With Ten Million Videos Played, TechCrunch TV Turns One

TechCrunch TV celebrates its one year birthday today. Since we launched, we’ve had 10 million live and on demand video plays. We have more than 2,300 videos archived in our library. In addition to breaking news interviews and live special event coverage, we now produce 9 shows in San Francisco and New York.

Last year in late June, TechCrunch had just moved into its new San Francisco office. Studio lights were quickly installed in a former conference room that became the studio. A rather wobbly desk was built for the set and rehearsals were conducted. One week later, TechCrunch TV launched with a very Max Headroom looking set.

In addition to the programs we launched (interview shows Keen On with Andrew Keen and Speaking Of with Cyan Banister, and our tech news roundup and sometimes fiery debate on OMG/JK with MG Siegler and Jason Kincaid,) we have added 6 new shows:

  • TC Cribs: Jason Kincaid goes behind-the-scenes at tech firm offices
  • Ask A VC: Sarah Lacy asks top Silicon Valley VC’s questions submitted by our readers
  • Fly or Die: Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs give a ‘fly’ or ‘die’ to new products
  • Founder Stories: Chris Dixon has deep conversations with other entrepreneurs about building startups
  • Why Is This News?: Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr discuss stories from outside of Silicon Valley
  • Gillmor Gang: Steve Gillmor produces and hosts a weekly show with industry experts and thought leaders

Our most popular “non-show” videos include Jason Kincaid trying out the largest Android phone ever and an iPhone controllable robotic ball called the Sphero that we saw at CES. Speaking of robots, another favorite was a visit to our office by the Anybots robot, controlled remotely by Michael Arrington. On the more serious side, Office Hours with Paul Graham from our last Disrupt conference was a hit. In addition to all the entrepreneurs, VC’s, founders and CEOs from startups and established tech companies too numerous to list, at Disrupt NYC we interviewed Ashton Kutcher, Senator Al Franken, and T-Pain.

We’ve upgraded our San Francisco production to HD. We now use HD robotic cameras (not remotely controlled by Arrington) and an HD Tricaster switcher. In our early days, if a guest moved out of the shot, there wasn’t much our director in the control room could do about it, as we usually have one TCTV staffer running the entire show. Now, with the robotic cameras, it’s a quick and easy adjustment to put the guest properly back in frame. We’ve also upgraded the microphones, set and desk.

Thanks to our acquisition by AOL, we now have access to the HD AOL Studios in New York, where we produce Founder Stories, Fly or Die and other NY-based interviews.

The most popular place to watch TCTV is within blog posts on Techcrunch. But we have a directory page at techcrunch.tv where we put the most recent episodes of our shows. We also list all the episodes for each show. We’ve recently made some speed performance improvements to the page, so it’s a good way to find past videos.

Looking ahead, we are planning to launch more shows and news segments. We also have some video production and website improvements on the way. Thanks for watching our first year and hope you keep watching.

Image: Will Clayton / flickr