Josh Harris lived through a version of the future—a future where TV is replaced by constant, live video chat/surveillance over the Internet—and it almost made him go insane. His experiments from a decade ago with filming people day and night in a New York City bunker, and then himself and his girlfriend in his own wired loft, were documented in the movie We Live In Public. Now, after many fits and starts, he wants to take another stab at making that future a reality through a new Internet TV project he is pitching called Wired City, which he explains to me in the video interview above. You can also go through the exclusive pitch documents which I’ve embedded at the bottom of this post.
Harris made his first millions by founding market research firm Jupiter Communications. He then ventured into Internet TV way before broadband with Psuedo, one of of the more spectacular flameouts of the 1990s dotcom era. At one point, Harris had a net worth of $80 million. That all disappeared, much of it during the time he was broadcasting his life 24 hours a day over the Web in 2001. He later created a live video chat community called operator11, which also quickly went out of business. Harris decided to unplug and went to to live in Ethiopia for a few years. But now he’s back, pitching his new project which is a continuation of his decade-long quest to turn reality into TV. He says he only needs $50 million to do it right this time. With everything from Chatroulette to the iPhone’s new video-chat FaceTime feature, the time seems ripe for video chat TV to finally find its audience.
When I first met Harris, I asked him what he thought of Chatroulette, the random live video chat service started by Russian teenager Andrey Ternovskiy. He shrugged and said, “It is child’s play.” And Facebook, to him, is nothing more than “an advanced message board.”
Wired City is Chatroulette on steroids. It starts with video chat rooms where the audience comes and watches each other. Since anyone can set up a home studio with a webcam, anyon can become a “ChatStar.” These chat rooms are organized in what Harris calls “Net bandstands,” which are divided into different categories such as music, gaming, fashion, news, lifestyle. The Chat rooms are organized in a hierarchy and linked together. A video DJ or director controls what is seen in each chat room, and when something interesting is happening in his chat room, he can signal up the chain to get his live video into more popular chat rooms. Some combination of eyeballs and money will determine which videos get promoted.
At the very top of the stack is a Hollywood production studio filled with the most popular ChatStars. Harris proposes to “build a sound stage and the sound stage is cast from people at home.” If you do something special that attracts a lot of attention or advertising or both, your live video gets promoted in realtime up the stack, and as you gain points you get a chance to go to the big stage which is promoted on the homepage.
“As you go up higher in the stages, just like in a massive multiplayer online game, you get more powers,” says Harris. “Or to put it more industrially, you get better administrative controls.”
In this way, thinks he can create a mass audience attractive to advertisers. Everything on that set can be sponsored, from Gillette shaving mirrors to the Swanson’s Hungry Man dining table. He wants to sell micro-day parts of people’s lives, and over the long term he thinks that these mundane videos will have value to people who want to go back and reconstruct parts of their lives.
Harris believes that everything he has done so far is leading up to Wired City. The technology behind it is an advanced version of Operator11, combined with creating their own home studios like he did with his loft. It is a real-life massive multiplayer game where the goal is to get onto the physical set and become Internet famous. What happens on the physical Hollywood set is “scarce and a highly coveted place to see and be seen,” says Harris, “sort of like the bunker in We Live in Public.
Rather than approach VCs, Harris is trying to go straight to ad agencies this time, and maybe start with one sponsored ‘Net bandstand” to prove out his concept. He is also talking to reality TV studios in Hollywood. But his past and his history of startups that run through cash isn’t making it easy. He knows what he is up against: “The tech guys don’t seem to appreciate the Hollywood style production elements and the television people can’t see beyond the next reality show. And then of course there is the “Josh Harris factor” which I can’t (or don’t want to) shake.”
Whether you think Wired City is an abhorrent example of Internet over-sharing taken to the extreme or you too cannot wait to begin lifecasting 24/7, it is instructive to look at how Harris thinks it can work. He has been obsessed with this idea longer than most people. Below are some slides taken from his pitch document and the entire document as well.
This is big.
Just gonna tell you this once. This guy has not moved on from his success in 1994. His business plan does not even convey any relevant business pitch. It’s all just a personal project. And who on Earth will spend $50M on a reality TV show? He totally forgot that the reason why reality TV shows are sometimes profitable is because they have programs/challenges within the house that hooks viewers in. Also that reality TV shows are low cost TV productions – typically involving only a camera, the house of someone, video editor and/or a director.
Oh god, not again… Although, the gun range in the movie, looked pretty cool.
josh harris needs to be stopped
This guy is a fucking weirdo.
The guy had $80 million of net worth and all this is gone?
Dude.
No further questions, your Honor.
This is so incredibly lame. No one is gonna want to really be controlled by people above them. People get on video chat because they have the control.
Besides, no one wants to basically watch commercials in their chat rooms.
Yikes!! Uh…..no thanks!
"We Live in Public" was just wrong on so many levels. He's not a visionary, he's disturbed.
How do you instantly get a free plane ticket back to Ethiopia?
Step 1: Lose $ 80 million
Step 2: Propose the most stupidest idea
Step 3: Ask for $ 50 million
Okay – I have been doing start-ups since 1994- Im still not rich. But I have been growing my skills. Since 2004 I have been working out of China and India and in the last two years have grown to 57 full time employees with a 1000 sq meter office.
Three years ago I had $0.10 to my name and now Im making a very good monthly income.
Point is such a large project in my experience is very risky. Even if you have incredible skill. The unknown factor is very big.
Set, Hut, Hike……. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary_pass
If you read the slides you see the sci-fi women dressed up in red robes sitting at futuristic workstations and the excerpts from startrek fanboy coffee-table books and you think he's totally batty, out of his mind crazy. Just cracked-out.
But when you listen to the interview, you only think he's half crazy. If there's one thing Harris gets today (and he got it 15 years ago too, but never managed to build a business on it) it's that the young today place vanishingly little value upon their privacy. They're growing up without the same concept of privacy that those of us in our 30s and older possess. They want to broadcast their lives and gain currency in the social network, and they'll sell out themselves and their friends to get it.
Right now that currency is intangible, it's your "friends" on facebook. Harris wants to generate real-world value from climbing the online social ladder, to monetize it through branding and advertising. His example of a channel where people broadcast themselves shaving seems silly at first, but that's because you don't consider the nature of celebrity. A celebrity blowing her nose is interesting to many simply because of their public status, and a picture of it has value. A channel aggregating celebrities blowing their noses could show Sudafed and Kleenex ads.
What he's proposing is to generate new celebrities simply through the same functions that today's kids already know– making friends and networking, climbing the social ladder, being the most popular in your tribe. It's just a much larger tribe.
It's always difficult to predict how the "hive mind" will react, but I don't think he's wrong about social media generating tomorrow's celebrities. I'm just not entirely clear how he plans to compete with the big boys in this arena, and he needs to put his feet back on the ground. The star trek references, silly pod-people, and goofy sci-fi pictures certainly wouldn't get me to open my checkbook. Those custom-built single-occupant TV studios are ridiculous pie in the sky ideas, the sort of thing you expect to get in the mail alongside rambling incoherent letters explaining the inventor's theory of perpetual energy. He needs to focus on the software and ads. Endusers will generate content using their laptop's webcam, just like they do now.
Those are some great points you made. it's unfortunate that Harris seems obsessed with replicating himself; expanding his ego so that everyone can share in and become his psychology … and a mal-adjusted one at that. The way you put it, there's some real potential – a likely and healthy growth of social media come the ubiquity of video not just on laptops, but front-facing cameras on mobile devices. I doubt, though, that as that happens, Harris will be a player in that arena, nor will he get his deepest wish which is that everyone is just like him: him in another pod.
So, he went insane doing this by himself, and that made him think it was a good idea?
He had a breakdown broadcasting his life 24/7, yes. He wired his apartment with motion-activated cameras and recorded every moment of his (and his girlfriend's) lives. He wanted to take the abrogation of privacy to what he (at the time) incorrectly thought would be the ultimate end state. That's not what this proposal is about at all.
Josh is due for a come-back tour…when focused don't underestimate him!
As ambitious projects go, it is there with the best of them; like landing man on the moon. However, we have all seen the affects of “reality” TV on susceptible members of society. A question to be asked is, “who takes responsibility, or accountability for any actions found socially, ethically, or morally unacceptable directly influenced by the “wired city”?
Fuck Josh Harris.
I don't mind product placement on some awesome movie – I don't care much for them, but I tolerate them.
But product placement on some crudely-made amateurish chat channels? It's like the 1970's equivalent of tuning to a crappy HAM channel, and got bombarded by commercials.
people are so bored, they 'd watch anything
so if everyone is broadcasting themselves who's gonna actually watch the TV?
that's the point, you are watching each other.
I kind of feel bad for this guy.
It's no so much feeling sorry for this guy, but the folks out there who would be prepared to go along with his idea!
I just showed this two my 17 year old son and 10 of his friends and they all want in! Maybe Josh is right?
why so many whiners posting here? oh I get it- invention envy
This should be done by tinychat.com, they already have the chatrooms. Just needs a main feed for every room where people could appear, possibly voted up by the others in the room, or choosen by an operator. Anyway that's the only useful idea in this whole article, the pitching pictures are just f**in lame, and streaming 0-24 is just disturbing.
Erick, I love the content, I felt compelled to share it, but the title – "Make Us All Live In Public" – is unnecessarily over-the-top for a product that's already crazy enough. Unless he said that explicitly somewhere, I doubt that it's the actual vision of the entrepreneur to *force* this technology on *everyone*. Ease up a bit. ;)
He did. Watch the video.
Was it cut, or implied somewhere in the video? The closest I heard was you asking, 'So you now want to scale this out so that anybody can live in public?' A quote would be awesome.
To which he replies, yes.
The exact quote was, "Yes, that is very much my game."
Your title states that he plans to force this onto everyone, "Us All." In the video, he agrees that he wants to scale so that "anybody" can live in public.
"Anybody," as opposed to "Us All," right? That's kind of a biggie because your title implies that he's much more of a whack-job than he really is.
Interviewer: "arent you asking people to do what created a nervous breakdown for you [filming 24/7]"
"Its the way of the world"
Even if he isnt asking EVERYONE to do this, isnt the concept seem a little too crazy? You say the title makes him sound crazy, but I think its his own quote that shows you how loony the guy is. Dont get me wrong, about 15% of the information is this video is not only useful, but may very well be implemented in the future. However, the rest of it is just this guy rambling on about a dream that is completely illogical, and frankly very weird. I think the title implies that he is just as much of a whack-job as he really is ha.
love it! He's in the right realm of future probabilities, but his vision seems so new and different that it's off-putting.
this is 1984
How much is this different from the concept of Justin TV or the like? Broadcast yourself or?
This definitely won’t be porn-dominated!
i thought it was about wimax
No matter how many video streams your face shows up on, you're still just one scarcely distinguishable inhabitant of a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.