Spindletop! Current TV, the Oil Business and the Future of Video

It’s a gusher!

On January 10, 1901, the world changed forever.

Captain Anthony F. Lucas was trying his luck drilling for oil in east Texas.  The landscape was hot and dry, dotted with salt domes, the remnant from some long forgotten sea from the Jurassic Age.  This was not western Pennsylvania.

Some of Lucas’ partners had been drilling there off and on since 1894, with nothing to show but a mountain of debt and a landscape littered with dry wells.

Lucas was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Then, at 1,139 feet, Lucas struck oil at a place called Spindletop Hill.

Prior to Spindletop, Western Pennsylvania had been producing 50% of all the oil in the world. And the Titusville well was producing 20 barrels a day.

When Spindletop hit, it blew a gusher that spewed out 100,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s 4,200,000 gallons of oil a day.

It took nine days just to get the well under control.

But Spindletop, and the later development of the oil fields surrounding Spindletop, changed the oil business, and the world, forever.

Suddenly a massive source of incredibly cheap oil and vast volumes had been discovered.

In 2000, I opened a video café in New York, on the Lower East Side. The idea was something like an internet café, except instead of people coming in to do their emails, I provided them with final cut pro stations and small video cameras. We had nightly screenings of the films my patrons made.

One day, a very tall guy name Jamie Daves came into my café to talk to me about the world of video. I showed him around. I told him that there was going to be an explosive growth of people making their own content instead of waiting for networks or studios to make it for them.

Then he left.

A few days later, I was in London when the same Jamie Daves called.

He asked if I remembered him.  Who could forget him?

He told me that he represented former Vice President Al Gore.  Gore had just lost the election.  He than asked if I would be able to meet with the Vice President the next time I was in New York.

Are you kidding? I was going to be in New York the following Thursday.

He asked if there were some private place we could meet. I suggested my loft in Soho and gave him the directions.

When I got home on Wednesday night, I told my ever sooner to be ex-wife that Vice President Al Gore was coming over the following morning. She rolled her eyes and said ‘right!’, in that special way that only soon to be ex-wives can.

Sure enough, the following morning, my doorbell rang at 8am, and there, in the little video monitor that passes for security in Soho lofts, was Al Gore.

“Al Gore” he said.

I already knew that.

“Come on up”.

Gore came in.  He looked just like he looked on TV.  He also got right to the point.  He and his partner, Joel Hyatt were going to start a new cable TV channel. He was thinking about a history channel or a politics channel.

“Al”, I said, “there’s a whole revolution going on now in video technology. For the first time, people can create their own content at home”.

Then Al told me all about how the introduction of new video technology was just like Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

I took a beat and looked at him…  I had told Jamie Daves the Gutenberg story only a few days before in NY.

OK.

At that moment, there was a sound in the kitchen. It was my soon to be ex, just getting up.

“What’s that?” Al asked.

“My wife”, I said. “Why don’t you go in and say hello”.

So he did.

He walked into the kitchen, where she was in her bathrobe, extended his hand and said, “Al Gore”.

The expression on her face was worth whatever unpleasantness was to come. And there would be a lot.

The next morning, as I was walking up Houston Street my cell phone rang. It was Gore.

“What are you doing next week?” he asked.

Nothing special.

“Why don’t you come on out to Park City, Utah. My partner Joel Hyatt has a ski house. We can talk about the whole video thing.”

Well, OK by me.

So that was how I came to spend a week with Al and Tipper and Joel and his wife Susan Metzanbaum, and taught them to shoot and cut video. And they made some pretty good films.

They could quickly see that in fact anyone could do this, and so at the end of the week, Al and Joel asked me if I would join the management team of their new TV channel.

“Who’s on the management team?” I asked.

They pointed at each other. “We are”.

“Sign me up”

And so it was that we formed what would become Current TV.

Al and Joel sent me on a national speaking tour of college campuses across the country to get the word out that there was a new kind of TV channel that was going to be born – one that would take content from the viewers instead of showing content to them. Publishing, not producing.

Then, we went to San Francisco, where Current TV would be housed, to await the results.

They were not long in coming.

A few weeks after the speaking tour, a large mail truck pulled to the back of the building we had rented on the Embarcadero.

The postman began to unload mailbag after mailbag after mailbag of DVDs and VHS tapes. These were still the days before anyone ever thought of uploading video to the web.

Our small storage room was soon filled from floor to ceiling with bags of tapes.

There was more content in that room than NBC or CBS could have produced in a dozen years. And it was just the first day.

We had struck Spindletop.

Current was founded in the early 2000s, and we tapped into something massive. But if Current was Spindletop, Youtube, which was founded in 2005 was Dammam 7.

That was the well that stuck the first oil in Saudi Arabia.

Today, people upload 24 hours of video to Youtube every minute! If NBC were to try and match Youtube’s video production volume in one year, it would take them approximately 2000 years of constant work to catch up… with one year’s worth.
And we are only at the beginning of what Youtube and what is called User Generated Content will do.

Until now we have been living in a video desert; a content desert. The great reservoir of content – the great engine that is going to produce the content of the future is not at the networks and not at the studios. It is ‘out there’. It is you.