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On The Edge

Entertainment, San Diego style, is anything but laid-back

Edited by Thomas K. Arnold

SAN DIEGO IS EMERGING on the cutting edge of entertainment. Sure, the Hollywood studios are still north of us, in Burbank, Culver City, West Los Angeles—anywhere but Hollywood proper.

But the edgy stuff, well, that’s right here in America’s Finest City—er, County. Genius Products, formed several years ago in Solana Beach as a supplier of budget public-domain and Baby Genius videos, has been taken over by moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein, executive producers of trendy flicks like Sin City, Scream and Pulp Fiction.

The brothers, who sold Miramax Films to Walt Disney, set off on their own last October with The Weinstein Company and shortly thereafter announced a deal to buy 70 percent of Genius and give it exclusive DVD distribution rights to all their films. Genius is now a major player in the home video arena, with several top theatricals under its belt as well as a lucrative new DVD distribution deal with ESPN.

Then there’s Veoh Networks, an independent Internet television broadcasting company, headquartered in San Diego, that lets users create and broadcast feature-length, TV-quality videos, using a peer-to-peer network. Viewers can watch Flash-based video previews up to 10 minutes, and then download the entire program using Veoh’s proprietary software.

The site launched a year ago this month; its second version debuted in March. The following month, a major strategic financing round raised $12.5 million. Investors include Time Warner and ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner, who also joined the Veoh board. In June, for the first time, Veoh broadcast more than 1 million videos in a single day.

Veoh is now riding the wave of popularity triggered by the success of YouTube, a video-sharing Web site that, since the beginning of this year, has captivated the youth market—industry folks are calling it the next MySpace—and spawned upwards of 180 me-too Web sites that also allow users to post, watch, share (via e-mail) and, in some cases, download videos.

Veoh is the brainchild of La Jolla resident Dmitry Shapiro and Ted Dunning of Mira Mesa. Shapiro, a high-tech guru and frequent speaker at technology and business events around the country, had previously founded Akonix Systems, which pioneered the technologies now standard for Instant Messaging and Peer-to-Peer management. Dunning is the former chief scientist at MusicMatch, now Yahoo! Music.

Shapiro says Veoh is in a different league than all the other video sites.

“Traditionally, there are three ways television gets to your living room: through the airwaves, through cable and through satellite,” he says. “Veoh is the fourth way—we use the Internet.”

Veoh uses spare capacity on the Internet “to deliver full-screen, TV-grade, long-form programming, not short 30-second video clips in grainy windows on your browser,” Shapiro says. He envisions a day, soon, when media-center computers will sit on top of televisions and channel everything that comes on screen. People will be able to access the Internet from the living-room sofa, and current capacity restrictions will be a thing of the past.

“We use a series of proprietary technologies we built, based on peer-to-peer architecture, that basically takes excess bandwidth and multiplexes it,” Shapiro says. “We’re therefore able to create, instead of channels 1 through 1,000, channels 1 through 1 million, or 200 million—a virtually unlimited number of channels. And it’s true public broadcasting.”

As of mid-July, more than 30,000 videos were available on Veoh, from the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates and Iraqi war footage to Max Fleischer Superman cartoons, Carlos Mencia comedy routines and even a Deepak Chopra lecture.

To make money, Veoh will temporarily steer away from the future and take a cue from the past: selling commercials on uploaded videos.

“We don’t make money yet,” Shapiro says, “but we will.”

JEFFREY KREBS is a highly respected San Diego physician who earlier this year was named one of the first Kaiser Permanente “Everyday Heroes.” He was honored for having single-handedly written an initiative on healthy foods in hospitals that was embraced by the American Medical Association and is now national policy.

“I took my nephew to Children’s Hospital, and he said he wanted a Happy Meal,” Krebs says, recalling the spark that lit his fuse. “I look up, and there’s a full-service McDonald’s in the lobby. I had a real issue with that, with the tacit endorsement they get from being in a healthcare facility.”

But beneath the scrubs lies another personality: Jeff Krebs the actor. Since 1998, he’s appeared in four motion pictures, beginning with 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain, which starred Hulk Hogan and Loni Anderson (Krebs played a carnival worker). He portrayed a doctor in 2000’s True Vinyl, a computer programmer in 2005’s Form 3254-A and a food critic in Single White Female 2: The Psycho.

His latest: “I’m going to be playing a nerdy prison inmate in a film called Justified that Sony Pictures is going to distribute,” says the Screen Actors Guild card-carrying Krebs, a former championship figure skater. He’s proud of his duality: “I have the ultimate balance between the right brain, art, and the left brain, science.”

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