MyPod Studios CEO Jay Miletsky: “We Don’t Want to Be YouTube”

Monika Jansen Jun 18, 2012 Tweet

Jay Miletsky was a traditional marketing/advertising guy and self-described big brand person. He had his own marketing agency in NYC with some pretty big clients – Hershey’s, NBA, Washington Mutual.

Several years ago, one of his clients, Asco Energy, which is a division of Emerson Electric, wanted to publish videos privately, rather than on YouTube.  At the same time, Miletskey, was writing a book on the principles of Internet marketing.  “I was talking to companies who wanted to use video, but didn’t want them public and couldn’t afford to have a custom channel built.”

So he said, “OK, let’s build this video platform.  We’ll help maintain it and it’s private, they can afford it, and we can license this out to other companies.  We built it and then promptly forgot about it…. Washington Mutual went bankrupt, so we had to focus on our core business.”

Fast forward a few years.  As his agency switched from traditional to social media marketing, Miletsky got antsy and decided to pursue the video platform.  He set up MyPod Studios with the specific intention of creating a non-YouTube.

MyPod Studios curates videos to keep quality high.  Think of it as a gated community for video.  You can’t just upload videos.  They are screened first, and if the MyPod team thinks it’s watchable, it goes up.  Furthermore, you only get 2 Gigs of space, and if your video is not getting enough page views, your video is removed.

Since launching last September, the small, 5-person company has been getting 18-20 million unique views per month for each pod (or group of videos).  Despite having VCs calling “all the time wanting to invest,” Miletsky is focused on staying lean and mean and growing the company deliberately.  “Our biggest challenge right now is keeping the gates closed – Hulu and other media platforms want to give us content.  I want to maintain a reputation for high quality in a short form video-type of way. “

Moving forward, they’ll gaming this summer and long form movies eventually – as well as branded entertainment.  Once a brand person, always a brand person!