RightNetwork’s Kevin McFeely bases ‘right-minded entertainment’ in Philadelphia

By a Philadelphian’s conventional stereotype, it might not seem terribly strange that a Georgian would be leading a new conservative cable channel startup.

It’s proving less understood that the Atlanta-based president and chief operating officer of RightNetwork is the outlier on staff, flying weekly to meet more than a dozen employees in their Center City headquarters.

Yet there is Kevin McFeely, the boyish 38-year-old chief whose career in content — including sales leads at Tech TV and the Anime Network — took him to Atlanta. Two years ago, he was brought on to help build out a concept for conservative entertainment. By summer 2009, it was decided that the world’s first cable channel dedicated to conservative entertainment would be based in Philadelphia.

Early in September, the channel officially launched, including on-demand content for Verizon FiOS users, online, mobiles phones and other distribution to start.

Today, he’s flying between familiar hubs of content and distribution, and suddenly Philadelphia is in the mix.Still, it’s tough to ignore the inherent politics of a cable channel promoted as being from an ideological perspective.

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PHILO makes TV more social, Penn grads drawn to other cities

The three founders of an application aiming to interject social media into TV watching got an education in Philadelphia but their addresses — and the buzz surrounding their startup — are in the familiar bi-coastal entertainment hubs.

As the web has buzzed for some time now, PHILO is a web and iPhone application that has its users ‘tune in’ to the TV programs they are watching in the same way Foursquare users ‘check in’ to physical locations, then pushing a conversation discussing shows in a “newsfeed-like conversation” as Mashable put it.

Like others before them, the three founders put time in at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in the 1990s but don’t call the region home. CEO David Levy, who also heads the Wharton Angel Network, and CTO Carter Page are in New York City, and Greg Goldman calls Los Angeles home.

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Gretjen Clausing of Philly CAM talks the technology behind public access TV

Gretjen Clausing thinks it’s “just perfect” that she grew up in Media.

She has lived in Philadelphia since 1989 — currently Roxborough — but from studying film and photography at Ithaca College to helping organize the first Philadelphia Film Festival to working at the Prince Music Theater or the Scribe Video Center, Clausing says she’s always had a hand in some form of media.

Gretjen Clausing

And now, the 45-year-old has a new role in the same industry.

Last June, Clausing took on the role of shepherding Philadelphia Community Access Media, the city’s long-awaited public-access cable channel. It’s a big role, considering, as she says, “that Philadelphia had the dubious reputation of being the last big city in the United States without a public access channel.”

There are public broadcasters like WHYY and WYBE, which has recently been rebranded as MiND TV, but Clausing says it’s time Philadelphians have a source for their best shot at getting the most local voices on the air. Now, Clausing is tasked with making a public-access cable channel that just launched in October a serious player in a two-decades old game, but she says she has all the advantages in the deck.

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Comcast Roundup: Comcast-NBC deal coverage-palooza

Every Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup. Get an e-mail subscription for our Comcast news updates.

And so the fallout begins.

One week after Comcast’s mega-acquisition of a majority stake in NBC Universal, more coverage of the deal happened than this modest roundup could fit. We took the best and most relevant and surely still didn’t get it all.

DEFINITE READS

The New York Times scores the big creation story of the Comcast-NBC deal, which includes note that Comcast investigated buying Facebook. Still, The Business Insider called it subdued.

The New York Times editorial board raises several concerns about the acquisition.

The New York Times reports that how people watch TV on demand is a “critical issue in the landmark deal” that gave Comcast controlling interest in NBC.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Comcast COO Steve Burke is primed to make a union between Comcast and NBC work.

The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that the Comcast-NBC deal will be a boost to the region, though whether it is more economic or psychological is yet to be known.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Comcast will look to refocus Universal Pictures.

Below, find more than three dozen more Comcast stories, and yes, they’re almost all about its proposed purchase of NBC.

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Shop Talk: Notehall, an ABC spot behind them and 65-college growth ahead

Notehall Chief Marketing Officer DJ Stephan and CEO Sean Conway on ABC's "Shark Tank" last night

The dining room is gone in this Manayunk rowhouse.

The living room, too, will soon be taken over by what will serve as desks and workstations for an expanding Web 2.0 startup that relocated from Arizona to the neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia that has attracted a steady stream of 20-something professionals for a decade or more now.

Sean Conway

“This is home,” says Sean Conway, the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Notehall, an online marketplace for study exams, class notes and other supplemental academic material that is already at 15 colleges nationwide and is due to expand to as many as 65 more by the end of the academic year — 20 to 25 this semester and 30 to 40 in the spring.

Students upload their own documents and take a 40 percent commission when sold to their peers, who are allowed to peek at a third of the document before purchase.

Notehall now has seven employees, including five in Manayunk and two executive staff in Arizona, and is looking for more — including a PHP developer — most of whom are being financed by their own revenue, though some investment capital remains. Last month, they debuted their Penn State marketplace and, they’re already generating positive revenue there, “it’s just soaring,” Conway says, though he declined to disclose just how high.

But now they go to work, fighting to get attention among the growing crowd of Web-based startups calling for college-aged attention. They’ve had a good start.

Last night, Conway and his chief marketing officer DJ Stephan appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank, which puts entrepreneurs in front of five investors on national, prime time TV to field offers. In fitting reality TV, there was drama, but Notehall came away with another investor.

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Technically Philly makes brief appearance on Fox 29

After the School District of Philadelphia said in a statement to Technically Philly yesterday that it was investigating how one of its computer peripherals ended up in a landfill in Ghana, Fox 29 reports that the City Controller’s office is also looking into the issue.

John Atwater added good reporting to our piece from yesterday concerning the district’s e-waste. Most importantly, and as we suspected though couldn’t confirm, Atwater reports that Regentech, the district’s current technology recycler, wasn’t on the job in 2004, when the shipment that ended up in Ghana appears to have left Philadelphia.

As we tweeted last night, TP reporter Christopher Wink appeared in Fox’s 10 p.m. newscast, discussing with Atwater details of the story. To see the station’s coverage, follow the jump.

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Friday Q&A: Mike Harris CEO of AnySource Media

Malvern-based AnySource Media thinks it has a good guess about the future direction of online video. The company, founded in 2006, provides software to TV manufacturers that allows consumers to pull their favorite Internet content directly to their television.

If you had AnySource’s technology on your TV and hooked-up to the Web, you could order movies, browse your favorite video content and even purchase products without getting your computer involved.

The company, started by former Ravisent Technologies employees, recently closed a $3.2 million funding round provided entirely by local investors and is anticipating its debut and first revenue later this year. We sat down with CEO Mike Harris to discuss how his company makes money without charging TV makers, what he thinks of Boxee and his fight against the West coast. Oh yeah, and he’s hiring.
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Comcast CEO gives the Internet a hug at The Cable Show

Brian Roberts (far left) sits on a panel about new media at The Cable Show.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts had the honor of being a panelist at the cable industry trade show in Washington. All of the cable big wigs are slated to attend the event hosted by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, including News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

According to reports, Roberts used his time to persuade his colleagues that the Internet is not the enemy and is another avenue for monitization. The cable industry has been abuzz over customers canceling pricey cable packages in favor of getting media via broadband Internet connections. The practice, known as “cord-cutting” in cable-company-speak, has had an impact on cable companies. Many companies are also suffering because of cost-cutting consumers not renewing service to save money, and the Center-City based Comcast is no exception. As covered previously in Technically Philly, the company lost 233,000 cable subscribers last quarter.

Of the five member panel, Roberts was the most supportive of placing video online.
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Friday Q&A: RedLasso CEO McGowan and President O’Kane

Last year, to the dismay of bloggers everywhere, the popular RedLasso video sharing service – which allowed users to search, customize, and embed video clips from national networks – was forced to shut down after Fox and NBC filed suit against the company.

On Monday, the Center City-based company announced that it had reached a licensing agreement with Fox Television Studios allowing users of the online video sharing platform to syndicate online customized clips from 27 of Fox’s regional television stations.

Technically Philly sat down with RedLasso CEO Al McGowan and President Kevin O’Kane Thursday evening to discuss how the deal went down, where they’re looking for funding, and what Philly entrepreneur Pat Croce has to do with the video sharing company.

Transcript of interview was edited for length and clarity.

Explain what’s been happening with RedLasso and the recent licensing deal

Al McGowan: When Kevin and I got together a few years ago, we said look, ‘This marketplace is changing. The way people are consuming media is changing. Let’s work with our friends in the media and figure out a way to help solve that problem for them.’ Kevin found some technology and put it on top of media, which allowed them to digitize it and extend the life of that content, especially on the news and information side.

Broadcast goes out on the air and right into the garbage can. Why not capture and digitize it and let it have another life on different platforms, like mobile and the Web. So we designed a platform that allows extending the life of that content to keep monetizing it. That’s the whole basis of RedLasso.

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