Redlasso

» see redlasso.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Redlasso only makes sense if American cable news was running somewhere in your house. Its whole reason to exist was that a thing got said on Fox or NBC at four in the afternoon and somebody wanted it quoted, with the video attached, by five. In Turkey the channels arguing all day were Turkish ones, and the clip habit arrived through YouTube uploads rather than through a tool built for the job.

The company was founded on 13 june 2005 in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, with Al McGowan as chief executive and Kevin O'Kane as president. What it built was a recording plant. Broadcast and radio feeds went in continuously and came out indexed against their transcripts, so you could search for a phrase and land on the moment it was spoken.

The public beta opened in late 2007 and it was free. A blogger searched for a phrase and dragged two handles across the result to cut a clip of up to ten minutes. What came back was an embeddable player. It spread quickly across political and celebrity blogs because it collapsed a job that had previously meant a capture card and a video editor into about ninety seconds of work.

Nobody at Redlasso had bought the rights to any of it. That is the entire story, and everyone involved knew it at the time.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the networks saw ~

The company's public argument was fair use plus the first amendment: short excerpts, used for commentary, of material broadcast free to air anyway. It also argued that it was doing the networks a favor by extending the life of footage that was worthless twelve hours after it aired.

The networks saw a company running a private recording of their signal at scale, then handing out pieces of it under its own brand. In may 2008 three networks sent cease and desist letters. Redlasso hired former studio executives to negotiate and kept the service running while it did, which is the decision that turned a licensing conversation into a court filing.

~ the day it died ~

NBC Universal filed for copyright infringement in the Southern District of New York, alongside two Fox companies. Wikipedia dates the complaint to 27 july 2008 and says the service stopped two days later, while TechCrunch and GigaOm had already reported the beta dark on 25 july. Either way the gap between suit and shutdown was measured in days, from a company that had spent two months saying it would not back down.

On 22 october 2008 the court entered final judgment with a permanent injunction. The business side of Redlasso, the media monitoring for corporate clients and the radio-to-web work, was never enjoined and carried on quietly.

~ the long tail ~

On 25 march 2009 Fox Television Stations signed a syndication deal that let Redlasso hand out clips from its local news programs. The relaunched product was ad supported and carried only licensed material, which meant it could no longer do the one thing it was famous for: reaching any channel a blogger happened to be angry about that morning.

Redlasso lasted a few more years in that reduced shape and then stopped, without an announcement anyone bothered to write down. The domain no longer answers. What the lawsuit settled was not whether people would clip television, since they obviously would, but who was allowed to hold the tape. The answer was the person who paid for the broadcast, and every clip tool since has been built on somebody's licensing agreement rather than somebody's antenna.

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