Surf Break: GrindTV Surf Channel

Need a little visual break at work? A little stoke, a little eye candy maybe? Or just a break from watching mind-numbing cat videos on YouTube when you’re supposed to be working? Assuming you’d like something a little more inspired and active, I got just whatcha need! Click this. And soon you’ll even get some cool live, daily surfing action from Hawaii’s North Shore…more on that later.

Southern California-based GrindTV.com (a division of PureVideo Networks) has just gone live with its new design, which I wrote was coming back on September 13. The redesigned site includes new content channels, industry news, enhanced profiles, and other features. User-generated videos are a big part of the site, but original videos and photographs captured by GrindTV’s own producers, and major surf-industry vendors as well, are what makes the site a real treat. Users can rate, search, share, and develop their own profiles to get what GrindTV calls “a complete sports entertainment and social networking experience.”

GrindTV.com’s uniqueness is that it’s a comprehensive destination for extreme and action sports videos — not just surfing. The Flash-based site has an updated design with a new color scheme and distinct channels for each sports category, and features better navigation and community interaction. Each channel — Surf, Skate, Snow, Moto, Bike, Air, Wind, and Wake — has its own dedicated videos, photo galleries, industry news, and profiles, and all differ in appearance to reflect each sport’s unique characteristics. [I, of course, am greatly partial to the surf channel, pictured above. Although I cut a mean skateboard when I was in high school…when we didn’t need no stinkin’ helmets!] The separate channels allow members to focus on the sport they’re most passionate about and connect with other like-minded fans. There’s a lot of crossover participation in these sports, too — surfing and snowboarding, surfing and skateboarding. Surfing really fired the whole action-sports craze that took off over the last couple of decades. I know because I witnessed it early on. The annual “ASR” shows — Action Sports Retailer — now a powerhouse event business, actually started as a sleepy little surf-industry show with a mostly SoCal focus back in the early ’80s, when I began frequenting them regularly.

GrindTV seems to have come up with a site that captures the whole enchilada. Every week on its homepage and every day on each channel, it features new profiles, events, albums, athletes, and GrindTV’s own original programming. Established features such as upload, search, and the rating of videos are also available to members on the new version, and users can share videos via email, instant message, or by using an embeddable player to post clips to their favorite social networking site or blog pages.

“Everyone at GrindTV surfs, skates, wakeboards, or snowboards,” said Curtis Beck, GM of GrindTV in the company’s news release. “We’ve taken our passions and experiences and designed our dream action-sports destination. Having just exceeded a million unique users a month, and the addition of over a thousand videos and 25,000 photographs, gives us the confidence to take our site to the next level.”

GrindTV.com has established this audience of die-hard action sports fans in just under a year, along with major partnerships with AOL Winamp, MSN, TagWorld, Windows Mobile, and Helio, as well as landing chief advertisers Sony PlayStation and Nissan. Likewise, th site has attracted a growing list of content submissions from action-sports companies like Body Glove, Billabong, and Studio 411. What’s in it for firms like these is the ability to distribute branded videos to GrindTV’s highly targeted audiences.

Who Is This Company, Anyway?
GrindTV.com is a division of PureVideo Networks (also based in El Segundo, CA), a leading broadband publisher “dedicated to compelling video and the people who produce it.” Funded by Softbank Capital, as reported back in December 2005, the company owns and operates another major video web destination as well: StupidVideos.com. Collectively, the two sites now stream more than sixty million videos to 6 million+ monthly unique users. As you might expect for a venture-backed business, PureVideo Networks has some serious management talent behind it.

Recently, the company launched a separate site, PureVideo Search, the Internet’s first meta search engine for video, and what they now claim to be the fastest-growing search site on the web. PureVideo Search is a free web tool, and the company calls it “the first video meta search engine.” It says this domain will also be the home for other tools it plans to roll out in the future. The search tool combines crawl and feeds for breadth and timeliness and, says the company, it’s completely impartial, pulling video content from sites all over the Internet. Categories displayed on the search site include music, sports, comedy, celebrity, entertainment, and news. Search results are displayed with an associated thumbnail and links to the respective publisher site. “In the short term,” said spokesperson Megan Schwartz, “PureVideo Search helps us grow organic traffic, some of which will convert into residual traffic for our online destinations — both of which are catgeories on our search site: humor and sports.” The company also will get important trend data about broadband video consumption from the PureVideo Search site. That reporting will help drive future strategic thinking around content, product, and business development, Schwartz said, as well as investment in future content verticals and utilities.

“Our strategy has been to leverage the best of two emerging online video business models – video utility and video publishing,” said Erik Hawkins, CEO and cofounder of PureVideo Networks. “Utilities, especially free ones, are powerful traffic aggregators, while published and programmed media destinations retain consumers and generate revenue. By combining the two, we’ve opened the gateway for traffic while maintaining our ability to offer value to our audience and our big brand advertising partners.”

Playing With the Big Boys — Where the Bigs Waves Are, Too
Very soon, the GrindTV team will move temporarily for six weeks to what it’s calling the “GrindTV House” on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, to cover the men’s and women’s Van’s Triple Crown of Surfing, the surf industry’s paramount event. Actually, the house is one that belongs to singer/surfer Jack Johnson. GrindTV tells me it will also work with my favorite girl-brand Roxy on the Roxy Pro Hawaii, the longest running professional women’s surfing event on the island. “Stay tuned in November, as video coverage and news from these contests will be updated daily on the site,” said GrindTV’s Schwartz. That will be sometime after the 12th, I learned. “Every day, we’ll post news and updates on the event as well as create more exclusive interviews while out there. Every major surfer whether in the contest or not will be there, and we’re scheduling a ton of interviews.

“Surfer and Surfing magazines, MTV, Fox Sports, and other media will also be covering the Van’s Triple Crown,” said Schwartz, “But they generally swoop in just for three days to cover the final event, the Pipeline Masters, and little else. We’ll be there for every day of the Triple Crown, both men’s and women’s.”

The number one differentiator between GrindTV and other action sports publishers, whether print or online, is that the latter have niched themselves into one specific sport — down to separating short board surfing from long board, etc, snowboarding from skiing, etc. “Competitors like Primedia and
Transworld believe these sports should be dealt with separately and cannot coexist,” said GrindTV’s Schwartz. “In fact, we were told by them that it would be impossible for them to live under one brand. But we’ve used technology in a creative way to allow these sports to coexist and at the same time live separately on their own channels, under one brand and one website. The technology allows our users to refine their experience right down to their specific rush — be it one niche sport, athlete,
location, etc. We’ve spent a ton of time, money,and resources building a site that allows for that type of specificity.”

The bottom line for GrindTV is its focus on video. “There are so many talented filmers out there, who up to this point have been at the mercy of television broadcasting or DVD distribution,” said Schwartz. ” We truly believe that we know how to find the talent to create great entertainment video content. Most action sports publishers have been and continue to focus on photography only. The equipment already exists to eliminate photography completely and pull top quality stills out of video. So we’ve chosen instead to study the video consumption habits of this industry.”

“The action-sports industry has evolved to become a pop culture phenomenon,” said Curtis Beck, GM of GrindTV.com, “in which new sports and variations develop overnight. Take the recent explosion of wakeboarding over this year. We’ve set up an infrastructure, through which we can simply fold in another page that focuses on that next hot new board sport or extreme sport that the kids are hungry for. Whether it happens on land, in air, or on water, we have the categories: Air, Wind, Wake, Pain, Surf, etc. And because we’re vertically integrated and have the charts that show us what our users want and where they go, we can dedicate the resources to deliver what they want on the spot. We have the intelligence (through the charts), the flexibility, the production team, and the broadcast outlet.”

All Surf and No Girls Makes Jack a Dull Boy
Recently, Billabong allowed GrindTV exclusive access to film its bikini fashion show at the ASR show, a video that’s currently posted to the site here. GrindTV reports that this video has received more than 62,000 views in one month alone, and that there will likely be more opportunities through the Billabong relationship. A second Billabong video on the site is of their ASR party.

“We are also rolling out another series of ‘Real Girls’,” said GrindTV’s Megan Schwartz. “We’ve had tremendous success with ‘Real Girls of the North Shore’, and now we’re posting ‘Real Girls of the OC’. These are profiles of girls who can seriously surf, but of course look great while doing so.”

Other videos produced by GrindTV that were recently posted at the site include coverage of the Boost Mobile Pro of Surfing 2006 at Trestles. There’s also a 10-part exclusive interview with Kelly Slater, who speaks of the possibility of pursuing up to 10 world titles, now that he’s currently in line for his 8th.

“Overall, we’re making the move to balance lifestyle, like the bikini fashion shows, with staying ‘core’ — as in covering the entirety of the Van’s Triple Crown.”

Is This Competition for the Traditional Surf and Action-Sports Publishers?
I continued my conversation with Megan Schwartz on this topic, and here’s what she had to say. “The bigger traditional publications in this space literally told us in the beginning that we’d never get access to the athletes, events, and industry that they control. I definitely think they see this as a threat because they’ve been late in taking seriously the power of online media, social networking, and
user-generated content. They’ve enjoyed a very long run of dictating cool and, in Web 2.0, the users establish cool.” I thought that last statement was a particulary cogent one.

“Now, a year later, and thanks to the warm reception we’ve received from the very same athletes and events, I believe GrindTV.com is being taken a little more seriously. Our business model revolves around promoting the industry as a whole — from the amateur to the pro to the filmers to the big
brands and small brands. And I think the action-sports community can appreciate that, especially because there has been so much intense competition existing between all these sides. We’re relying on advertisers from outside of the industry to support those within it, and we hope this leads to a lot more cooperation within the surfing community.”

Do the established pubs in the surfing world have reason to worry? “The print publications in the action-sports industry do have and will continue to have a dedicated audience. They have an important editorial voice that the online publishers cannot match at this point. In this way, we’re not a threat or a competitor because GrindTV has no plans to delve into editorial copy — we’re very clear on who owns that area. There’s good reason why they’ve been on top for so long.”

Where does that leave GrindTV? “We plan to stick to online video content as our main focus, which is a very different type of business and monetization strategy. We do create original programming — and, for now, that revolves around interviews, profiles, and event coverage with little to no GrindTV commentary or voice involved.”

Is there room for all these traditional and online media outlets in surfing? “We share the same audience and we are honored to — but I think where we have potential to become a threat may be in advertising dollars and marketing/promotional partnerships down the line. Ad and marketing dollars are moving out of TV and print and moving online across most industries. While we do not focus our efforts on the action sports industry ad and marketing dollars right now, we are considering more integrated and creative opportunities, and that may become desirous to endemic companies interested in users interacting with their brands and content — very difficult when you’re dealing with print and TV.”

How are you making money? “Half of our monetization strategy is involved in syndication, not too different from traditional television, in that advertising revenue around our syndicated content is then split. We syndicate content to TagWorld and Helio, for example. GrindTV.com content is included on a GrindTV.com profile page on TagWorld, and our content will also be included on the channels on their video page (not yet launched). TagWorld will also promote our profile and content. GrindTV clips are also available on Helio mobile phones.”

It’s kind of a SoCal, thing, I guess — GrindTV in El Segundo, and Tagworld and Helio in Santa Monica.
Now, whodda thunk? Trends starting in Southern California…. 🙂

Tags: surfing, online video, GrindTV, PureVideo, BodyGlove, Billabong, Tagworld, Helio