Very interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal (available here, at freepress) regarding the growth of viral media. WSJ focuses on a two-man company based in Bernalillo, NM. The company has seen explosive growth since being founded just last year.
I spent portions of my childhood in Bernalillo. For example, I stuck a large screw up my nose, when my parents lived near my grandmother's house in Bernalillo, adjacent to the train tracks, when I was three years old. My mom and my grandmother had to wrestle with both pliers and me, in order to fish the screw out. Ah, the good old days!
WSJ refers to Bernalillo as a 'suburb' of Albuquerque, which made me laugh. I suppose these days it's true enough - it's only ten miles from the Albuquerque city limits - but, in fact, Bernalillo is the third-oldest European-founded town in the United States (only St. Augustine, FL, and Santa Fe, NM, are older). You'd never know that, however, because much has been erased, with the outer edges of town swept aside by mobile home tracts. Bernalillo may be a 'suburb', but it ain't New Rochelle....
But Bernalillo is nevertheless on the frontier of guerilla media. Maybe Bernalillo's permanent place in history is yet to be written:
From a small outbuilding alongside the train tracks in this Albuquerque suburb, two men in their twenties are peddling something that has become a big threat to big media companies.
The men, Sam Martinez and Billy Duran, use two low-end desktop computers to run a Web site that offers a remarkably broad menu of television shows and movies free of charge. They provide online access to 17 episodes of NBC’s “Heroes” TV series, 49 installments of ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” more than 70 feature films and hundreds of other videos. Within four days of Walt Disney’s theatrical release of “Meet the Robinsons,” the men had the movie available for viewing through their site, YouTVpc.com.
As media companies fight to keep control over distribution of their shows, they have focused their guns on big sites like the YouTube unit of Google Inc. But little sites like this one in New Mexico collectively represent an equally thorny challenge. They are like guerrilla squadrons that are constantly shifting tactics to defy big media and keep offering consumers free programs.
... Last year Mr. Martinez’s childhood friend, Mr. Duran, built on the idea and created a site called “VTele” as an assignment for a computer-science class at Central New Mexico Community College. Through it, users could view TV shows and movies that he and Mr. Martinez copied from DVDs and uploaded to the school’s computer servers. The 23-year-old Mr. Duran says he got an “A” on the project. But within a month, the site attracted so many users that some of the school’s computer servers crashed. Administrators threatened Mr. Duran with expulsion.
“In any court of law I’m sure we’d be found guilty,” concedes Mr. Martinez. “But how else are you going to put something together?” Mr. Martinez says he sent emails to TV networks suggesting they adopt his idea but never heard back.
...Mr. Duran dropped out of Central New Mexico, and the two friends relaunched the site in September. At first it relied on volunteers to store video files on their own servers, until a user pointed Mr. Martinez to Dailymotion. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh — gold mine!’ ” recalls Mr. Martinez. “We had all 18 seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ in two hours.”
...Mr. Duran still works in a tech-support job at a medical center, but he and his friend consider themselves pioneers in online television. “With the right technology and investment, this idea could blow away a lot of other ideas out there,” says Mr. Duran.
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