Stand and Deliver

Some of you may remember this 1988 film staring Edward James Olmos and Lou Diamond Phillips. The film is about an inner-city math teacher who decides to change an educational system that is blind to the needs of its students.  This true story is a great example of overcoming challenges to deliver on a promise.  In this case, the promise of a valid education to kids, regardless of geography or socio-economic status.

The team at 1Cast believes in the premise of “Stand and Deliver.”  For the past two years, we have been quietly developing a service that delivers on the promise of seamless mobility of professionally produced content.  This has been more than just a technological undertaking, but an educational one as well.  For us, our real challenge was to educate broadcasters and cable programmers that by giving viewers more control over how they consume content, two things happen: first, the user is able to build greater affinity with a brand if it’s flexible to use and easy to consume whenever and wherever people want.  Second, specifically in the case of perishable news content, this affinity leads to more time spent with the content and additional monetization for a product with such an inherently short shelf life.

We are extremely pleased with the response we’ve seen from national and international broadcasters and programmers to our proposition.  Yet, in the end, only the consumer has the ability to say whether we’ve delivered on our promise.

I think the following post by political blogger Ben Domenech of RedState answers that question:

“The fine folks over at 1Cast, a new media delivery tool for smartphones, were kind enough to let me try out a beta version of their software on an iPhone during the DNC and RNC. It’s an excellent solution to a problem for smartphone users who want to find video content across multiple channels, but end up getting RickRolled by Youtube half the time, and have to deal with proprietary constraints on others.

Imagine an automatically updated RSS feed for video, personalized to your specific political, corporate, or news tags, delivered smoothly to your device, and that’s this new service. The ability, within hours of her speech, to pull up footage of Sarah Palin’s remarks and then effortlessly move to related news clips of responding coverage on a variety of networks was just wonderful when you’re on the go at a convention. To me, the untapped potential of this service for Sports is the most tempting – the day I can get an inexpensive service on my existing smartphone (as opposed to having to purchase some specific device) that delivers so quickly and smoothly that I can get fully streamed TV highlights from a first half of NFL play while sitting at the game at halftime will be a very happy day.

If you’re a gadget addict or a politics and news junkie, check them out.”