From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 11:22 PM
To: *ALL MetaTV
Subject: Capt. Midnight: The Press and Analyst Tour – Day One
Day One – Boston, MA
“You have some serious issues you need resolved”
“No I don’t, why do you say that?”
“Well, why else would anyone want to see four different analysts in one day?”
…. and so it began, with a rented car service we set off to have discussions with some of the leading iTV analysts today.
Our mission, to spread the good word about MetaTV and also to get their advice on how they feel we are positioned in the marketplace today.
And if at all possible, avoid their sales people, who would be desperately trying to sell us their services.
Why bother? Analysts are starting to write detailed reports on the iTV space. Whenever there is an emerging category and the hunger for research and opinions, analysts will build stats and compare players. We wanted to come to town with our exciting funding news and to get face time with the analysts which could potentially be the leading voices in the industry as it develops.
The morning started off innocuous enough, with Mary (of Msrdotcomm), Andrew L and myself waiting to have breakfast with Michael Kokernack of Backchannelmedia.
As we looked out the window at the flakes of snow (yes SNOW!) falling down onto the mushy Boston pavements, we took a deep breath to prepare ourselves for the hectic schedule for the day ahead.
The meeting with Michael and his two colleagues was a good start to the day. It gave Andrew and myself a great warm up for the meetings to come. We explained MetaTVs value prop and engaged in potential business discussion opportunities. Michael K, writes articles on a freelance basis for certain magazines but also has his own startup company that is looking to aggregate advertisers and recommend iTV outlets and strategies to them. We saw a potential mutual benefit and agreed to explore this further.
Then it was time to pack up out of our hotel in Boston (our overnight home for 8 hours) and into the car service we had rented for the day to hit all the appointments. For those of you who don’t know, the reason we are in Boston is that many of the biggest analyst firms are based in and around Boston. Whenever you go on an analyst and press tour, you jam in the appointments and a car service is essential so that you are not panicking about parking and also so that you have a chance to regroup in the car, tweaking PowerPoint slides and adjusting the messaging for the next destination.
First stop, our old friends at Forrester and of course Josh Bernoff. Joining Josh this time were 3 analysts who we hadn’t met before. Lisa Allen and Evie Black Dykema, whose focus was around online retail and Scott Doniger (based in San Francisco) and new to Forrester covering the delivery of sports, news and media from an interactive TV and general broadband perspective. This session was a lively exchange of questions and answers and we revealed our funding news (under embargoed NDA until 4/23) to congrats from the Forrester team. Josh Bernoff was particularly pleased because he had suggested that we seek investment from the Cable operators and as it turned out, we did exactly that (we were going to do it anyway before he suggested)… and of course gave him all the credit (analysts love it when you listen to them and do what they say). We also revealed Innmedia and that really impressed them since it represented great potential in terms of rollouts that would take place this year. We also told them about our position as iTV architects and how many companies, both netops and content providers were looking to MetaTV to provide them with not only technology but guidance to navigate the muddy iTV waters.
Then …. drum roll please …. we showed the new DVD content containing the VOD walled garden …. and it was a big hit. “This is really great stuff” said Josh, “why didn’t you show me this before?”
The great visuals and compelling applications everyone put together for the DVD really went over incredibly well in this session as well as the others later in the day.
GREAT JOB to everyone who put this together and thank you for letting me steal an early copy to showcase to the analysts.
Josh’s parting words to us were … “Hey I told those OpenTV and WorldGate guys”, both of whom he had met recently “that if they weren’t working/partnering with MetaTV, they were not serious about content for iTV.” Not a bad endorsement from the current “titleholder” of leading iTV analyst.
We wrapped up at Forrester and hopped into the car to head out to Framingham out in the burbs where IDC and Hurwitz awaited.
After a quick lunch, we went over to IDC where we waited in the lobby of the main building for 20 minutes before we were told that we had been mis-informed and that our meeting was actually in another building about 10 blocks away. Strapped for time, we rushed over to the other building where we finally met with IDC analysts Greg Ireland and Josh Duhl.
Greg Ireland was a recently laid off Product Manager from Commerce.TV and had just started at IDC (following the old adage and common career path of analysts of “former knowledgable experts” in their chosen field who decide that it’s more fun (and easier) to tell people what they should do, rather than do it themselves). We were particularly careful and had them sign an NDA (since we are not customers of IDC) and also did not fully reveal the news we had to offer.
Andrew went through our PowerPoint presentation (pumped up at an accelerated rate as we had to rush to be in time for our next meeting) and we were delighted to hear from both of them that they “got it” almost immediately. They described MetaTV as “insulating the netops and content providers from technology challenges” and helping them to “manage change”. Both of those are key messages that we wanted to get across.
Oops, looking at the watch, we showcased once again the fabulous DVD and bid farewell to IDC to hustle the few blocks over to see Hurwitz Group.
Hurwitz do not yet have an iTV practice but the analyst we met with Carol Baroudi is a well seasoned veteran in the software space. She is the author of Internet for dummies! But being no dummy herself, she totally got our value proposition from the angle of skills shortage and issues of developing software for a fragmented market with multiple hardware (set-tops) and middleware vendors. Once again Andrew did a fabulous presentation in tight time constraints as we were already lagging behind from the previous meeting. We thing that Hurwitz could really write some thought leadership pieces around skills needed for iTV development and of course MetaTV would be more than happy to contribute in any way Hurwitz might find useful. After a quick thank you and goodbye to Carol we hopped back into the car to zoom back into town. Surprisingly the traffic was very light, which was just as well because it took us about an hour to get to and find the building where the next analyst firm, the Delphi Group, was.
The Delphi Group had extremely plush offices and their conference room was actually designed in the style of a living room with comfortable couches and a flat screen TV/monitor for us to display our presentation. The perfect setting to talk about iTV. It turns out that the Delphi Group, who advises many Fortune 500 companies on a variety of topics (and get paid very well for it based on the swank ness of their offices) didn’t know much about iTV. So we set about giving them background and the basics (every analyst you educate and help understand in the space has an opportunity to pay dividends down the road, no effort is too great in this early maturing market). Andrew again lead the way with an overview of the desire for netops to rollout branded services which reduced churn and monetized their investment in iTV/digital infrastructure. One of the analysts here particularly liked the QVC idea of one touch shopping. She definitely bought into the whole paradigm and was eagerly taking notes.
Where we thought there might be value was if they kept an eye on the space (which MetaTV would be more than happy to help them with) and recommended iTV strategies to their big name consumer clients. Our reasoning …. hey you don’t want your big name consumer brands web sites looking this awful on iTV do you? It will kill millions of dollars of brand building on the web! They agreed and we will follow up with them to see if anything develops.
Phew, Delphi was the fifth and final meeting of the day for us. Now it was time to head straight over to Boston Logan airport to catch a flight to NYC where we had meetings scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Thankfully, no snow in NYC!
All in all, a very successful day. We ran the gamut today with a potential business partnership meeting in the morning, to updating folks who knew some of what we did, to brand new iTV savvy analysts, to analysts brand new to the space. Each time positioning and articulating MetaTV’s value proposition in terms that made the most sense to our target audience. And it was all worth it because, everyone GOT IT and agreed that MetaTV had great stuff!
Big time kudos to Andrew L for his tireless presentations and Mary S for the flawless co-ordination and crisis control. We start all over again tomorrow at the crack of dawn, when we head over to NJ to meet a new research firm and engage with Jupiter/Media Metrix in an important meeting around mid afternoon.
Stay tuned … for details about those meetings and more …
The Capt.