New video-sharing site’s motto: ‘View green from every angle’
Posted on August 20th, 2007By Lydia DePillis
Greenwire: Green junkies get a new way to feed their habit today with the launch of a YouTube for the environment.
Billed as the world’s first environmental video-sharing Web site, emPivot.com says it will show all — from congressional floor speeches to flash videos on wave energy. The emPivot slogan: “View green from every angle.”
Unlike many other sites with an environmental focus, emPivot’s promoters say theirs is not aimed at preaching to the converted, or converting anyone. Its founders say they want to attract “environmental fence sitters” and “people who don’t want to be associated with the word ‘green,’ per se.”
“We want to empower people to make a choice,” said co-founder Thom Wallace, 29. “We know there’s a lot of different angles that green media is produced from … it’s not an exclusive club that they have to be a part of.”
That means the site will accept content from all comers — from Exxon to Greenpeace. Wallace and co-founder Chace Warmington, 37, hope that users will get into the game as well, uploading their own videos and creating communities around common interests.
Warmington and Wallace have been developing the concept for about a year while running Ecofusion, an environmental consulting company. Wallace has worked in grassroots environmental groups including Northwest Sustainable Energy for Economic Development, a Seattle-based group that helps farmers become more sustainable, while Warmington comes from broadcasting and Democratic politics. They met while working at a Washington, D.C., nonprofit called Hoop Dreams, which runs programs to help poor students get to college.
The video-sharing marketplace is booming. There’s Blip.tv, Filecow, Veoh, Grouper, Fliqz, Revver, Eefoof, Sharkle, Bolt, Vimeo and Panjea. emPivot, a combination of the words “empower” and, well, “pivot,” is among the few to focus on a single issue.
‘It could be a frontier’
Some say the environmental video sector is in its infancy. The League of Conservation Voters is beginning to develop video to host on its new Web site, which LCV’s new media director Jay Natoli said will launch later this month. Natoli has been filming LCV events with a Sony handheld to post on the site.
“The thing that concerns me about about new media is how many people can actually produce a video on their computer,” Natoli said. “I think it could be a frontier, for sure.”
Besides soliciting voluntary contributions, emPivot has enlisted blinkx, one of the Web’s biggest video search engines. Using patented speech and pattern recognition technology, blinkx automatically combs the Web for related clips from major networks and radio stations with which it has content sharing agreements.
Other companies, such as Yahoo!, have both environmental sites and video search engines, but have yet to meld the two (Greenwire, May 17).
The environmental lifestyle Web site Treehugger.com launched a TV section earlier this year. On Aug. 1, Discovery Communications bought the three-year-old site for $10 million, adding it to its Planet Green network. But Treehugger’s video component updates infrequently, with nowhere near the volume of content that emPivot will display when it goes live.
Joel Makower, executive editor of Greenbiz.com, remains skeptical.
“We’ve come to a point in the greening of the Internet where there’s starting to be a green version of everything,” he said. “It feels like there’s a little bit more heat than light here, or preaching to the choir.
“I don’t think that central clearinghouses are really what we need,” Makower continued. “I think what we need are more tools.”