The Festival Travel Channel Launches With 250 Video Clips

New York May 1, 2008 - With only $500,000 in initial seed funding The Festival Travel Channel launched its beta web 2.0 site on May 1 with eight hours of 250 professional grade HD videos clips featuring seven major festivals. The site plays across several networks, including a YouTube partnership. The average user views several clips, spending over fifteen minutes on the site. Following the launch dozens of networks committed to feature the channel going forward. 

The Festival Travel Channel focuses on the festival travel niche in the travel vertical, a vertical with total revenues of $94 billion and projected growth of 17% annually. The festival travel niche consists of the 60 million Americans who travel to festivals each year. If the niche is broadly interpreted to include sporting events such as the super-bowl, Nascar, industry events; fashion weeks, and events in general; spring breaks, film and rock/music festivals, parades and state and country fairs, the numbers are far larger. The Travel Festival Channel is the only site currently with a community in this niche.

Traditional general travel site derive income from advertising and booking travel agency. The links to the agencies have a phenomenal click through rate and the sites typically earn 50 cents to $1 per transaction whenever someone books a hotel room, flight and car rental. The Festival Travel Channel will have additional revenue streams from the sale of festival related merchandise, brokerage of tickets to festivals, festival travel group and individual tour services, licensing the long form video content and entering the formerly only lucrative bricks and mortar market festival sponsorship business, as it takes it online with a database linking buyers to sellers. Event sponsorship is the fastest growing segment in advertisers’ budgets, rivaling online.

The marketing strategy includes widgets with viral video, now playing an increasing large part in marketing of brands and site. Some travel sites have increased as much as ten fold, reaching 1.3 million members in two years largely due to a single travel widget on facebook requiring the users to visit their site to register and unlock the widget’s full functionality.  Branded widgets now under development by the Festival Travel Channel for 3G smart phones with GPS will provide addictive network functionality at social events such as festivals, as friends seek to meet or share the festival experience.

The site launched with an online competition for travel hosts selected from members of the community. With an initial estimate of over ten thousand contestants in three months signing up the site is expected to acquire an additional 90,000 members interested primarily in festival travel within a year.

About The Festival Travel Channel
The Festival Travel Channel http://www.festivaltravelchannel.com  is a production of Curious Travelers, a producer of TV travel productions for cable and network television.

Contact: Jonathan Sarno, President
Tel: 212 767 972 or Email: info@curioustravelers.com

Editor's note: The views expressed in this post may not necessarily represent the views of CenterNetworks. This press release was paid for and provided in its entirety by The Festival Channel.