Web studio EQAL, which now likes to call itself a social entertainment company, is taking a big step into the platform game today. The company announced today (at Twiistup in Los Angeles) it is rolling out a consumer version of their core social website platform that they are calling Umbrella.
This tool will allow independent producers, celebrity talent and online personalities to create their own Web site and develop an audience on the Internet using the same enterprise-grade platform that powers EQAL’s premium partner Web sites, but with simplified publishing and a clean, user-friendly management interface. (from the annoucement)
These guys built their brand around creating not only the first breakout episodic drama (lonelygirl15) but the social community that formed around it. Still to this day, even after the series has been shelved, the fan base remains active, and gravitated to subsequent EQAL series like KateModern, Harper’s Globe and the upcoming Level 26 project from CSI creator Anthony Zuiker.
The recently launched Level26.com site is built of of EQAL’s core social platform, hooked in to their central user database of previous shows allowing for relatively seamless porting of user profiles for registered members of their other sites. It has all you’d expect from a modern social networking site—Twitter, Facebook and YouTube integration, but also a pretty robust set of backend tools that give show creators deep visibilty into the audience.
The VC-backed company is moving away from being a pure content play as it now jumps in the platform business, which is probably the better bet for scaling the company. The team will continue to work with high-level talent like Zuiker and cooking personality Paula Deen (Get Cookin’), though at this point there don’t appear to be any purely original lonelygirl15-type series in the works.
In effect, the EQAL team is taking what they’ve mastered, building tools for social engagement with shows, and handing them over to the next generation of upstarts who want a crack at the next LG15. Right now the platform is in private beta, though the company said they are actively looking for web series and talent that want to use the software to manage their sites.
Some web series have turned to other turnkey offerings like Ning for their community sites, including The Guild, but still have relied on publishing platforms like Wordpress for their main sites. Umbrella appears to marry those two in a more complete offering, adding chat rooms, forums, user account and blogging all in one interface.
We asked EQAL’s Miles Beckett what the business model is for the product, and it’s clear that the software will be a paid product, though they may experiment with a freemium option that gives some basic set of the tools for free.
“Our plan is for this to be a premium paid product that gives content creators the option of having complete control of their advertising sales or partnering with us and participating in a rev share,” said Beckett. “However, we’re not certain the exact model and we’ll be using the private beta to figure this out (for instance, we might have an entry-level free version). Our desire is to give content creators complete control over how they choose to monetize their audience.”
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“It has all you’d expect from a modern social networking site—Twitter, Facebook and YouTube integration, but also a pretty robust set of backend tools that give show creators deep visibilty into the audience.”
Come Marc. Can you actually say that with a straight face?
Ha, well, from what I know about it they can see a lot more than just what you can learn from say Google Analytics on a plain vanilla web site. They can see who are the connectors and key fans of a series, who is most active, etc.
With that kind of data you can target your outreach better. Maybe give top fans an early look at rough cuts? Ask them for notes on story lines? There’s a lot you could do if you had more visibility into who is watching and contributing to your show.
freemium – my word of the day. :-)
But they still don’t have RSS. That is something they promised way back when Harper’s Globe was launched.
Now perhaps Eqal can develop this software in the future but really you need to do a side by side comparison with Ning. If there are specific advantages then write about them but to say this is state of the art at this point is just premature.
To make life easy for you try http://www.maddisonatkins.com and compare the experience to http://www.harpersglobe.com. Dive into the experience and then write about what you find as a user rather than just taking what a press release says as fact.
I wonder if the author of this piece is aware of the fact that, weeks before EQAL made this announcement, both the LG15 as well as the HG communities started wandering off to ning, because everyone hates EQAL’s crappy, under-featured software.
@Renegade – interesting. What does Ning have that’s better in your opinion? Ning has a long history of focusing on the platform and they aren’t the only ones that EQAL will have to compete with there. But are there things that Ning is missing for web shows?
We’re also partnering with other organizations to put on a series of different events to reach new audiences — The Independent Television festival and New Media Vault, as well as a partnership with EQAL for the launch of their new CBS Interactive series Harper’s Globe.
http://www.eventbrite.com/blog.....in-person/
- partnership with EQAL???? Does this mean you are being paid by Eqal, Inc. Perhaps it is time you disclosed the nature of any financial relationships between Tubefilter and Eqal, Inc. in the name of journalistic ethics.
Umbrella, as a platform, is just more of a giant accumulation of hacks than anything. You can follow the progress of the software quite well if you look at lg15.com compared to HG. LG15 doesn’t even have a “forgotten password” link. Numerous people have had to create multiple accounts because the forgot their password or couldn’t change their display name. And that’s just a glimpse of the number of things wrong with it in that version.
Ning is just more “whole”. More polished. Both the features as well as the individual Ning-sites among each other are well-connected. Standard, basic features actually exist. Data entry exists in more than a rudimentary fashion. There are no glaring, obvious bugs that show that no developer EVER looked at a page during development.
It’s less a question of how Ning is better, and more a question of how bad soon-to-be-Umbrella is. Yes, it has improved a lot from the barely-a-beta version released for The Resistance to the one running on Level 26. But it’s still years behind the likes of Ning or Facebook. And let’s face it: Facebook sets the standard. There’s Facebook as the standard for social networks, Ning as a standard for mass-consumer white label social networks, and then far, far off at the bottom is Umbrella.
Of course base Ning is missing some features for web shows – but there’s another advantage to Ning, one that EQAL will have to work years to beat: OpenSocial apps.
Basically, _it doesn’t matter_ that Ning is missing some things, because it gives every site owner the option to write what he needs, in the way he needs it – a grade of customization Umbrella won’t offer for a long, long time.
I myself am the one who’s going to write a YouTube integration “app” for the LG15 escape Ning, as well as a Twitter one to pull character tweets.
I have used both APIs before and they are fairly easy to use – usually, one just requests a page and reformats the response.
Anyone who truly plans to do a big web show will surely find a developer with basic JavaScript skills, which is really all that’s needed.
Speaking of customization, if you look at EQAL’s sites, you’ll notice they all look basically the same – sure, from LG15, over HG and Paula Deen, to Level 26, more and more features got added so it stopped looking so bare, but ultimately, it’s the exact same thing every single time.
EQAL’s software is static. Get Cookin’ might look surprisingly different, but compare HG, Get Cookin’ and Level 26, and you’ll find the exact same building blocks in the exact same positions. Hell, the customization they did from The Resistance to The Last _literally_ consisted of nothing but putting a new style sheet _over_ the old one. The entire Resistance stylesheet is still read. Many of the old backgrounds are still there, just hidden under the The Last ones.
Compare that to Ning’s options to move around modules, add and remove pages, add and remove applications, write custom applications, and so on, and so on.
Basically, all EQAL offers is creating yet another EQAL site – same layout, same features, just different colors. Whereas Ning offers true individuality, customizable for the community or project at hand.
For free. Not for some premium fee.
If you *want* to pay for Ning, the features you pay for are individually selectable, and below $20 a piece. You can use your own domain, for example, for only $4.95 a month. I haven’t seen EQAL’s Umbrella pricing, but I’d venture a guess they’re a tad higher.
Speaking of free, there is one aspect to this you have surprisingly neglected to mention: Open source software.
If one has the skills to acquire, install and set up Umbrella, then one also has the skills to download and install Elgg ( http://elgg.org/ ), or any of its competitors, for free. Look at Elgg’s about page, and you’ll see that Elgg offers VASTLY more features than Umbrella currently does, with the full source code available to the administrator for 100% customization, a community of developers who have worked with the software for months and years who can help, and all of that at no charge at all. For as many installations for as many series with as many communities as you want.
EQAL is trying to sell a sub-par product at a high price, based on their reputation alone. Most free options are technologically superior, time- and crowd-tested, and more customizable. And the hilarious irony, as pointed out before, is that not even EQAL’s own users like the software. Go back to lg15.com’s earliest forum posts, and you’ll find the vast part of the community lamenting the lack of basic functionality.
I, personally, have asked Miles Beckett in the post-lonelgirl15 live chat with the Creators about RSS syndication on the new system. He assured me it was on their radar. That was one year and three software iterations ago, and TO THIS DAY, “Umbrella” doesn’t support content syndication. (Check level26.com if you don’t believe me.)
Tell me, as someone well-acquainted with the way the world of “Web 2.0″ works – would YOU base your business on a software that doesn’t even know RSS? In today’s web?
EQAL’s software sucks. Not just subjectively. Objectively, it is simply years behind in development of all competitors, it is lacking basic features, and it’s not really customizable.
And that’s their “premium paid product”.
On a similar, but different note, let me say: I happen to be the user who writes and maintains the community-issued fix for The Last’s site (did I mention we think the software is crappy? http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/51625 ) – so while I, of course, can’t see the actual PHP source code, I have glanced a lot deeper than the average user, into the way the site is layouted, data is passed, things are organized, etc., etc.
And I wouldn’t pay a single cent for that software.
I’d run away screaming.
(Food for thought: Even after one year of development, EQAL’s software on Level26.com still identifies itself as version 0.1, development branch. What does it say about the quality of software development if the developers don’t even update the version number?)
@modelmotion – we have no financial relationship with EQAL at all and we weren’t paid at all for helping with their launch event. We host or promote a number of events within the web series community and serve as a media partner with several events.
So this was not correct?
“We’re also partnering with other organizations to put on a series of different events to reach new audiences — The Independent Television festival and New Media Vault, as well as a partnership with EQAL for the launch of their new CBS Interactive series Harper’s Globe.”
Or what exactly does it mean by “partnership”? Please explain.
In this case it means media partner. Same way Tubefilter is a media partner of Twiistup, Digital Hollywood, ITVFest, Digital Media Summit, etc. We have no financial interest in these events.
So “media partner” means what exactly?
“Umbrella appears to marry those two in a more complete offering, adding chat rooms, forums, user account and blogging all in one interface.”
Ning has chat (either as a facebook social bar or a separate chat), discussion boards, user accounts and blogging all in one interface. Ning also offers groups, better slide shows and “aps” which are not currently available from Eqal.
Eqal actually uses Meebo chat as a simple embed. It is not custom coded.
Again, in time Eqal can improve but perhaps you should dive into Ning and experience it if you are going to continue to write in this field.
Gah, I give up. I’ve tried to submit the post in various ways, lengths, pieces, with and without cookies cleared, and from different IPs. For some reason, it doesn’t like the second part.
The full post is here: http://tubefilter.pastebin.com/f3f2d3c67
The second part begins at line 23.
Whoever has the necessary power, feel free to remove my redundant posts above, or even add my full comment here.
And somebody please investigate wth is the problem.
@Renegade: For some reason Akismet, our spam filter, has flagged your posts repeatedly as spam. Registering your email address with Gravatar and Wordpress.com may help reduce the recurrence of this problem for you.
That’s good to know….could somebody remove the army of me up there? xD
“In effect, the EQAL team is taking what they’ve mastered, building tools for social engagement with shows, and handing them over to the next generation of upstarts who want a crack at the next LG15.”
Now Marc, after all you have read here can you really say “mastered”. I have seen so many people leave our little community over the years because LG15 Studio/Eqal is NOT responsive to our needs, our feedback or our concerns. Now this is not easy, but to say that anyone has “mastered” this field shows that the force of the Hollywood reality distortion field is beginning to approach the power of the 436.
Now, don’t get this wrong. We all want this to work and being positive is a good thing. However being delusional is dangerous.
Big, big thanks to whoever removed all the duplicate posts of mine. :)
Might I suggest some kind of feedback to be implemented, like “Your post has been flagged as potential spam and will appear after review.”?
That way, a user knows it’s not just bad luck or a glitch. It’s rather frustrating when half your posts go through, half don’t, and you have no clue why xD
Also, @Marc Hustvedt, thanks to Mr. Brim-DeForest, my reply to your questions now appears in its entirety above: http://news.tubefilter.tv/2009.....ment-16046
Interesting development here, in case anyone is still reading along:
I had already mentioned before how EQAL’s users were wandering off to ning – now there is yet another group of fans who’s trying to get the Creators to re-activate the old (phpBB-based, non-Umbrella) forums: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=112939577793
As you can see…EQAL’s own community simply isn’t very fond of the precursors of Umbrella. Not a good sign for Umbrella, imo.
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