Recently, click.tv turned off its service. I, for one, was sorry to see them go. You may find it odd that I would be sad to lose competition but there really is a precedent for it.
Before I talk about the precedent, I would like to say that there were 3 main competitors in this space at the outset: click.tv, MotionBox and Veotag. Of these, click.tv and Veotag were doing text based tables of contents for a video and MotionBox was (and is) doing a pictorial representation of the contents. I have met with the 2 founders of these two companies, Mike Lanza (formerly of click.tv) and Chris O'Brian of MotionBox. Both of them are smart and gentlemanly and it was good to be in their company.
I regret the loss of click.tv in the marketplace because they had an interesting product that should have been useful to some. Naturally, I hope that their customers will come to Veotag to get the service that they lost from click.tv.
But there is a wider loss that occurs when one loses good competition. It happened to survivors of great wars. For soldiers who fought bitterly against good opponents they felt a loss when their greatest rivals died. There is a loss related to those we struggle against. And it is a personal one which is incomprehensible to those who observe from the outside soldiers mourning the loss of the enemy.
I do not dance on the graves of those who lost here. I pay respect to the efforts of click.tv and I hope Mike Lanza and his team will find a good future.
We're survivors, and Scott knows it. There's no grave to dance on. We're doing *very* well, but we just can't talk about whassup just yet.
Posted by: Mike Lanza | June 25, 2007 at 09:19 AM