Steven Starr
Encyclopedia
Steven Starr is the producer of FLOW: For Love Of Water, and the founder of Revver
.
. Starr started his career in high school as a volunteer journalist at WLIR-FM in New York, pursued a degree in Radio, TV and Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
, and worked his way through college as a campus journalist, a DJ, CBS Records college rep, and a concert promoter for Bob Marley & The Wailers
.
in 1980, Starr launched a homevideo and an audiobooks division, packaged television and screenplays, then headed the New York Motion Picture department. His clients over the years included Andy Grove, Joseph Papp
, Larry David
, Ang Lee
, Andy Warhol
, Ziggy Marley
and Tim Robbins
.
Starr left Morris in 1991 to produce Johnny Suede
, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival
, and to write, direct and produce Joey Breaker
, winner of the Audience Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival
. He then co-created and produced the Ace Award series nominee The State
for MTV and CBS, and worked with the Marley family on a variety of estate projects, including a Bob Marley
biopic.
Starr went on to focus full-time on media democratization, as a co-founder of the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, and founding CEO of AntEye.com, a user-generated video site where video creators, voted on by their peers, were awarded micro-pilot budgets in various categories. Despite thousands of submissions and a first-look partnership with HBO, by mid-2000 bandwidth costs were prohibitive and AntEye became unsustainable.
To address the bandwidth problem, Starr co-founded Uprizer with Freenet
Project founder Ian Clarke and Rob Kramer. A pioneer in P2P and funded by Intel and others, the goal was a zero-cost bandwidth solution for independent creators. After Hummer-Winblad was named in the Napster
lawsuits, Uprizer re-oriented as an enterprise software solution, Starr and Clarke departed to continue working on Freenet, and Uprizer sold to Redux Holdings.
Starr was then approached by the Pacifica Foundation to reorganize KPFK
, the largest progressive radio signal in the US. After helping to restore community and financial controls he started ChangeTv, a user-generated digital cable network designed to filter online video onto cable and reward creators, advised by John Perry Barlow
and Amnesty International
's Jack Healy.
, Clarke and Luckett were named co-founders and the Revver beta launched on October 29, 2005.
Revver
split advertising revenue 50/50 with creators, and gave 20% of advertising revenue off the top to syndicators. To allow sharing of Revver videos, the upload license enabled redistribution under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Creative Commons
License. Although a lot smaller than sites like Youtube
, Revver’s creator-centric business model had a significant impact; numerous video sites started offering advertising revenue share to creators.
In 2006, Revver was awarded the Most Influential Independent Website by Television Week, nominated for an Advanced Technology Emmy Award, and honored as one of the 100 most promising startups by Red Herring
. In 2007, Revver announced it had paid out its first million dollars to online creators and syndicators. In February 2008, Revver was sold to LiveUniverse, which abandoned the creator/syndicator revshare model, starting a precipitous decline in users.
FLOW premiered as a Grand Jury Prize nominee at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival
Competition, going on to win a variety of festival awards, including the International Jury Prize at the Mumbai International Film Festival
and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the United Nations
Film Festival. FLOW was released theatrically by Oscilloscope Labs in September, 2008, and then invited to screen for the UN General Assembly on the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
, where the first 50,000 signatories to Article31 were presented to the President of the General Assembly, Father Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann.
On July 28, 2010 a resolution was presented by Bolivia
and co-sponsored by 35 countries, calling on the United Nations
General Assembly to recognize the Right To Water. Despite opposition from the U.S., the U.K. and their allies, the resolution passed with the support of 122 countries, representing more than 5 billion of the world's population.
Revver
Revver is a video sharing website that hosts user-generated content. Revver attaches advertising to user-submitted video clips and originally offered to share ad revenue with the video creators. Videos could be displayed, downloaded and shared across the web in either Apple QuickTime or FLV format...
.
Background
Steven Starr was born on Long IslandLong Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
. Starr started his career in high school as a volunteer journalist at WLIR-FM in New York, pursued a degree in Radio, TV and Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
, and worked his way through college as a campus journalist, a DJ, CBS Records college rep, and a concert promoter for Bob Marley & The Wailers
Bob Marley & The Wailers
Bob Marley & The Wailers were a Jamaican reggae, ska and rocksteady band formed by Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer in 1963. Additional members were Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso, Cherry Smith and Aston and Carlton Barrett...
.
Career
After starting in the mail room at the William Morris AgencyWilliam Morris Agency
WME is the largest talent agency in the world, with offices in Beverly Hills, New York City, Nashville, London, and Miami. WME represents elite artists from all facets of the entertainment industry, including motion pictures, television, music, theatre, publishing, and physical production...
in 1980, Starr launched a homevideo and an audiobooks division, packaged television and screenplays, then headed the New York Motion Picture department. His clients over the years included Andy Grove, Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp was an American theatrical producer and director. Papp established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in downtown New York . "The Public," as it is known, has many small theatres within it...
, Larry David
Larry David
Lawrence Gene "Larry" David is an American actor, writer, comedian and producer. He is best known as the co-creator , head writer, and executive producer of the television series Seinfeld from 1989 to 1996, and for creating the 1999 HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, a partially improvised sitcom in...
, Ang Lee
Ang Lee
Ang Lee is a Taiwanese film director. Lee has directed a diverse set of films such as Eat Drink Man Woman , Sense and Sensibility , Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , Hulk , and Brokeback Mountain , for which he won an Academy...
, Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, Ziggy Marley
Ziggy Marley
David "Ziggy" Marley is a Jamaican musician and leader of the band Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers. He is the oldest son of famed reggae musician Bob Marley...
and Tim Robbins
Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon...
.
Starr left Morris in 1991 to produce Johnny Suede
Johnny Suede
Johnny Suede is the 1991 film directorial debut of writer-director Tom DiCillo. It starred Brad Pitt and Catherine Keener with early appearances from Samuel L. Jackson and Nick Cave.-Plot summary:...
, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival
Locarno International Film Festival
The Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...
, and to write, direct and produce Joey Breaker
Joey Breaker
Joey Breaker is a 1993 American romance film starring Richard Edson and Cedella Marley. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Erik King also appear in the movie. The movie contains some autobiographical elements of its writer and director Steven Starr.-Plot:...
, winner of the Audience Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
The Santa Barbara International Film Festival is a film festival and non-profit organization, established in 1985, that showcases independent American and international films. The SBIFF line-up includes 20 world premieres and 11 U.S. premieres, with newly expanded 11-day festival...
. He then co-created and produced the Ace Award series nominee The State
The State (TV series)
The State is a half-hour sketch-comedy television show, originally broadcast on MTV between December 17, 1993 and July 1, 1995. The show combined bizarre characters and scenarios to present sketches that won the favor of its target teenaged audience...
for MTV and CBS, and worked with the Marley family on a variety of estate projects, including a Bob Marley
Bob Marley
Robert Nesta "Bob" Marley, OM was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and musician. He was the rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the ska, rocksteady and reggae band Bob Marley & The Wailers...
biopic.
Starr went on to focus full-time on media democratization, as a co-founder of the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, and founding CEO of AntEye.com, a user-generated video site where video creators, voted on by their peers, were awarded micro-pilot budgets in various categories. Despite thousands of submissions and a first-look partnership with HBO, by mid-2000 bandwidth costs were prohibitive and AntEye became unsustainable.
To address the bandwidth problem, Starr co-founded Uprizer with Freenet
Freenet
Freenet is a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store originally designed by Ian Clarke. According to Clarke, Freenet aims to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network with strong protection of anonymity; as part of supporting its users' freedom, Freenet is free and...
Project founder Ian Clarke and Rob Kramer. A pioneer in P2P and funded by Intel and others, the goal was a zero-cost bandwidth solution for independent creators. After Hummer-Winblad was named in the Napster
Napster
Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...
lawsuits, Uprizer re-oriented as an enterprise software solution, Starr and Clarke departed to continue working on Freenet, and Uprizer sold to Redux Holdings.
Starr was then approached by the Pacifica Foundation to reorganize KPFK
KPFK
KPFK is a listener-sponsored radio station based in North Hollywood, California, United States, which serves the Greater Los Angeles Area, and also streams 24 hours a day via the Internet...
, the largest progressive radio signal in the US. After helping to restore community and financial controls he started ChangeTv, a user-generated digital cable network designed to filter online video onto cable and reward creators, advised by John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow is an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic...
and Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
's Jack Healy.
Revver
After financing proved difficult, Starr repurposed ChangeTv into an online creator marketplace, bringing on Ian Clarke, Andrew Clarke, Oliver Luckett and Downhill Battle as consultants, focusing on how to reward online video creators in direct proportion to virality. After raising capital from the syndicate that funded SkypeSkype
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...
, Clarke and Luckett were named co-founders and the Revver beta launched on October 29, 2005.
Revver
Revver
Revver is a video sharing website that hosts user-generated content. Revver attaches advertising to user-submitted video clips and originally offered to share ad revenue with the video creators. Videos could be displayed, downloaded and shared across the web in either Apple QuickTime or FLV format...
split advertising revenue 50/50 with creators, and gave 20% of advertising revenue off the top to syndicators. To allow sharing of Revver videos, the upload license enabled redistribution under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
License. Although a lot smaller than sites like Youtube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, Revver’s creator-centric business model had a significant impact; numerous video sites started offering advertising revenue share to creators.
In 2006, Revver was awarded the Most Influential Independent Website by Television Week, nominated for an Advanced Technology Emmy Award, and honored as one of the 100 most promising startups by Red Herring
Red Herring (magazine)
Red Herring was a technology business magazine, which flourished during the dot com boom, with global distribution and bureaus in Bangalore, Beijing, and Paris. It also sponsored conferences designed to bring venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and technologists together. But the magazine went into...
. In 2007, Revver announced it had paid out its first million dollars to online creators and syndicators. In February 2008, Revver was sold to LiveUniverse, which abandoned the creator/syndicator revshare model, starting a precipitous decline in users.
FLOW: For Love Of Water
Starr stepped down as Revver's CEO in June, 2007 to finalize production of Irena Salina's feature-length documentary about the global water crisis entitled FLOW: For Love Of Water, and launch a Right To Water campaign to add a 31st article to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, Article31.org.FLOW premiered as a Grand Jury Prize nominee at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...
Competition, going on to win a variety of festival awards, including the International Jury Prize at the Mumbai International Film Festival
Mumbai International Film Festival
Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films , is a festival organised in the city of Mumbai by the 'Film Division', Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India. It has been organised since 1990, and focuses on documentary, short and animation...
and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
Film Festival. FLOW was released theatrically by Oscilloscope Labs in September, 2008, and then invited to screen for the UN General Assembly on the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly . The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled...
, where the first 50,000 signatories to Article31 were presented to the President of the General Assembly, Father Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann.
On July 28, 2010 a resolution was presented by Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
and co-sponsored by 35 countries, calling on the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
General Assembly to recognize the Right To Water. Despite opposition from the U.S., the U.K. and their allies, the resolution passed with the support of 122 countries, representing more than 5 billion of the world's population.