Steve Rosenbaum

Steven J. Rosenbaum is an American entrepreneur, curator, filmmaker, Emmy Award-winning producer, director, best-selling author and public speaker. Rosenbaum is widely acknowledged as the father of User Generated Content or UGC.Steve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Waywire Networks and holds two patents in the areas of video curation and advertising technology. Steve founded Broadcast News Network (BNN) with the intention of revolutionizing television and making his audience go from being passive viewers to active participants. During this time, he also acted as the company's executive producer. During his time as an executive producer,the company's main program was "Broadcast New York" which had an audience of 700,000 across the state of New York. In 1991 the show was awarded a New York Emmy for Outstanding Magazine Format Programming. Rosenbaum won an additional Emmy award that night for Outstanding Issues Programming - Segments for his work on "Life on Trial - AIDS Guinea Pigs". These early experiences in content curation led to the development of the concept of "Digital Curation". These concepts were further developed and explained in his 2011 well-reviewed book, "Curation Nation" In 1995, he created MTV News: Unfiltered; a half-hour show on MTV featuring first-person stories provided by viewers and curated by the show's producers. The show would typically feature content not covered by traditional media and was the first commercial use of UGC, User-Generated Content. In 2001, while working on a shoot for Animal Planet, he witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. He directed his five film crews to Manhattan to capture the devastating aftermath of the attacks. This footage would later become the award-winning documentary "7 Days in September"(winner of CINE Golden Eagle and Telly Award) and go on to become a research archive of meticulously curated amateur video known as The CameraPlanet Archive The 500 Hours of 9/11) which Rosenbaum donated to the National 9/11 Memorial Museum. Later in 2001, he launched CameraPlanet.com; a web-based video shop that created television content and encouraged users to create their own content by providing them with tips on how to tell their own story. The site featured many categories like "beaches" and "pets" and each video featured about four minutes of footage created entirely by the users. In 2005, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking for his work in "With All Deliberate Speed" for the Discovery Channel. The documentary, which was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, examines via newsreel footage and interviews the events that led to the landmark decision. In 2006, he founded Magnify.net, a New York-based startup focused on developing a video aggregation and curation platform. The company spent seven years building a steady business providing tools to enterprise clients who wished to manage and curate their own channels of video content. In 2013 Magnify acquired Waywire; a video-sharing website founded by the former Mayor of Newark; Cory Booker. In April 2014, Magnify.net adopted the Waywire name for its existing enterprise software business. One of the main objectives of the acquisition was to build a consumer-facing business around the curation of videos online.[13] Rosenbaum has also acted as a Member of the Social Media Week:New York advisory board, as a Member of the FAST PACK 200 and was also named the first-Ever Entrepreneur at Large for the New York City Economic Development Corporation; offering his expertise as an author and curator to help startup business in the New York Area grow and develop. Rosenbaum's passion for curation and content discovery innovation resulted in two inventions, and the awarding of two patents in the areas of video curation and advertising technology. Just a year after YouTube was founded, Rosenbaum filed Patent No. 8,117,545 "Hosted video discovery and publishing platform" which was granted in 2012. And in 2014 Patent No. 208,812,956 "Video curation platform with pre-roll advertisements for discovered content" Rosenbaum is a sought after public speaker, with two TED Talks to his name, and a number of well-regarded talks at industry leading conferences including SXSW, CES, and Dev:Learn and Brite.