the viewer allowing them to navigate quickly through a website using video rather than written text.

Says Matejcek, who spent years teaching people how to use computers, “I started to see patterns of how they would learn. People would learn from facial expressions and body language, but everybody was trying to teach with text.”

The concept may sound simple, but putting it together into a workable, efficient framework has taken technological advances only recently available, advances both in the computers people own and connections fast enough to download enough information to make the presentation viable. A typical presentation isn’t one video shot it is dozens and dozens, all fitted together like a jigsaw so that a viewer can seamlessly, easily work their way through a website to the information they want.

Hustream’s first big customer was Okanagan College. A visit to the front page of Okanagan College’s website is dominated by the Hustream aboriginal tour, titled ‘OC: The Possibilities – An Interactive Aboriginal Student Recruitment Resource’ (www.okanagan.bc.ca/site15.aspx).

At each stage, the student host poses viewers with the most sought after questions, which the viewer can click on. The next screen poses more choices based on each preceding question. The answers come in audio and video formats.

Initially, says Matejcek, “When we first did the Okanagan College we thought we had too much, but the kids went through everything. [The College] came back and said they wanted more.”

Callaghan explains why. “The playful, gaming side of human nature gets people to try the different buttons.

Some of it is suspicious too – if I push other buttons will I get the same message?” (They don’t.)

Matejcek is wildly enthusiastic about the service’s potential, because of inherent limitations in text. He gives another example where Hustream has great advantages. “We think this has a great value for First Nations people doing a video covering their ancestry without the language or literacy barriers.”

Hustream, which is a startup with eight employees, is not yet profitable. It is funded in large part by the National Research Council of Canada who, says Matejcek, “Totally gets it. They have been great in helping us connect in the U.S.”

Callaghan has worked with other start ups although never one this small, but he has unbounded aspirations for the company. “We’re there, we’ve got a market. We want to be the number one provider of one-to-one video tools in the world.”

Matejcek describes Callaghan as having the solid business sense that grounds the company. “Pete [C] is the pragmatist and helps us put a structure on it.”
That doesn’t diminish Callaghan’s own palpable enthusiasm. “We’re way ahead in our thinking of where the market will be.”

He believes one of the major revenue streams will be in helping companies generate sales leads. “We have every evidence that we have top companies willing to invest top dollars.”

He relates a discussion with a company getting 30,000 leads a month from their web services. Too much of a good thing, is the same as having nothing. The company principal told him that there were so many leads that led nowhere that the sales people disregard them.

Callaghan says, “Companies trying to generate leads with video say the video isn’t effective.”

He believes differently. “With well designed questions people can go through much farther and give much more information.”

That is significant, he says. “Sales leads can be pre-qualified to get people because they really want the information. The quality of the leads from a one-to-one video is going to be much higher.”

If you’re skeptical about that claim, because many websites already solicit information from viewers to improve their prospect as leads, Hustream’s multiple video shots are linked, in the background to a database. The path users cheerfully pick in these sessions answer many questions that people won’t take the time to answer directly.

Callaghan points out, “Instead of a message for the masses it’s a user-controlled conversation. This keeps the user engaged much longer. Questions will have scores to get people of higher value to the sales staff.”
For that reason, Hustream is already getting a lot of attention. According to Callaghan, “We keep having conversations with companies who want to lock us up.”

The pair are only beginning to tap into the full potential of the video/digital interface. One of their newer clients, whose material is not yet complete, sent up their host to have the interactive segments filmed at Hustream’s green screen studio in Kelowna.

The filming may have been done indoors in the Okanagan, but the onscreen work shows the host overlooking a magnificent ocean view with crashing waves and blowing sea winds.

Matejcek says they are building other basics into the design concept – one being that these presentations work best if they are done, not by paid actors reciting lines in a commercial, but by real people who either produce the service (i.e. employees) or use it (i.e. customers). “The U-tube generation sees right through the corporate B.S.”

More than that, says the irrepressible Matejcek in one of his own full motion video presentations, “You’ve got to make it fun, and exciting, and enjoyable.”

If Matejcek comes across as unbridled optimism, it belies the depth of his knowledge on how to carry the message effectively. The Hustream model is closely based on the experience of commercial TV.

Says Matejcek, “We ask the clients to give the message in 30 seconds.” He adds, “For every second of an online presentation you lose 1% of your audience.”

The answer: “One of my personal beliefs is that you have to keep it simple. You can build nice, simple, clean products that don’t require 50 programmers.”

Ultimately, Matejcek feels Hustream is going to work because it isn’t offering a competing product or service that will take away from other video production companies.

Instead, Hustream is a tool. “We’re not positioning ourselves to compete with people, but to help them. I see us as [employing] at least a 100 people at some point with thousands of partners.”

Yes, that includes the home user.

Callaghan says, “You’ll be able to do this at home in a year. It’ll be packaged and licensed for different users.”

What that means, predicts Callaghan, is, “We’ll be profitable by the end of next year [2010].”

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.