Video Chat Portal, Seesmic Gets Celebs including Spielberg

I fooled around with the social video site Seesmic–you might think of it as a video chat portal–some time ago, and I found it boring. But now that the likes of Steven Spielberg, Karen Allen and Harrison Ford are posting video clips there too, maybe I should take another look?

And here’s a thread you can view (without signing on to Seesmic) from a UK Guardian Journalist who dialogged via video with Steven, Karen, Harrison & more: Spielberg Pops Up on Seesmic

I caught wind of this from a TechCrunch post: Don’t Screw Your Partners Over A Marketing Promotion which explains more background and some related technical issues. Most interesting to me, they refer to the appearance of these celebrities as a “promotion” without explaining that deal. Jemima Kiss, the UK journalist says “the guys behind the project” are the Picture Production Company. However, The Industry Standard’s coverage of this says, “Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur claims that he didn’t even know it was going to happen until right before the videos went up.”

Still, it’s clear that these celebrities are not just posting. For one thing, they all have the same background (gold curtains) on their videos so they apparently all went somewhere together and recorded their posts. These are hardly the casual, usually at-home kind of chats most Seesmic users post. Just the same, I view this development as an interesting new kind of access to some very interesting creative, innovative people, as well as more evidence of how important “The Video Web” is becoming to more and more people, including top-level leaders in the entertainment industry.

Anyone out there using Seesmic regularly and care to comment?