Woo! We launched Revver 1.0, we had a great party and now the real work begins. Let’s take a step back for a second for a bit of perspective. Here is a personal history of Revver from CTO, Rob Maigret:

When I first starting talking to Steven Starr and Oliver Luckett back in April of 2005 about their new company I was really excited/impressed with the idea of the “Rev-Tag” and how it would enable content owners and creators to participate within a channel of distribution that at that time was not available. When I began to dig deeper into Steven’s background in media it started to make sense. Steven had been an advocate for Artist’s rights going back to his days as an agent. Oliver I knew from iBlast, we’d been on the emotional roller coaster of Startup 1.0 together and both come out a little less convinced of the whole process but eager for something… different.

When I began to get to know Ian Clarke, I realized that he and I were very close in our ideas regarding software. Ian, if you don’t know, created FreeNet and is still its maintainer. Ian stands strongly for free media distribution. The ideals of the company started to form, and at least in my own head, I began to see where I fit in.

As I began to devote more and more time to Revver the picture of it’s infrastructure started to reveal itself. Revver had already made some key software choices. Namely Twisted Python as its web framework and PostgreSQL as its database. Everything else was up-for-grabs, as was whether or not to continue further with these technologies, or to replace with more traditional and/or proprietary applications. But the choice was clear. Revver’s mantra was this new form of “not-DRM”. That is, non-conditional, unobtrusive advertisement insertion. It was kind of like DRM, but we wanted as many people to watch the videos as possible. Anything that made the viewing limited wasn’t a consideration.

And by that definition, we adopted the idea of open media. It can go anywhere on or off the network. It can be downloaded, e-mailed, shared on P2P networks, burned to a CD or DVD…it doesn’t matter. It can be syndicated via RSS, watched on the site, embedded on a partner portal, or sit on someone’s blog… Again, doesn’t matter. We really don’t care. And again, by definition, we then adopted the idea of Super Distribution.

We didn’t want to police the content, but we also had to make the hard choice to not allow for any copyright infringement on our site. We also didn’t want any porn or any hate. Anything else was fine. Our reasoning was simple: We can’t allow others to benefit from someone else’s creation nor benefit from it outside of the owner’s blessing. We didn’t want to get into the porn game because we’re not bottom feeders, and we don’t hate. It’s that simple.

That all said the technology had to mirror the moral stance of the company.

I’d spent a number of years working for media giants, seeing the process first hand of how out of control a company can become if it aligns itself too much with a particular software vendor. I’d seen major bids won during golf games, which had nothing at all to do with technology. I’d seen department upon department of redundancy, and entire armies dispatched to apply software patches. I’d seen something horribly expensive, ugly, and hard to maintain.

It was around this time that I met the Australian Linux guru Andy Gayton, who’d rather not work than not be able to develop in Twisted. And thus I learned about tech passion. It was the rebellion to counteract the folks I’d recently broken away from up in Seattle, where I was living at the time. I was swept up quickly into a world of idealism that most of us never will experience. You have no idea how idealism can fuel you until it’s a possible and potentially profitable stance to take.

Back in LA, User Interface Wizard Ben Cerveny had come aboard to teach us a thing or two. Ben had founder status at LudiCorp (creators of Flickr) as well as lots of other unworldly exploits and was ready to dive into the video space. Listening to him talk about how video would interact, how video would perform, how it was all to be a big game. Our software decisions were no longer debatable. We had to embrace open software more than ever. We had to participate. We were, to some extent, from the same bizarro universe that it all comes from. Somehow we landed Finnish Debian sith lord Tommi Virtanen and the road was paved.

So we stuck with Twisted. But we didn’t limit ourselves. We decided that the best way to promote open software was to allow anyone to develop video portals powered by Revver with whatever software they want. That’s why we built our API. Ben found super tech artist Mark Daggett, who’s team built out Revver 1.0 (the new Revver) in Ruby on Rails, and it sits atop our API – just as any other site would. We built templates for PHP as well. And will soon be giving it away to the public. You can make your own Revver.com. Take it. It’s a classic.

Some of the choices we have made so far have been hard. Stripping the copywritten material from our site was painful. We lost half our content and half our traffic over the course of 48 hours. But it came back to us tenfold. I stand behind the choices we have made to use, promote and endorse the open projects we take advantage of. As the convergence of media and technology continues blur – and that blazingly fast free-for-download movie about how fast your custom compiled version of Gentoo on your PowerBook can run starts to make you real money – I believe that the choices will seem to have been obvious. To quote Steven slightly, “in this moment in history, we are right.”