Pioneered online and broadcast video-on-demand technology for a music video network in Miami Beach, FL.
When the web became public, THE BOX asked Jason to be their webmaster, to help THE BOX take advantage of the phenomenon of the web.
THE BOX was a broadcast and cable network with presences in the biggest cities in the USA. Viewers to the channel controlled which videos would play and be viewed by everyone in their cable area by calling in and entering a 3 digit number with their phones. Their phone bill was charged a small amount. This innovative concept gave the company it’s first name: Video Jukebox Network. Jason began by collaborating with the in-house technology and programming teams, as THE BOX’s new webmaster, to discover the plan to best represent THE BOX online.
Within the first year of the project the system of representing the entire video catalog, thousands of videos changing each week and different in each geographic location, was managed. The website was designed to have a webpage for each music video, and a webpage for each artist that had music videos running, linking to each video that’s appropriate. Thousands of videos, thousands of artists, thousands of webpages changed each week.
By the second year the ability to actually order the videos was developed and tied to credit card accounts as opposed to phone bills. The music video pages had become popular with the viewing audience, an audience whose individuals had no more experience with the web than the web was old: 1 or 2 years. These were the days of dial up modems, before anyone had a smartphone, where the closest thing was called a Palm Pilot, a monochrome LED pocket organizer that wasn’t your phone. The debut of the new functionality featured a digital rebirth of the brand, a big party in NYC, and it put the company in the spotlight. Streaming music services were getting a lot of attention at the time, but nobody was doing what THE BOX was doing with video, making it on-demand, and integrating the online and offline brand promise so precisely.
This rebirth worked so well, the strategists of THE BOX had gotten epic attention and were vectoring forward both online and offline. It was doing so well building its audiences that MTV bought THE BOX. Viacom closed the Miami Beach office, the birthplace of THE BOX, and moved the talent to NYC to join the rest of the Viacom offices in Manhattan.
