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Comment by 1234letshaveatw | Hacker News Reader

So it wasn't by choice, but most of my grad school business classes are now virtual. Most have a team presentation aspect where you collaborate on a powerpoint and charts and spreadsheets then "present" virtually by tacking on audio and video and then upload the whole mess after a lot of stress and panic.

Have you considered creating a free "edu" edition that would generate a mashup of uploaded videos, ppt and media, watermarked or whatever? The students would then conversion to a paid model for work? I would use it

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Yes! Non-profit and academic use case is currently free.

It's worth noting, the use case you are mentioning is interesting, but not exactly the workflow we are building for.

We are focused on improving the workflow around a marketer/demand generation/sales person at a company who needs to use existing content to get attention on social media/blog/email.

One of the ways we are thinking about this is around increasing the "shelf-life" of quality content, which doesn't get discovered because its long. This is very much a problem that appeared when businesses became content creators, as opposed to individuals.

That being said, if you have any questions, please email either Ross (ross@milkvideo.com) or me (lenny@milkvideo.com) and we will be happy to help!

Gotcha, I respect that you have a focused model.

I would also think that local government would be a good target audience- We have sat through some endless school board zooms (due to COVID). I am sure "shrink and share" would work there as well.

At a high level, there are two kinds of video processing work: synthesizing/organizing and creation.

There are a number of new companies appearing in the synthesizing/organizing space, because there was an explosion in the quantity of video being produced, and the software to parse it exists (speech-to-text, object recognition, better-search, etc).

At least for companies, people intuitively want to share all the "best parts", but we found that people won't actually watch them. Instead highlighting one specific piece that visually looks engaging is a better way to capture attention, and then engage.

Our thought process here is that there is only so much organizing/synthesizing most people will do, but there is an endless about of creation someone can do.

Re: government - For what it's worth, the US Chamber of Commerce is one of our paying customers.

It would be sexier to synthesize the cyber truck unveiling over the local planning board, but then again Buffett didn't shy away from investing in garbage pickup

"The students would then conversion to a paid model for work?"

Honestly that almost never works for startups.

It never happens or at least it never happens fast enough. I'm fairly sure that large companies like Microsoft that popularized student licenses, are benefiting from this, but through very long cycles of adoption.

At the end of the day if you get discounted Office for 4 or 5 years, you will highly likely continue doing it once you lose the discount. The secret sauce there is distribution. Office is so massively popular that you don't even need to advocate for that at work. It's the default choice.

I work in IT for engineering.

CAD sw for the engineering schools is crazy competitive. If you are graduating and know a CAD/simulation suite really well it helps you get a job (and therefore it will influence where you apply, which influences the employers, etc)

I totally believe this. But it's highly contextual to your job/area. CAD software is very specialized so it definitely makes sense that you can influence or take job decisions based on your knowledge of a particular suite.

What I believe is that if you're a startup building a generic business tool and you target students with the hope they will be your advocates or future buyers, you should adjust your expectations.

I believe that giving student discounts as a long-term adoption strategy makes sense. Unfortunately, startups have to fight for adoption in the short term. If you can afford to give student discounts you should do it. It's a good thing to do. But don't count on this as a way to drive adoption.

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