The goal of the NYC Turing Fellows program is to promote New York as a vibrant tech scene for more than just online advertising, Lee told Jacob Brody of VentureBeat. "[The interns] will go back to their own schools and spread the word."

Foursquare, SecondMarket and Tumblr are among the startups that will be accepting interns. NYC Turing Fellows also has backing from several high profile investors including Ron Conway's SV Angel, Bessemer Venture Partners, and First Mark Capital.

The program is for technically-oriented computer science students--New York has enough budding community managers and business development folks--as evidenced by the first question on the one-page applicaton: "What is the coolest thing you've built, and why did you build it?"

NYC Turing fellows will have access to mentoring and networking events in addition to the internship, which pays a $5,000 stipend at the end of the program. Applications will be accepted between January 17 and February 7, and candidates will be selected by February 14. Students in the U.S. and Canada are eligible.

Other high-profile sponsors include Hunch, Buddy Media, News Corp, the New York City Investment Fund and Deloitte.

New York tech evangelists hope initiatives like this will boost NYC's tech cred relative to other cities, namely San Francisco, which draws most of the top technical talent. New York is second behind California in terms of new startups.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Ms. Kaplan, a Pittsburgh native, had spent the good part of a decade building her career as a journalist—from her college days at Wesleyan to reporting for MTV News during the mid-’90s—and giving it up to join a tepid tech start-up wasn’t part of her plan. She was intrigued, but far from sold.

But later that September, an interview she had with Andrew Heyward, then the CBS News chief, made up her mind.

“We had a pretty formal interview,” Ms. Kaplan recalled. “At the very end he said, ‘What else do you do? What are you interested in?’ And I said, you know, ‘On Wednesday nights, I get together with some really smart friends of mine and we are starting a company, which is a platform for people creating Web shows on the Internet.’ And—I will never forget this—he pulled his chair back and looked at me in a whole new light. That sort of glaze of interviewing yet another reporter, only the seventy-five thousandth of his life, ended and he snapped out of it. He looked at me directly as a person rather than another local TV reporter, and he said, ‘Do that. That is the future. Forget this TV reporting thing.’

“That, actually, was the moment that I knew we were onto something,” she continued. “I stopped worrying and thinking about TV reporting and spent a lot more time thinking about Blip.”

Ms. Kaplan, who would not disclose her age, uploaded videos of her own on-the-street reporting from the Cannes Film Festival onto the platform. She joined Blip.tv as chief operating officer soon after.

Four years later, Blip.tv hosts and distributes more than 48,000 original Web shows via platforms including iTunes, AOL Video, the iPhone, Facebook, TiVo and Verizon On-Demand, sharing ad revenues 50-50 with content creators. The company has found a comfortable niche as a distribution site for independent content creators. If YouTube, which launched in February 2005, is the go-to spot for amateur video clips, and Hulu is the home for professional content from major networks and studios, Blip.tv is wedged in between, as the choice platform for indie Web show producers.

Late last month, Blip.tv hosted a big press event at its brick-walled, Broome Street loft, where the company now employs more than 20 people (there’s usually a keg of beer on tap in the kitchen and Nintendo Wii to play with in a media area). Ms. Kaplan and the rest of the Blip.tv crew announced new distribution partnerships—with YouTube, Vimeo, NBC’s Local New York station and Roku, which makes a digital video player—that promise to bring Web shows to the millions, whether via computers or on flat-screen TVs.

But now that Blip.tv has top-notch software, some good press and decent distribution deals, Ms. Kaplan and the team is taking on the task that colleague sites like Hulu and YouTube still haven’t figured out: how to be profitable.

Ms. Kaplan would not disclose exact revenue figures, but it’s safe to say that Blip.tv still relies heavily on venture capital to pay for all those videos on their servers and to keep engineers coding. They offer a premium membership (at $8 per month) for video bloggers, but most clients prefer the free service—and would likely abandon Blip.tv if the company decided to charge all users.

Her challenge now is to transition Blip.tv from a tech company to a media business.

“The next step is going to sound a lot less sexy,” she said.

AFTER OFFICIALLY JOINING the company, Ms. Kaplan launched a charm offensive, going to tech events and conferences, some where she was the only woman in the room. She helped land funding from angel investors (the first to sign on was her father, Robert Kaplan, a Harvard Business School professor) and venture capital firms (at undisclosed amounts); at a sports conference, she made Blip.tv’s first distribution deals with AOL and Yahoo! (Ms. Kaplan has made a name for herself as a bit of tech-world socialite, too, hosting soirees like last spring’s Founders Club event on a roof overlooking Rockefeller Center, with IAC’s Barry Diller, NBC’s Jeff Zucker and Late Night’s Jimmy Fallon in attendance.)

Some angel investors didn’t take her seriously as an entrepreneur. Even in this day and age, they would sit down to pitch meetings and ask if she was the wife or girlfriend of one of Blip.tv’s four male co-founders. “It was definitely a handicap,” she said. “Most of them had never been pitched by a woman before. I started realizing that you were smart to bring a guy with you, no matter who it was—it could be a guy you met on the street or an intern, but having a guy there was helpful. Hopefully, that will get better.” (Indeed!)

As part of the team's plan to take Blip.tv to the next level, Ms. Kaplan will need to land more distribution deals—especially with cable companies and TV box top devices—and get more advertising, from brand integration to pop-up ads, on Blip.tv’s shows. They plan on hiring a new sales team.

“You have to squeeze blood from stone,” Ms. Kaplan said about the challenge of making advertising deals. “You’re having to create budgets where they don’t exist and you’re either stealing money from display advertising or from TV. We definitely have good products—it’s building trust with the ad sales fairy dust.”

After sitting down with The Observer earlier this month, Ms. Kaplan flew to Los Angeles to attend a few parties and meet-ups. “You will find us talking about and spending a lot of time in L.A.,” she said. On the West Coast, she meets with companies about forming partnerships, “whether distributing videos within the Warner Bros. family or CBS Entertainment,” she said. Major Hollywood studios and independent companies, like Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media, for example, are revving up their online content creation, and Ms. Kaplan wants to turn them on to Blip.tv as their distribution platform.

Blip.tv has so many different small Web shows that they can be bundled into packages—like, say, five or 50 shows geared toward moms—for brands and advertisers. According to Mr. Hudack, this is a tremendous advantage when attracting advertising. “One hundred thousand people are usually too few to justify an ad buy,” he wrote on Blip.tv’s official blog. “It benefits advertisers because packages made up of lots of little shows can  be much better targeted than individual mass market shows.”

At the press event in July, Mr. Hudack said he hopes his aging aunt, a decade-long AOL dial-up user who only recently got a modern modem, will soon be able to sit down on her living room couch, flip on the television and not be able to differentiate whether a TV show was created by a major network or “that guy in his garage.”

“You don’t have to go up to Jeff Zucker at NBC and essentially ask for what is a bank loan” to create your own TV show, Mr. Hudack said. “Sometimes, literally for a couple hundred bucks, you can start a Web show and reach millions of people.”

Still, it remains to be seen whether Ms. Kaplan and the rest of the Blip.tv team can turn those millions of people into millions of dollars. We’ll be watching.

greagan@observer.com

"You don't have to go up to Jeff Zucker at NBC and essentially ask for what is a bank loan" to create your own TV show, Mr. Hudack said from Blip.tv's Broome Street loft this morning. "Sometimes, literally for a couple hundred bucks, you can start a web show and reach millions of people."

Mr. Hudack, along with the rest of the Blip.tv team, was announcing their new distribution partnerships with YouTube, Vimeo, NBC's Local New York station and Roku, which makes a digital video player, that will bring more of those "guy in the garage" shows to the millions--whether on computers or wide-screen TVs.

The new deals mark another step in Blip.tv's goal to make creating Web shows a "sustainable business," he said.

Blip.tv already hosts and distributes more than 48,000 original Web shows on platforms including iTunes, AOL Video, iPhone, Facebook, TiVo, and Verizon On-Demand, and shares ad revenues with content creators. Web show producers can upload their episodes into Blip.tv and get on those platforms across the Web in a few easy steps--which will now include YouTube and Vimeo.

Chief operating officer Dina Kaplan said the partnership with WNBC will bring between 1,000 and 5,000 of Blip.tv's  most popular shows to an on-air slot on NBC’s NY Nonstop broadcast channel in New York.

Blip.tv's TiVo services will also now allow them to syndicate shows to the DVR service with just one click. On the Roku device, Blip.tv's content creators will be able to create their own channel after the company releases new software this fall (watch out, Boxee!).

Blip.tv also revealed a new behind-the-scenes dashboard that will allow creatives to edit and reorder their videos, see how many views and ad dollars the videos are generating (in real time!), and also allow them to respond directly to YouTube or Vimeo comments from the Blip.tv interface. With a new online analytics service TubeMogul partnership, show creators can also see which blogs are embedding their videos and track viewer numbers by the second so they know exactly when they lost eyeballs in individual videos.

These will be important numbers to show advertisers, according to Mr. Hudack, which are difficult for these little Web shows to court attract. But if they are bundled in packages--and distributed all over the Web as well as TV sets--they might have a fighting chance to survive. "100,000 people are usually too few to justify an ad buy," he wrote on Blip.tv's official blog after the announcement. "It benefits advertisers because packages made up of lots of little shows can be much better targeted than individual mass market shows."

"Together we’re creating a new future for television," he added.

"For too long in New York City, the smartest business people have joined large companies rather than starting them, as they often do, in California," she continued. "For too long in New York, the most talented engineers have joined existing big businesses, rather than starting their own, or becoming CTOs of really promising startups. For too long, people like Mark Zuckerberg, who, remember went to college at Harvard on the East Coast, have moved to Silicon Valley to start their companies and people like Larry and Sergey [Google's founders] moved to California to attend Stanford and start a small company there."

Ms. Kaplan said the tech community already has a base fostered by organizations like the New York Tech Meetup and her own Founders Club to connect the city's digital entrepreneurs with venture capitalists, other digital executives and advertisers. "However, we can't do it all on our own," she said. Mr. Bloomberg's plan will "bring our efforts to a whole new level."

Standing among city suits, IAC chief financial officer Tom McInerney, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, Huffington Post chief executive Eric Hippeau, and DFJ Gotham Managing Partner Danny Schultz, Ms. Kaplan was also one of two women who stood behind Mr. Bloomberg as he made his announcement. Elizabeth Berger, president of the Downtown Alliance, was the other. Ms. Kaplan told a story about meeting Gerry Laybourne, who partnered with Oprah to create Oxygen Media, when blip.tv was just a year old in 2006. "She gave us our first revenue deal ever and after the deal was signed she hung back to talk to me and to whisper and say, 'I believe that my number one priority must be to enable the next generation of women in digital media in making their lives a little bit easier,'" Ms. Kaplan recalled. "Her mentorship changed my life and it helped lead to the success of blip.tv. That deal lead to other deals and lead to our first round of financing, which enabled us to go full time."

Ms. Kaplan said it's the community and the city's job to attract the best young minds in tech. "We want them to choose New York to build and scale their digital media companies," she said. So, hey, future Mark Zuckerbergs, when are you moving to Brooklyn?

Correction Appended: An early version of this article misidentified Elizabeth Berger, president of the Downtown Alliance, who was standing behind Mr. Bloomberg as he made his announcement.

Boxee is not actually a physical box but a software program that users can download for free. It searches all of your connected devices—from your hard drive to your iPod—and scoops up photos, music and videos, and then organizes them into an elegant interface that you can view on your screen. It also aggregates videos and music from content providers like NextNewNetworks and Blip.tv (both presented at Tuesday night's Meetup), Comedy Central, CNN and many others, including Hulu.

But when Mr. Ronen first mentioned NBC and News Corp.'s joint video site at the Meetup, an audience member was overheard hissing. "No, no, we love Hulu," Mr. Ronen said with a wily smile. Although Hulu was never an official partner with Boxee, its content was available on Boxee until Hulu's content providers requested that executives block access. Boxee created a work-around by integrating Hulu's RSS feed, but Hulu blocked that, too.

Now, Boxee has a new solution—their own browser. Users can now select Hulu videos on the software's interface (Lost and Heroes are popular choices) and a browser will launch, automatically detect the video on the page and open it in full screen. Voila! Now, "if it's on the Web, it's on Boxee,” Mr. Ronen told The Observer in an earlier interview.

Another addition to the new version of Boxee is the integration of Pandora, the popular Internet radio service that specializes in creating a "one-click personal radio experience," said Tom Conrad, Pandora's chief technology officer, from the Webster Hall stage. Users will be able to listen to Pandora's carefully curated radio channels and create their own "stations" based on artists and albums of their choosing. They can also use the "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" feature to narrow their preferences.

"At home, that’s the only music we listen to," Mr. Ronen told The Observer. He added that Pandora was the most requested service to be integrated with Boxee after Netflix.

Another new application, called Radiotime, automatically detects users' IP addresses to find their exact location to provide local radio stations available for listening. Users can listen to stations like WNYC and WNYU right from their television screens with Boxee.

Boxee is also releasing a new version of their API so developers can build applications on top of the system and add whatever content they want. The New Jersey natives behind Boxeehq.com have already created applications for Open Film and Game Trailers, and for the new version of Boxee, they are releasing a PBS channel. Fire up Frontline!

Mr. Ronen called for developers to make Boxee into whatever they want it to be.

Mr. Ronen and Whitney Hess, Boxee's user experience designer, also presented a preview of what Boxee's beta version will look like, including a more customizable home screen, a global search for shows instead of sifting through content providers' channels (right now you can only find 30 Rock if you go to NBC's page, for example) and improved social networking capabilities. (Mr. Ronen mentioned that one religious Boxee user was accidentally sent the infamous pornographic video "Two Girls, One Cup." Whoops!)

Mr. Ronen said his team has been hard at work on the new alpha version of Boxee, but they’ll be working on the beta version, which will be much friendlier to mainstream audiences, during the next few months. He guessed it might be released "maybe by the end of the third quarter."

The Meetup was a relative success for Boxee. Pizza and beer were served to the packed crowd. T-shirts were thrown into the audience stadium-style, and, despite an audio mishap earlier in the evening, spirits seemed high. Integrating Hulu back into the software was something of a triumph for Boxee, which has been in a David vs. Goliath battle with Hulu since mid-February.

But with tonight, “We want to put the Hulu thing behind us,” Mr. Ronen said, sitting in an office by his Park Avenue home base at NextNewNetworks the morning before the Meetup.

"The idea of Boxee is scary for them," Mr. Ronen said.

In a February 18 blog post, Hulu chief executive Jason Kilar wrote that they would be blocking the site's content on Boxee at the request of their content providers.

"While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence—bumps and all—we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners," he wrote. "For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you're likely to tell us that we're nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won't stop innovating in support of the bigger mission."

"They love the application, they just don't like what it's doing to their business," Mr. Ronen said. But perhaps, he continued, content providers like Hulu should see this as an opportunity to prepare for an inevitable future. "Don’t try to fight it or delay it or ignore it, rather they should participate and see it as an opportunity to explore new business models."

"The risk of not doing it now is that users will turn to solutions that don’t respect their copyright," he said.

But Hulu and the like still have time. Boxee currently has about 370,000 users, Mr. Ronen told The Observer. "We're still talking about the early adopters here," he said. "It's not going to move the needle for anybody."

As for Mr. Ronen, he wants to look past Hulu and continue to attract the "big enchiladas," as he put it.

He also told The Observer that he plans on making Boxee available on a hardware device by 2010. Users who own an Apple TV can already create a TV set-up with Boxee. But Mr. Ronen is in talks with device and board-makers working on embedding the software into an easy set-up box that can sit on top of your TV—no hacks necessary (think TiVo). "That will be the big step into breaking into the mainstream," Mr. Ronen said.

As for the new version of Boxee, Mr. Conrad, of Pandora, told the crowd at the Meetup that he "can't wait to go home and install it."

The crowd probably couldn't, either.

Advertising Age reports that "4.2 million subscribers, and test whether the genre has legs off the PC."

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