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FeedRedlasso Rides Again
A King of Prussia company battles successfully to find its place on the Web.
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From afar, it looked like a one-punch KO that sent the upstarts from King of Prussia to the canvas. The mighty television networks screamed, “Cease and desist!” And the little guys at Redlasso, well, ceased and desisted. So much for the dream of filling blogs with TV news clips and providing platforms for broadcasters to get their news to broader audiences.
Apparently, what looked too good to be true actually was. And now it was time for Redlasso to abandon a business model that would help push blogging to a new level and increase exposure for advertisers, and return to being a TV clipping service for its public relations clients.
Last July, FOX and NBC got medieval on Redlasso, suing for copyright violations. For three years, the company had been providing clients with access to news clips to embed in blogs or for use on websites, radio shows and other applications. And for founders Al McGowan and Kevin O’Kane, lawsuits weren’t the answer. Accommodation was. “We were always aiming to work with broadcasters and be totally transparent with what we were doing,” McGowan says.
So Redlasso worked on a resolution. Meanwhile, more than 20,000 bloggers lost access to Redlasso.com, and media experts wrote their obituaries.
Earlier this year, an agreement was reached with FOX’s 18 owned-and-operated stations that produce newscasts. It wasn’t a universal victory, but Redlasso was back in business and able to move forward. “It was a terrific validation to get things done with FOX,” says O’Kane.
The coast is now clear for Redlasso to make a strong move into the future its founders envisioned in June 2005. With FOX playing nice, the hope is that NBC and the rest will follow suit. The settlement allows Redlasso to tell the others, in effect, “See, we’re not so bad after all. Come do business with us.”
And make no mistake—this is serious business. A not-so-distant future incarnation of Redlasso could include a platform that provides the world’s hundreds of millions of bloggers with an enormous inventory of content, all the while providing networks with demographic deliveries that get their product to highly targeted audiences.
“The [goal] is to have a single aggregated source that people know, so they can find, create and share these clips,” says McGowan.
Redlasso’s fall relaunch will give bloggers access to any news content those 18 FOX stations create. It’s just a start, to be sure, because there is so much more out there, and Redlasso wants to make it all available—in a manner that benefits both provider and user, of course.
Twenty-five years ago, it was all about the printed word. Now, there’s little published that doesn’t find its way onto the Web. The business of providing a portal to the video world is newer and less charted. YouTube, Hulu and others are a start, but they’re generally entertainment vehicles. Those who really want to know what’s happening have fewer outlets.
That’s where Redlasso comes in.
“We want to help media extend the life of their products and monetize it,” says McGowan.
