Easy coder

Martin Tobias' film about a cross-country Harley ride prompted another journey -- into multimedia encoding.

By Damien Cave

Jun 26, 2000 | When Martin Tobias heard that Amazon was distributing his 1996 Harley Davidson documentary, "Biker Dreams," he immediately called up the retailer's site, found the video, displayed with the box's cover art of he and his wife riding into the sunset, and ordered five copies. His mother ordered one too.

Unfortunately, the tapes that arrived a few days later had nothing to do with Tobias' trip to South Dakota's famous Sturgis Rally. Instead, "it was a '70s porno with the same name," he says. "It was pretty funny."

But of course, it's more than funny, and Tobias didn't tell me to inspire a good chuckle. The anecdote highlights the complexities of e-commerce, Tobias says, and the importance of companies like his own. Loudeye, Tobias argues, helps media companies ensure that mistakes don't happen as they distribute their wares on the Net.

Specifically, his 340-person Seattle company, which was called Encoding.com until December, converts audio and video content to a Net-ready form accessible through software like Real Player and Windows Media Player. The company also offers consulting services and software that helps clients, including Disney, Sony, AtomFilms and others in the entertainment industry, keep a leash on where and when the content gets distributed.

Clearly, it's a business that depends on Hollywood going digital, even as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are on a legal rampage against any Net-based distribution systems that the entertainment industry has not yet embraced. But Tobias, 36, who spent six years in sales and marketing at Microsoft before striking out on his own, says that that attitude is changing.

Tell me you got involved in this streaming world. Did it have anything to do with "Biker Dreams"?

[The movie] is actually what got me interested in audio and video on the Net because "Biker Dreams" was an independent film -- very low-budget, no big studio behind it. It's about my girlfriend at the time, and now wife, going to Sturgis and back and all the people we meet along the way. It shows the outlaw bikers, the average bikers and the very rich bikers who ride $100,000 Harleys. But the story is us going there and back, so I guess we're the stars.

And one of our challenges was how to develop interest and excitement in a film that has a very dispersed audience who might be hard to communicate with. And we thought, hey, why don't we use the Net -- put up a Web page, audio and video trailers and a back-behind-the-scenes footage?

So we did that back in 1997 as the first project of Encoding.com, and we did it two years before "Blair Witch" used the Web so successfully to promote its film. Now, our results weren't quite as good as "Blair Witch" but when I was doing it in '97, I said, "This is going to be pretty powerful technology to promote things like this. Everyone's going to want to have audio and video as part of their standard Web experience, so why don't I start a company and see if I can make that happen sooner rather than later."

That's why we started Encoding.com, which was doing the work of convergence: You send me a tape, I'll convert it and put it on the Internet for you.

Next Page: "People need to get paid and if they don't, they won't make music"

• View blog reactions