What We Can Learn From Sean Parker's Failure at Social Video

Airtime quietly gave up on its video chat service months ago. Here's why social video is a massive challenge -- and clues on how to crack it.
Airtime founders Sean Parker left and Shawn Fanning right. Photo Airtime
Airtime founders Sean Parker, left, and Shawn Fanning, right.Photo: Airtime

The much-hyped video chat service Airtime is now officially a failure. As reported by Fortune, Airtime's high-profile team -- which includes Napster and Facebook impresario Sean Parker -- has left the service in the dust, quietly replacing it with a revamped social video contraption called OkHello.

OkHello had a modestly successful launch, and it may yet be a breakout hit. Unlike Airtime, which was tied to desktop computers, OkHello is focused on mobile devices, where growth is far more robust. But over the past several years, companies have tried time and again to bring social video into the mainstream, with most failing miserably. Airtime is just the latest in a long string of flameouts, from the browser-based fad Chatroulette to Facebook pan-flash Viddy.

For Parker and crew, the trick will be to learn from all these failures, including their own. And if they look hard, they can also find the seeds of success in tools like Twitter's Vine and Google's Hangouts, tools that have attracted a fair amount of attention in recent months.

The Airtime team has already gotten at least one thing right. They launched OkHello without the ridiculous hype that surrounded the arrival of Airtime -- hype that I personally contributed when I profiled a pricey and elaborate effort to engineer a viral video that could promote the service.

But the problems with social video go well beyond too much hype. Video is an emotionally taxing medium. If you use it, you have to worry about not only your appearance but how your surroundings look, and if you want to make the most of the medium, you need a good command of your voice, your face, the camera, and the microphone. That sets a high bar for participation, and it can impede the sort of virality that helped non-video social networks like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter take off. Typing is so much easier than shooting a video.

Chatroulette tried to mitigate this stress by providing anonymity, but that also encouraged lewd behavior. Viddy tackled the problem by aggressively recruiting users to its service -- but most of them never came back. Airtime hoped that its $33-million hype machine, plus an algorithm that matched up like-minded strangers, would finally crack the nut. But it didn't.

What's the ultimate solution? Recent history indicates that one good option is to keep interactions short. Twitter's Vine limits videos to six seconds, an approach mimicked by Instagram's 15-second video service. The short length makes it much easier to control what goes into a video. Shooting a video becomes more like posing for a still photo.

Others are finding some success by bridging the gap between video chat and video publishing. Ustream has grown both traffic and revenue by letting ordinary people stream live video to both friends and strangers, who talk back primarily via text channels. Bittorrent, the San Francisco company behind the ubiquitous file-sharing/piracy tool, is poised to launch a peer-to-peer streaming service that should make this kind of sharing smoother, sharper, and less expensive.

Another option is to keep users in small private groups rather than flinging them into impromptu chats with strangers or asking them to share video with the entire world. Google's Hangouts has thrived by embracing this model. It's a good way to bring together a small online class, a book group, or a strategic corporate huddle. OkHello, it seems, is already taking this route. Perhaps Sean Parker and friends will finally get it right.