Revver
Revver (formerly ChangeTv) was an American video sharing website that hosted user-generated content. Until its shutdown in 2011,
.
Background
Steven Starr was born on
Long Island
Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United Sta ...
. Starr started in high school as a volunteer journalist at
WLIR
WLIR was a radio station that played a new music/modern rock format on the frequencies 92.7 FM, 98.5 FM, and 107.1 FM from the 1980s into the 2000s. Bob Wilson, longtime WLIR employee and historian, created the website WDARE (Dare FM), which m ...
in New York, pursued a degree in Radio, TV and Film at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison
A university () is an educational institution, institution of higher education, higher (or Tertiary education, tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. Universities ty ...
, and worked his way through college as a campus journalist, DJ,
CBS Records CBS Records may refer to:
* CBS Records or CBS/Sony, former name of Sony Music, a global record company
* CBS Records International, label for Columbia Records recordings released outside North America from 1962 to 1990
* CBS Records (2006), founde ...
college rep, and concert promoter for
Bob Marley & The Wailers
Bob Marley and the Wailers (previously known as The Wailers, and prior to that The Wailing Rudeboys, The Wailing Wailers and The Teenagers) were a Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae band. The founding members, in 1963, were Bob Marley (Robert ...
.
Career
After starting in the mail room in 1980, Starr launched the
William Morris Agency
The William Morris Agency (WMA) was a Hollywood-based talent agency. It represented some of the best known 20th-century entertainers in film, television, and music. During its 109-year tenure it came to be regarded as the "first great talent a ...
new media division, packaged TV series and screenplays, then headed the New York Motion Picture department under
Sue Mengers
Sue Mengers (September 2, 1932 – October 15, 2011) was a talent agent for many filmmakers and actors of the New Hollywood generation of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s.
Early life
Susi Mengers was born to a Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany, ...
. His clients over the years included
Larry David
Lawrence Gene David (born July 2, 1947) is an American comedian, writer, actor, and television producer. He and Jerry Seinfeld created the television sitcom ''Seinfeld'', on which David was head writer and executive producer for the first seve ...
,
Ang Lee
Ang Lee (; born October 23, 1954) is a Taiwanese filmmaker. Born in Pingtung County of southern Taiwan, Lee was educated in Taiwan and later in the United States. During his filmmaking career, he has received international critical and popula ...
,
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
,
Ziggy Marley
David Nesta "Ziggy" Marley (born 17 October 1968) is a Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician, actor and philanthropist. He is the son of reggae icon Bob Marley and Rita Marley. He led the family band Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers until 200 ...
,
Sandra Bernhard
Sandra Bernhard (born June 6, 1955) is an American actress, singer, comedian and author. She first gained attention in the late 1970s with her stand-up comedy, where she often critiqued celebrity culture and political figures.
She is perhaps b ...
,
Andy Grove
Andrew Stephen Grove (born András István Gróf; 2 September 193621 March 2016) was a Hungarian-American businessman and engineer who served as the third CEO of Intel Corporation. He escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 ...
,
Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp (born Joseph Papirofsky; June 22, 1921 – October 31, 1991) was an American theatrical producer and director. He established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in Lower Manhattan. There Papp created a y ...
,
Reinaldo Povod
Reinaldo Povod (1960 - July 30, 1994 Brooklyn) was an American playwright.
Life
Reinaldo Povod, known to his friends as Rei (Ray) grew up on the Lower East Side.
The son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father of Russian descent. In 1977, h ...
,
William Kunstler
William Moses Kunstler (July 7, 1919 – September 4, 1995) was an American lawyer and civil rights activist, known for defending the Chicago Seven. Kunstler was an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, a board member of the American Civil ...
,
Tim Robbins
Timothy Francis Robbins (born October 16, 1958) is an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for portraying Andy Dufresne in the film ''The Shawshank Redemption ''(1994), and has won an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards for his role ...
, and
Kids In The Hall
The Kids in the Hall is a Canadian sketch comedy troupe formed in 1984, consisting of comedians Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson. Their eponymous television show ran from 1989 to 1995, on CBC, in C ...
.
Starr left Morris in 1991 to produce
Johnny Suede
''Johnny Suede'' is a 1991 American film the directorial debut of Tom DiCillo, and stars Brad Pitt, Catherine Keener, Calvin Levels and Nick Cave.
Synopsis
Johnny Suede is a young man with an attitude and an immense pompadour, who aspires to be ...
, winner of the Golden Leopard at the
Locarno International Film Festival
The Locarno Film Festival is an annual film festival, held every August in Locarno, Switzerland. Founded in 1946, the festival screens films in various competitive and non-competitive sections, including feature-length narrative, documentary, sh ...
, then write, direct and produce
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 film. The film contains some autobiographical elements of its writer and director, Steven Starr.
Pl ...
, winner of the Audience Award at the
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) is an eleven-day film festival held in Santa Barbara, California since 1986.
The festival boasts screenings of over 200 feature films and shorts from different countries and regions. SBIFF al ...
. He then co-created and produced Ace Award nominee
The State
A state is a centralized political organization that imposes and enforces rules over a population within a territory. There is no undisputed definition of a state. One widely used definition comes from the German sociologist Max Weber: a "stat ...
for MTV and CBS, and collaborated with the Marley family on a variety of estate projects, including a
Bob Marley
Robert Nesta Marley (6 February 1945 – 11 May 1981; baptised in 1980 as Berhane Selassie) was a Jamaican singer, musician, and songwriter. Considered one of the pioneers of reggae, his musical career was marked by fusing elements o ...
biopic
A biographical film or biopic () is a film that dramatizes the life of a non-fictional or historically-based person or people. Such films show the life of a historical person and the central character's real name is used. They differ from docudra ...
.
Starr went on to focus full-time on media democratization in 1999, as a co-founder of the Los Angeles
Independent Media Center
The Independent Media Center, better known as Indymedia, is an open publishing network of activist journalist collectives that report on political and social issues. Following beginnings during the 1999 Carnival Against Capital and 1999 Seatt ...
, and founder/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
Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is ba ...
, bandwidth costs were prohibitive, and by mid-2000 AntEye became unsustainable.
Starr then co-founded Uprizer with
Freenet
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web ...
Project founder Ian Clarke and Rob Kramer. Funded by
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
, Uprizer developed a zero-cost, peer-to-peer bandwidth solution for independent creators. After
Hummer Winblad
Hummer Winblad Venture Partners is an American software and web focused venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. Its founders include John Hummer and Ann Winblad. The firm was an early investor in Napster, the first popular file ...
was named in the
Napster
Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn ...
lawsuits, Uprizer re-oriented as an enterprise software solution, Starr and Clarke departed to continue work on Freenet, and Uprizer sold to Redux Holdings.
After the
Pacifica Foundation
Pacifica Foundation is an American non-profit organization that owns five independently operated, non-commercial, listener-supported radio stations known for their progressive/liberal political orientation. Its national headquarters adjoins st ...
approached Starr to reorganize
KPFK
KPFK (90.7 FM) is a listener-sponsored radio station based in North Hollywood, California, United States, which serves Southern California, and also streams 24 hours a day via the Internet. It was the second of five stations in the non-commerci ...
, the largest progressive radio signal in the US, he went on to develop ChangeTv in collaboration with
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the ...
and
Amnesty International
Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and sup ...
ED Jack Healy, a user-generated digital cable network designed to filter online video onto cable and reward creators.
Revver
When financing proved difficult, Starr launched
Revver
Revver (formerly ChangeTv) was an American video sharing website that hosted user-generated content. Until its shutdown in 2011,
to focus on rewarding online video creators in direct proportion to virality, bringing on Ian Clarke, Andrew Clarke, then Oliver Luckett an Downhill Battle. The Revver beta launched on October 29, 2005. Revver split advertising revenue 50/50 with creators, gave 20% of advertising revenue to syndicators, and enabled content redistribution under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
License.
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
A red herring is a figurative expression referring to a logical fallacy in which a clue or piece of information is or is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual question.
Red herring may also refer to: Animals
* Red herring (fis ...
. Revver's creator economy business model forced many sites to begin offering revenue share to creators, including
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
, and in 2007, Revve announced it had paid out its first million dollars to online creators. 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 went on to finalize production of Irena Salina's feature-length global water crisis documentary 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
The Sundance Film Festival (formerly Utah/US Film Festival, then US Film and Video Festival) is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,66 ...
Competition, and went on to win a variety of festival awards, including the International Jury Prize at the
Mumbai International Film Festival
The Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films (MIFF) is a festival organized in the city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) by the Films Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. It ...
and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...
Film Festival. FLOW was released theatrically by Oscilloscope Labs in Sept. 2008, and served as an activist tool for the global Right To Water movement.
FLOW was invited to screen for the UN General Assembly on the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal De ...
, where the first 50,000 signatories t Article31 were presented to the President of the General Assembly, Father Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann. On July 28, 2010, a resolution presented by
Bolivia
, image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg
, flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center
, flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...
and co-sponsored by 35 countries, called on the General Assembly to recognize th 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 over 5 billion people. In 2010, a French court rejected a defamation lawsuit against FLOW brought by
Suez Environnement
Suez SA (formerly Suez Environnement) is a French-based utility company which operates largely in the water and waste management sectors. The company has its head office in La Défense, Paris.The Garden.
CitizenGlobal
Starr joined CitizenGlobal to build a media co-creation platform with a team including Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, organizing social initiatives for
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a protest Social movement, movement against economic inequality and the Campaign finance, influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Financial District, Manhattan, Wall S ...
Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is an environmental organization with chapters in all 50 United States, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. The club was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by Scottish-American preservationist John Muir, who be ...
,
350.org
350.org is an international environmental organization addressing the climate crisis. Its stated goal is to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy by building a global, grassroots movement.
The 350 in the name stands fo ...
,
Univision
Univision () is an American Spanish-language free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. It is the United States' largest provider of Spanish-language content. The network's programming is aimed at the Latino public and includes ...
,
Sesame Street
''Sesame Street'' is an American educational children's television series that combines live-action, sketch comedy, animation and puppetry. It is produced by Sesame Workshop (known as the Children's Television Workshop until June 2000) a ...
, Congo Woman's Relief, and others.
Spotlight Expose
After going back to school for a Master's in Spiritual Psychology, Starr broke a lifelong silence to share childhood experiences at The Fessenden School as the lead of a 2016 Boston Globe Spotlight expose on sexual abuse at 67 boarding schools with hundreds of victims.
Extinction Rebellion
Starr then co-founde XRLA the Los Angeles Chapter of
Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion (abbreviated as XR) is a global environmental movement, with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk o ...
, a global environmental movement using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.
NooWorld
Starr then launched the climate solidarity networ Noo.World as part of th 80x25 Coalition to protect 80% of the Amazon Rainforest by 2025.