Eevo is a company with a clear mission, “to bring you the best content virtual reality has to offer.” Today, Eevo told UploadVR that they have successfully raised $1 million in angel funding to accomplish that mission. But Eevo knows they cannot do this alone because in order to build the best curated content streaming service for VR, you are going to need content. That is why Eevo is planning to dedicate nearly a third of its funding to commissioning and licensing content from the top VR content creators.
The content development fund will be available to anyone who is currently “producing high end VR content,” and will be essentially limitless in their size scaling to the size necessary for the production and will be addressed on a case by case basis. This is only the start for Eevo, however; according Alejandro Dinsmore, Eevo’s CMO, the company is planning on “raising another significant round soon,” which will also feed into and grow the content producers’ fund.
Key to Eevo’s mission is the curation of the content on the site. According to Dinsmore, other options have a mix of good and bad content and often there is more bad than good. “We want to be the ‘Netflix of VR'” says Dinsmore, not necessarily directly competing with them rather, by taking an approach that is similar to Netflix’s streaming a library of carefully curated, high quality content. By not allowing any direct user uploads it creates a space where people will come for only the best of VR content, streamed directly to their devices.
Initially Eevo’s platform will launch as an app on the GearVR store, but the company has plans to expand into browser versions in the future in an effort to make the platform as accessible as possible. The company is building their own player for video content as well as “lots of other stuff in house.” Unlike some other streaming content services emerging on the market, Eevo does not plan to initially focus on live events and sports, rather their “main focus is on compelling narrative content.” The company is also looking into the idea of buying equipment for content producers to take advantage of (camera rigs, lighting, etc.) but are currently waiting on the innovation within that field to settle a bit before making that investment.
With an evolving 360-degree camera market it is hard to make an investment in equipment a large scale.
Eevo is also working on a robust backend analytics system for content that producers will have access to. According to Dinsmore this is an area the company is “heavily focused on.” The analytics system will collect data at millisecond intervals in order to get incredibly accurate data. Among some of the real time data points that Eevo plans to capture are head position, gaze direction, time looking in a certain area, how a user flows through the content, etc. basically “any type of data [they] can collect, [they] will try to collect.” Eevo will also allow for this data to be easily visualized, using things like heat maps. This analytic data collection will prove vital in helping to quickly develop content that is optimized to be the greatest possible experience. In an industry that is so nascent, producers are still trying to figure out how best to structure narratives in VR, and this analytic data will go a long ways towards helping inform those narratives in the future. Numbers tell some great stories, and stories are what Eevo is all about.
As of now, specifics on the model are “subject to change” but Dinsmore did share Eevo’s current position on the matter. “We are very producer focused and are trying to be as generous as possible,” says Dinsmore, “but we are also aware of the high costs associated with hosting content at this scale and fidelity.” The model itself will be a subscription model with revenue splits, but that is also subject to change.
As the days fly off the calendar in 2015, one pattern has truly emerged – 2015 is the year for VR content production. Eevo is not alone in issuing funding to content producers. WEVR recently announced a $1 million grant program (offering grants up to $50,000) for VR content producers, and Unreal Engine opened up a $5 million dollar grant program for people developing on their engine. The consumer money isn’t here yet, but it is right around the corner. Programs like these act as the carrot on the stick for developers weary of taking the risk of hopping into VR now. It is a necessary project based influx of cash into the industry that has been sorely needed, now it’s up to the pioneering developers of this content to do what they do best, create stunning, immersive worlds for us to play in.
Those interested should send Eevo an email detailing your project and presumed budgetary requirements.
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