Littlstar, pioneers in 360 video space

Yay. We are now live. Yay.

Yay.

Yay. Swipe down the stop and we have some people. Yay. So this is my first Periscope. So who are you guys?

Tony And Ben from Littlestar. Yeah.

And what is Littlestar is a system to put up these new 360 degree videos, right?

Yep. It is a destination and a platform for creating and distributing 360 video and VR content.

And this is a hot space. But nobody knows about it. The insiders know about it because I bought one of these new 360 degree cameras. And we'll talk about that in a second. But what is it that's going on and why do we need you and not YouTube? Because right now some of my videos are up on YouTube, some are on Little Star. But why do we need you guys?

Well, we're a platform dedicated solely to this format. And so we believe it deserves a format solely for this and not for cat videos and everything else. And so consumers can come to Little Star and just immerse themselves in a world of content that our producers all over the world are shooting.

Yeah. You know, people are saying, I'm back. This is my first video. This is my first Periscope video which didn't exist two months ago. YouTube exist on. On this new 360 camera. And we'll talk about this came in a second. And what you guys are doing with cameras like this. But you guys did. How long have you been in public view?

We started. Yeah, in the fall. And so, you know, we're level and prosumer level360 cameras as well as, you know, we're a developer partner with OS VR, which is the open source Rift. And so, you know, we've made a lot of traction in a short period of time in the 360 space. And you know, as the consumerization of this, the hardware gets to a price point where it makes sense for consumers. We see the space just exploding.

So people who've had Oculus ripped on their face really understand what's going on and understand why a camera like this is so cool. People who haven't had an Oculus or a Gear VR or, you know, one of the Valvi units on their face hasn't quite gotten to the same evangelistic fervor that I have. Right. I'm like betting my whole career on this. 367.

As are we, as are you.

So our goals are aligned, but most people don't get it. So can you show us what's going on here?

Yeah. So basically we have native iOS and Android applications. So this is a piece of 360 degree content. This is actually from the Donna Karan fashion show. And this is their account on our platform. And so you know, this is, you can watch, you know, in 360 degrees, you can zoom in and out. And this. Yeah, and then this is the gyroscope. So you can, it's almost like looking around in a, you know, like you're sitting in the front row of the fashion show. And then we can go into.

And this is Your app on iOS?

Our app on iOS, right. It's in the market now. And so this one button, you can go into Google Cardboard mode. So if you have Google Cardboard or any of the variants of that, you can just pop it into Google Cardboard mode. This same piece of content can be distributed to our forthcoming Gear VR and Oculus Rift apps as well as all the other future headsets that come out. We have a unity based application for VR headsets as well.

That's really cool. This new world of media is really changing. I mean Periscope and Meerkat didn't exist two months ago. You guys really didn't exist, you know, before a few months ago. And YouTube just shipped a week ago, like two weeks ago. And Facebook just announced support for this new 360 video format. So a lot's happening in both the 360 as well as this new live off the cell phone camera videos that people are watching right now. Where do you think it's all going?

I mean, it's a completely new form.

When is Apple or Facebook gonna buy you and just integrate you into a board?

We're psyched to build an amazing platform on our own. And I think the immersion of this type of content, the way people are gonna experience it, it's all coming fast. People have no idea yet what they're about to see. We pull our iPhones out in bars and hand them to people and they're just wowed by the experience of being able to look around and see. Stu used to just seeing this sort of box controlled video screen that now there's a world around them.

You guys have an advantage over YouTube because you have iOS and Android apps out that play your content.

Right.

YouTube doesn't work on iOS yet?

Nope, they're Chrome only. You know, better browser support, more multi platform, you know, going after game consoles and a number of different places for people who create this stuff to be able to distribute it into a lot of different places. We're optimizing it for cross platform and.

You guys built this all on an investment of less than half a million dollars.

Half a million bucks, yeah. Haven't spent much of it and only in a few months, so got a great team behind us and, you know, building and moving fast.

And you're raising funding, so. Because this is going to get real, this space is going to get real over the next 18 months as people start getting Oculus Rifts and whatever else is coming. Valve has a headset, Samsung has a headset. The headsets really do change your experience with this kind of 360 degree video, right?

Completely.

Yep. It really does. And I think people see these things under the Christmas trees in the fall or in the. In the, you know, in the holiday season and maybe next year. Part of it I like.

He's more realistic. We all want it this Christmas, but I don't think it's coming this Christmas. But, you know, they're gonna aim. They're trying to get it shipped, but yeah, I don't think it's ready to go. Where do we go with this? Let's talk about the cameras. So this is.

Sorry, I don't want to interrupt you. I was just wondering, are you.

We're not filming.

No, we're not filming with that.

So, you know, all the filming. Because we have privacy policy.

Sure.

Because of guests, you know.

Right, Cool.

All right.

And all that stuff.

We're just filming.

Filming. Right.

Filming right here.

And we're just doing live video. So. Yeah.

Okay.

Just I don't know if you want to film or anything.

30 more seconds.

Okay, sure. Just one more second. So this is just for you?

Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay.

So if this go anywhere else, you can just front us know, just so we're.

Sounds good.

Of course, of course.

Sure.

The new world people ruin their content, I guess. Well, yeah. When people see a camera like this sitting around in a lobby and they. They wonder what's going on.

So y.

Where was this? This is at the Standard Hotel in New York.

They really want to control their content.

So let's talk about cameras like this, Right? These cameras have. Mine has six GoPros. There's some cheaper ones like the Ricoh Theta, I think, which has. Two people are asking, who are you guys again? Little Star, they're the founders of Littlestar, which is a place to watch 360 video done with cameras like this one.

Little Star VR on Twitter.

Little Star VR on Twitter.

That's it.

And anyways, so, yeah, I mean, the.

Consumerization of these cameras is coming right now. You know, like you mentioned your freedom. 360 is 3D printed housing with six GoPros in it. You stitch it together afterwards. But there's, you know, GoPro's working on stuff. Ricoh's got, you know, some consumer versions of it. We're probably not too far off a couple years maybe from having these spherical lenses in our cameras themselves. So people will be able to create this content in 360 and ultimately VR here pretty soon.

That'll be a lot of fun. Now stitching these cameras together, this kind of camera requires a lot more processing than, let's say this Periscope video. Periscope. You just turn it on and everybody's watching. Everybody gets to heart in real time. Hi guys. And they get to ask questions in real time. No editing, no nothing. Right. This, this thing requires you to take the six videos, put them on no computer, use some expensive software. My software I think cost about a thousand dollars if I remember right. You got to stitch them together, which takes an hour and a half just for the computer time and not the human time. And so it can take all day just to do one video and that's to do it crappy with a lot of stitch lines. Because my videos have a lot of blurry spots and stitch lines. I'm trying to learn to get better. Some of these videos that you have on your site have been what, take a week to do, or it can.

Take, you know, days and weeks to stitch that stuff together. And really high quality depends on how many cameras, how long the video is. It can take a lot of effort. All that's getting faster and better. The stitching software is getting better. And so people are going to be able to do this a lot, a lot faster. In the meantime, the quality, production, produce content will take a bit of time to get stitched together and look good.

It's pretty crazy.

Yeah. And there are people doing this with everything up to like Red Dragons. So you can stitch together an arbitrary number of cameras and it's kind of the sky's the limit in terms of cost. So you know, you can do reds all the way to GoPros and then to the all in one units.

Well, I just met with Jaunt. Jaunt has a camera with 16 lenses, basically cut apart GoPros inside that's in a 3D housing and they're building one with 32 cameras thing. So yeah, things are getting crazy. And the quality on that thing is so stunning.

It is good. Yeah. The biggest thing that the challenge there is that delivering 4k or 8k across the Internet. So it's mostly downloads at this point. And, you know, playing back that high of quality, if you stitch together, you know, six red dragons, you're talking about 36K. So, you know, Codex can't even handle that, really. You need to smash it down so you can consume it in some way. So lot of challenges.

Well, I got to get over to the DJI press conference, which I'll be broadcasting. I'm going to be broadcasting on Meerkat, so over there. So come on over to Meerkat. The company is littlestar and it's L, I, T, T, L, S, T, A.

R, Y without the E. But we just got the E. We just bought.

The E. Yeah, we bought little.

Little Star Val.

We bought a val.com with the E and go there on the web and you can go download our apps on the.

Anyways, it's good to see what you guys are doing. What's going to be the quality difference between you and, like YouTube and Facebook? Because there's probably. You guys are doing all sorts of different formats when you upload these videos from these new cameras, right?

Yeah, yeah, we do a number of different formats. We own our encoding process, so we're able to do some things that improve the quality as well as accommodate other camera systems. So, you know, that's a big focus for us. And, you know, quality, of course, is a big focus. So, yeah, we. We own the encoding process to ensure that, you know, we're getting the best quality from 360 degrees.

Yeah. Well, I like what you guys are doing. I'm going to use it more.

Thank you.

Good. Good luck. Yeah, thanks.

Little.

LittleStar.com if you get bought by Facebook, I won't be shy. Spend 50 years of engineering time or buy somebody else. Thanks, guys. You can buy littlestar.com it works with any iPhone or Android phone.

Yep. You can mobile web on the web or download our apps in the app stores on Android and iOS.

Very cool. And see you in a few minutes from the DJI press conference. And I'm Robert Scoville. Thanks for joining us. Thanks.

See you.

All right, swipe down the Stop broadcast.