"We want to take the best of iLike, Last.fm, and Pandora, and apply them to video," says Patrick Koppula, founding CEO of FFWD, a new startup formally being launched Tuesday at the Under the Radar conference. Koppula, a music business veteran who served as CEO of music discovery service iLike for a few months during 2006 and helped lead the management buyout of predecessor company Garageband.com, says FFWD intends to make online video seem more like the passive experience of watching television channels while tailoring content to individual viewers.
According to Koppula, online music fans will recognize in FFWD the collaborative filtering technology that powers a personalized Last.fm radio station, gathering videos a user may potentially enjoy into a channel that programs them sequentially. FFWD plans to license content from a variety of sources, including YouTube, Hulu, TV networks and newspaper sites, and other content providers, then organize them into personalized channels. The site will also offer social features including a sort of public chat in which a group of "onstage" users dictates what will appear on a given channel.
FFWD plans to push its video channels onto a variety of devices, including the Nintendo Wii game console. (Think of its gyroscopic controller as a sort of next-generation remote control). A user can create a playlist on a PC, then watch the videos on the living room television via the Wii. FFWD also collects personalization information from Facebook and FriendFeed on an opt-in basis, and will soon open an application programming interface (API) so that its service will work on more devices, Koppula says.
Revenues will come from music and video sales referrals, as well as white-label promotional opportunities. Draper Fisher Jurvetson has already invested $1.7 million in FFWD's first round, and Koppula says a second round worth less than $10 million is planned for later this year. At least half the new round will likely come from strategic investors such as consumer electronics or software companies, rather than traditional VCs, he says. -- Paul Bonanos
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