Sriram Krishnan™ Live

In a nutshell…who are you and what do you do?

I’ve just finished my work at MMS (Mediameasurements in Scandinavia) investigating the consumption behaviour of moving pictures on different platforms. I’m currently working together with Fabian Bonnier on a new project, the Fri TV initiative. We’re trying to facilitate video distribution on the web and enable advertising on that distribution.

This sounds revolutionary to a certain extent. Explain more.

The idea is not about revolutionizing the way we watch stuff, it’s more about creating new business models for the content owners/distributors/aggregators. We want to organize the current chaos in an industry where nobody’s really making any money. The viewers are there, the behaviour is there and the content is also partly there even if it’s “illegal”.

Any insights into the technology?

It’s not rocket science, but we’ll develop some nice tools.

LOL. Nice way of saying “mind your own business”. Are there any competitors out there?

There are some American companies out there doing something like this, but not really. Things are however happening every week in this industry, so there will definitely be some soon!

Biz model, biz model, biz model.

The business model is not official yet. (I bet the future competitors read your blog

You told me that there are more than one person involved. Who are the others?

We’re currently three working with the business plan and planning. In August, we’ll start for real, and then we’ll get some guys. Currently we have one tech-guy, one internet statistics-guy, one sales-guy and a great mentor involved. Yesterday we also met some interested angel investors wanting to be a part of the project, both economically and generally helping out.

And how did you meet these guys?

I’ve met all of the guys in different ways and through different contexts. Fabian and I studied together, two of the guys I met through a friend of a friend, one I met after a talk I held at a company and the mentor and I found each other after a job interview. And the investors, well, they heard about the idea from a bird you could say

So as Tomas Wennström puts it, what’s next?

The next step is to get the concept completely worked out and build a plan for the beta period. After that, we’ll need some partners for a test period. We’re working with those relations already and have many interested actors.

What time periods are we looking at? How long? When will you guys go live?

We’ll hopefully go live when we’re ready Can’t say much more.

And to sum up, what do you think of Bubblare?

Bubblare is great at marketing and PR, I really admire them for that. The site has some design issues though and I think they should be more restrictive with their statistics. For every time you press F5 reload the page, they add a view to the clip. But I love the idea of local video sites and they are the largest video site (in the UGC-genre) in Sweden. I hope to see more local sites in the future, or at least more traffic to the existing 5-6 ones.

OK. You’ve wriggled through all the sensitive questions like a tapeworm through stomach acids. Next up, some “no brainer” comparisons.

Bill Gates or Steve Jobs

Jobs. He’s got more satisfied customers and I think he has more fun! Bill has money but no love.

Apple or a PC

I have two PC’s, but I’m moving more and more to the web. I just stopped using Outlook and do it the Google way, even synching my GCal through 3G with my cell, I love that!

Thanks Sorosh and all the best with your Fri TV endeavours.