BusinessTN

While sitting in a hospital waiting room, Kevin Antoine, 29, and his brother-in-law Erik Luchauer, 29, reminisced on their childhood love of Choose Your Own Adventure books. From this conversation, the idea for a modernized online video version was born.

Rootclip.com launched on May 1, 2008, as a creative forum allowing screenwriters, directors and actors to submit their own videos in online contests for collaborative short films. To meet this objective, Rootclip provides an opening video sequence or "root" clip to become the first chapter of the short film. Then users submit their own one to two minute videos building on the previous clip's story line. Each video submission is voted on by a panel of expert judges and the user community for a two-week period. After which, the video with the most votes is selected to become the next chapter of the film. The result is a six chapter, six-to-twelve-minute short film with a final product completely reliant on its various contributors.

Kevin Antoine and Erik Luchauer, the president and vice president of Rootclip, co-founded the project with the aid of Scripps Entrepreneurial Ventures, a division E.W. Scripps where the two are current employees. Antoine joined the E.W. Scripps Online Newspaper's corporate office in Knoxville in early 2007, where Luchauer has worked since 2006. Scripps Entrepreneurial Ventures selected their idea for Rootclip to receive funding, fulfilling the company's goal of supporting new ventures and undertaking more interactive, video-based content. Unfortunately, this subset of Scripps disbanded in November 2008, leaving Antoine and Luchauer as the official owners of the project as of March 16. (Scripps funding will continue for at least the next few months.)

The fact that Rootclip is contest-based, awarding various prizes to each chapter winner, provides an incentive for users to submit their work; it also creates a need for auxiliary funds. Anticipating the end of the current funding, Antoine and Luchauer are "approaching advertisers for product donations as prizes in exchange for publicity on our site," Antoine says.

Though not yet profitable, Rootclip avoids some of those expenditures common to startups--for one, it has not required a budget for advertising. "Our marketing is all word of mouth through Twitter and Facebook, primarily. That method is actually working fairly well," Antoine says. This proved to be true when Academy Award-winning film maker, Michael Moore, took notice of the site last year, inviting the Rootclip team to the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan.

Antoine attributes Rootclip's popularity to providing users with more artistic freedom than competing sites such as Triggerstreet.com and Microsoft's "Ultimate Video Relay" contest, through fewer entry regulations and less content control. While Rootclip is still in the early stages of its life cycle, "Our current audience is highly engaged and very targeted," Antoine says. "Our traffic is also increasing every week, so things are looking up."

The explosion of user-generated content on the Internet made the brother-in-laws' vision for Rootclip a reality. In recent years, Internet users invaded the world of online media by way of affordable, high-quality technology. As evidenced by E.W. Scripps recognition of and investment in Rootclip's potential in the first place, this trend has not gone unnoticed by media giants.

"What we are seeing now is only the beginning of user-generated content," Antoine says. The Internet levels the playing field, and the cream will really rise to the top, which is how it should be."

As a result of this media trend, the amount of online video viewing reached new heights this year. An acclaimed source for measuring digital marketing, comScore, determined that 76.8% of U.S. Internet users viewed online videos in January 2009, exhibiting a high demand for interactive media forums. In addition, comScore shows a 4% increase from December 2008 to January 2009 in the number of videos viewed per month, totaling 14.8 billion. YouTube is credited with 91% of this rise in viewing. January 2009 was the first month that the number of YouTube video viewers surpassed 100 million. Furthermore, U.S. Internet users are spending more time watching videos online, at an average of six hours in January, increasing by 15% since December 2008.

These growing rates show a clear desire of every day citizens to be seen and heard. To accommodate the need for community interaction, "We are adding more features to the site to make user collaboration even easier," says Antoine, who adds his company aspires to become "the home of collaborative movie-making." Antoine sees no end in sight for user-generated media, stating, "The people will speak, and the people will be heard. Rootclip really lets our users speak and speak loudly."

Despite the demise of Scripps Entrepreneurial Ventures, Rootclip's future among online video forums remains bright.