Most people knew when Sony Pictures Entertainment (SNE) bought Grouper that there would be a lot of tinkering and changes going on. It's actually going to be monumental changes, with one of them being they will no longer be in the user-generated-video business.
Also as of July 16, the service will no longer be called Grouper, but Crackle, and will now stream syndicated entertainment across the site and web.
We are getting out of the UGV business, which is a pretty radical step for us,” says Josh Felser, founder/co-president of Grouper. “It is not a business for us. The content is rarely exclusive, and it is hard to monetize.”
A lot of this is the result of input from advertisers who say they aren't interested in putting their products next to the redundant user-generated fare.
Supposedly the site hasn't lost popularity, as Sony says it received 25 million unique users in June. Interesting in that comScore says it's closer to about 1 million.
We do need to define what is considered user-generated video. It's the backyard shenanigans and living room lip synching type of stuff that isn't wanted.
But in what I think is going to be a really important part of the online video scene - the semi-professional video - that will still be included as part of the Crackle strategy, which can be created and submitted by those outside of Crackle.
Even so, Crackle will continue to produce original video content in-house, with original reality shows like Judgment Day, where unknown people are judged based upon assumptions, and then seen if they are right. There's also a new music magazine called Scrambler, dealing with rock video. Crackle will also continue on with their popular Mr. Deity, an online sitcom based in heaven.
Crackle will get a solid production budget that is somewhere around $5 million. Content will be produce in the range of $2,000 to $28,000 an episode. The majority of it will be short-form video under five minutes long.
There will be an embedded media player which will allow the company to syndicate their video content across various third party sites like AOL, Wordpress, Facebook and MySpace (NWS-A), among others. In most of the cases there will be revenue-sharing as part of the syndication process.
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