Meet Field Garthwaite of IRIS.TV in Downtown

Today we’d like to introduce you to Field Garthwaite.

Field, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started working in media at 17 as an intern for Jim Burress at Columbia Records. It was the height of CD sales and I was using Napster and similar services at the time. It was a unique time because there was this huge divide between user behavior and what the businesses were doing. They were completely unprepared when the floor fell out of the music industry.

I later worked as an intern and assistant at places like HBO, Universal Pictures and other entertainment companies I realized that every media industry was going to undergo a similar fate essentially at the same rate of technology development and the increasing speed of bandwidth which would make video streaming possible. I graduated in 2008, the worst time in recent history to be looking for a job. I had an art degree—technical skills around production and engineering so I ended up working in post-production and continued to create my own artwork.

When the film ended, it won an Emmy, but I was broke and so I found some part-time jobs before I landed at Rubicon Project a fast-growing startup. After working on the product side I developed Jukebox TV (Pandora for video) to help solve the problem facing media companies and their inability to build good products that engage users as consumer behaviors were changing. We launched Jukebox TV in 2011 and while we patented the technology and it had some good traction—it wasn’t Snapchat. So we shut it down and took the technology and some of the awesome team we built to pivot and become IRIS.TV in 2013.

Today IRIS.TV is the largest video programming and personalization platform in the market and we’re focused on helping publishers, broadcasters and media owners of any kind build intelligence on their audiences and create great user experiences so they can compete with companies like YouTube and Facebook for the audience. I am also a volunteer with The Carbon Underground, a non-profit organization here in LA. TCU is responsible for implementing large-scale carbon sequestration initiatives, corporate partnerships, communication, and education to meet the drawdown requirements of the Paris Climate Accord.

Hopefully, we’ll go a step further and to have an impact on solving climate change. www.thecarbonunderground.org.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
No. This is the craziest time in media since the change from network to cable.

Please tell us about IRIS.TV.
Our mission at IRIS.TV is to enable broadcasters and publishers to turn video into a profit center online and we do this by providing our clients with the same disruptive technology that has made Google and Facebook, Netflix and Amazon so successful. IRIS.TV is a video personalization and programming platform utilized by hundreds of broadcasters and publishers worldwide to increase video views and revenue across their digital properties.

IRIS.TV’s technology utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate streaming of personalized content based on audience preferences, user interaction, and behavioral segmentation. This is what we do today… its what enables us to create huge increases in video consumption—we have clients that we’ve helped grow by over 10 times on their owned and operated sites and applications. What makes this possible is the data network that we’ve built.

For brands and marketers, IRIS.TV helps them build intelligence on their video content and we’ve built a product for brands to allow them to distribute their branded video in-stream alongside premium editorial content to better understand how it performs as content and to create a brand-safe environment that is an alternative to Facebook and YouTube—by using our A.I. platform we know what streams audiences are watching—say hockey clips or Emmy highlights— and we can place branded video into contextually relevant streams on publisher sites and apps.

We founded this company after realizing that the future of TV is changing and media companies are leaving money on the table when they push video off their owned and operated platforms. We have learned that video is the best revenue path for media companies and personalization is what is getting people to stick around and watch for longer periods of time.

Do you feel like our city is a good place for businesses like yours? If someone was just starting out, would you recommend them starting out here? If not, what can our city do to improve?
Los Angeles is a great place to be. It’s where a lot of brilliant people live and work and it is great for new types of industries. I think overall what our city needs to work on is infrastructure around transportation and water resources for droughts. It’d be exciting to see a bike highway be developed alongside of the push for self-driving cars or hyperloop. The city can improve in some practical ways to improve quality of life and make it easier for bicyclists.

Contact Info:

• Address: 453 S.Spring Street, Suite 712 Los Angeles, California 90013
• Website: www.iris.tv
• Email: [email protected]
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adaptivestream/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/iris_tv/
• Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iris-tv/

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