Online video monetization will be huge ("Much Bigger Than Groupon"). To take advantage of this opportunity a startup must be built.

A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

A business model describes all the parts of the company necessary to make money.

The core building blocks of any business model: Key Partners (FP), Key Activities (KA), Key Resources (KR), Value Proposition (VP), Customer Relationships (CR), Channels (CH), Customer Segments (CS), Cost Structures (CS) and Revenue Streams (RS).

Steve Blank video [4:50] about customer development: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teURBW6qnRY

Customers don't care about your technology. They are trying to solve a problem.

The business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development.

Customer Development is the process of how you get out of the building and search for the model. Customer Development is designed so that you the founder(s) gather first hand experience about customer and market needs.

Who is the customer with online video? Is it the viewers or is it advertisers? Louis CK developed a successful business model with the viewers as the customer. If the viewers are the customers there are two basic models pay-per-view and subscriptions. If advertisers are the customers then there are two basic types: large corporations and local businesses. If you are looking for large corporations to advertise, then you run into the issue of control. If you are looking for local businesses to advertise then there a different set of issues for customer development. Some of the issues of customer development for local businesses are addressed with The Alchemist of Entrepreneurship and the Alchemy Card (affinity/gift card).

The Alchemy card promotes the following ideas:

The key to reversing the long-term trend of stagnating incomes in the U.S. lies in nurturing small, locally owned businesses and limiting further expansion and market consolidation by large corporations (http://bit.ly/uUEq3b).

Most job creation in the United States is the result of Main Street entrepreneurs, not Wall Street financial wizards (http://bit.ly/viTZQh).

Neighborhoods with thriving independent businesses saw home values outperform citywide markets by 50 percent over the last 14 years (http://bit.ly/sl8kKs).

There are no upfront costs to business owners. It works a little bit like a daily deal from a site like Groupon. People buy discounted gift card (e.g. $125 gift card for $100). Participating business owners will redeem the gift cards and receive a percentage say 60%. Business owners will also be able to sell Alchemy cards.

There are other issues with video monetization such as the ones brought up by Paul Graham of Y Combinator: http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html

SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

What's the most entertaining thing you can build?