Michael Cooper - TV-Mail, a new business in Japan

1 Jun 2005 Category: Features, Products, Technology

Michael Cooper - TV-Mail, a new business in Japan

Michael Cooper during the interview

Michael Cooper, has more than 25 years experience producing and directing TV　- commercial and developing high technology projects in the pacific rim. He has worked for and with a broad cross section of international media and technology organizations (e.g. Columbia Pictures, ABC Television, TV Asahi, Tokyo Broadcasting System) and was consultant for Europe’ s leading edge high-tech innovators. He just moved to Japan for his latest, new business idea: TV- Mail, a technology solution, which eliminates downloading to view high quality streaming media.

Interview by Uleshka

Michael, could you briefly describe what TV- Mail is?


Michael Cooper explaining TV- Mail

TV-Mail is a way of streaming video. We originally designed it for sending video of any length by email, so that the picture and sound stream immediately, without the need for clicking or downloading once you opened your mail. It’s not an attachment, so there are no virus worries. It’s also no link to a web page - so the viewers don’t get redirected from handling their mail. No player required and no web browser necessary. That is a very efficient and effective method of personally delivering video messages directly to the targeted viewer.

Does it have to be in an email, or could it be on a website, too?

You can include it on a website just as well. We are still working on some things there, though. It doesn’t work perfectly on Safari yet. Our biggest restriction is, that if you are in a corporate environment, most likely, the firewall will turn off Activex, but we will have that fixed by August.

So- how does it work then?

Flash Video is the basic, but it is how we use it that makes the little difference. Every frame you see is replaced by the next frame, instead of residing on your computer. That’s why it doesn’t take up any space. There is no buffering time and our video server automatically determines the available bandwidth of the viewer and plays the video accordingly for the best experience.

How did you actually come up with that idea? I mean, you’ve been directing TV commercials for over 25 years now- was TV- Mail born out of some new necessity?


TV- Mail developed out of a personal story

It is actually based on a personal story. Some time ago, my wife was in a rehabilitation center on Hawaii. Talking to other patients while waiting for her, I realized, that most of them were hurt at work but their treatment got denied by the government. The insurance companies wanted to force them to settle, because they didn’t want to keep paying them over the life expectancy of their accident. I really wanted to do something about that and realized, that we had to educate the legislators. My idea was, to make a short film interviewing the victims and then find a way to make all legislators watch it without fail. I found a programmer at Xerox corporation, told him what I wanted to do and this is basically how we invented TV-Mail. We sent an email to every legislator and politician in Hawaii and now they are actually changing the law. It worked!

Wow! Now that is quite a success story, I would say. So, now you want to set it up as a business in Japan? What are your first experiences here?

Well, we find it quite hard to establish something people don’t know anything about. The Japanese tend to be much easier to interest in something that has been proven to work already. Right now, we are dealing with Hakuhodo and our first client, even before Citibank, who is just about to sign up, might be the Japanese government. Hakuhodo has an environmental institute and they are sponsoring that project. The government wants to get a consensus among the people and convince them to conserve electricity and save water. It basically comes down to education.

How come the government is interested in TV-Mail?

They like it because it is new technology and nobody has seen it working like this before. The effect is very convincing. If they wanted to use progressive downloading, to show their educational films, they would have to give each consumer a lot of bandwidth. The same amount of content that usually takes up about 10 megabytes, could be put on by us in only 10 kilobytes - easily sent in an email for no costs.

Michael, you are originally a TV person. In what way do you think has the internet influenced television already and what will the future of TV look like?


So what will the future of TV look like, then?

They will simply merge more and more. People already use things like Tivo to control TV more - but soon all television will be entirely on command using the internet connection to watch it. Microsoft is already trying out a few things, like offering a remote control to navigate.

There will be more ways of avoiding advertisement, though. Filters get better and better, soon, there won’t be any spam anymore, things like Tivo allow you to skip commercials - so how and where do you think will advertisement be?

I have just been to the Streaming Media East, a video conference about exactly that question held at the Hilton New York. They were talking about TV, seen as “lean back viewing” and the common use of the internet, seen as “lean in viewing”. Both have a whole set of different rules- at least in this transition period. It seems that people don’t mind watching commercials, as long as they know what they are going to get right after it. If you could go and watch something you want to watch and the ticket for that is either a dollar or watching a 15 seconds Toyota commercial - what would you choose? It will simply make the position of the “sponsor” of your program more obvious.

Wouldn’t that mean that there is still less, but then more powerful advertisement? I mean, you would have to select that “sponsor” very well.

Exactly. For those things, TV- Mail comes in very handy because we can tell exactly when you select your mail and if you stop it, we know how long you watched it for. That means we will be able to tailor to your demographics. We are able to target the commercial to the customer, so we won’t waste a commercial for retirement on a young couple, who is not interested in it.

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