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  • Wavey’s Web site of the month

    Every month I’m inundated with requests to take a look at sites either operated or recommended by PC Pro readers. Space constraints prevent me from mentioning more than just one or two, so those that do make it here have to be pretty special in one way or another. Keep sending your URLs and I’ll keep visiting them, and if you do make it on these pages be prepared for a hits explosion.

    If you’re fed up with the US dominance of the Web-based book and video market, check out Black Star, the UK’s biggest video store. It’s a privately held company with over 60,000 videotape and DVD titles, including every release that is currently available in the UK. Compare that with an average of around 2,500 titles in your average high-street outlet. You can search for titles on-line by director, star, title, distribution company, year or category. If you’re after a rare or deleted film, Black Star offer a unique ‘video hunt’ service to track-down deleted or hard-to-find videos (provided they’ve been released in the UK at some stage) – a search which might take months of investigative work, but if it succeeds Black Star charges you a standard fee of £16.99 for the film, with no additional charge for the hunt.

  • Watching The Web: BlackStar

    The Web site of Britain’s biggest video store is full of information on any film that has been released in the U.K. Whether you want to buy a film or find out more trivia on one of the old classics, the site is an entertaining and useful resource. Blackstar.co.uk is a bit like an Amazon for movies, but because of its smaller scale, you personalize profiles that let you know when your favorite movies are on sale, or when commemorative editions of your favorite series are being released. To look for a film, you can search through the extensive listings by title or genre. If a film is no longer in the Black Star inventory, the company searches for the film and sends it to you. Perhaps the site’s biggest advantage is that it offers free delivery of its films to anywhere in the world.

  • CyberMarket Sweep

    Alongside established retailers making experimental forays into Internet trading, new companies are being set up exclusively for e-business. Black Star (blackstar.co.uk) is an e-business that sells videos. It claims to be the leading UK site in its market, and report massive growth over the past few months. “Free access seems to have doubled the amount of people online,” says Jeremy Glover, Black Star’s marketing director. “It’s growing massively by the month, and if there are eight million online in the UK now, there may be 25 million by 2003.”

    Black Star offers a huge selection of videos, including a massive catalogue of older ‘arty’ titles, and does good business in these, rather than the Hollywood top ten. “We’ll take any form of payment, ” says Glover, “but customers now seem a lot less worried about giving their details online. In any case, we go well out of our way to hold people’s hands. We’re secure and up front about who we are and what we are, and let people know they’re dealing with human beings. You’ll get a handwritten delivery slip when your order arrives, for example.”

  • Video Thrills The Virtual Stars

    Belfast may seem an unlikely launching pad for one of Ireland’s most promising Internet retail companies: the virtual video store blackstar.co.uk.

    Darryl Collins seems an unlikely frontiersman of the information age. His soft insistent northern accent and unassuming appearance belie an evangelical zeal for the subject of Internet trading.

    And it’s not all talk – after a year spent playing with electronic commerce business ideas, Collins, an independent film producer, and partners Tony Bowden (Northern Ireland’s first web designer) and Jeremy Glover (a former ad agency creative director) set up Ireland’s first virtual video store, blackstar.co.uk, within just 9 days in January 1998.

    Their-original deadline – for setting up the licensing, site design, programming, launch, banking, credit card processing, suppliers, distribution, – was a mere seven days, but was foiled by Bowden’s impromptu two day hospitalisation.

    That’s typical of the energy and speed of reaction that has infused Belfast-based blackstar.co.uk from the outset. ‘We used those early days, when traffic to the site was low, to take on customer advice’ explains Collins. ‘The early customers were really knocked out by the concept we were able to respond to their suggestions for change or requests for additions in real time. It was a great learning opportunity.’

    By July of last year, blackstar.co.uk was trading books and CDs alongside video and DVD, and had completely revamped the site design and navigation systems in line with shopper feedback. The company’s current incarnation was born: imagine a more dynamic, colourful and interactive version of amazon.com, with most of the big site benefits, but more personality.

    The painstaking site development also paid off in terms of customer retention. While Collins doesn’t regard ‘hits’ as the most valid measurement of success, BlackStar does track its 35,000 registered customers – and knows that 30% of first time shoppers will return to the BlackStar site for more spending within a month.

    By last Christmas the BlackStar site was literally swamped with shoppers – a trend echoed on all major ‘gift’ websites – and the 15 strong BlackStar team was almost snowed under trying to supply the demand. ‘We’d joke that we spent 80% of our time servicing 20% of our sales,’ recalls Collins. ‘In reality, our success had outstripped our resources. We realised we couldn’t be excellent at all three retailing areas, so we decided to concentrate on just one.’

    Conscious, too, of the rapid growth of Internet superbrands Amazon.com and the US based CD.now, BlackStar shifted their focus back to video.

    “The writing was on the wall – the big competition is coming from US Internet retailers, whose economies of scale allow intense price competition,’ outlines Collins. ‘Our clearest advantage lay in the video market, specifically in the PAL format video, which accounts for two- thirds of the world market – UK, Europe and South East Asia. It’s an area that’s off limits to American virtual video stores, who cannot operate beyond the regionally encoded NTSE domestic market”

    What’s remarkable about BlackStar’s customer base is that is grown organically – almost entirely through direct links and word of mouth. Last autumn’s video launch of Titanic – the spectacular disaster epic with origins in the Belfast shipyards – proved to be an important milestone for the city’s first Internet retailer. BlackStar matched the lowest price on the high street and launched a low budget but precisely targeted UK marketing campaign – which doubled their customer base. ‘The £9.99 Titanic offer was a loss leader.’ Collins explains. ‘But the amount of add-on purchases generated were excellent – 50% of those who bought Titanic bought other titles – that’s what we were really after.’

    As with most Internet start-ups, development and capital costs are high, profits are low, (annualised turnover for 1998/99 is projected at £3m) but the promise of future profits is irresistible. Particularly when the learning curve has been scaled with only minor casualties. ‘It might be only 15 months since we set up’ says Darryl, ‘but Internet years are like doggie years – we feel we have a decade of experience under our belts!’

    That’s certainly reflected in the confidence of new investors – and underpinned by the support of Paul White, Managing Partner in A&L Goodbody, London, and the newly appointed chairman, James R Osborne, another former Goodbody partner.

    As for the David and Goliath style competition with the Internet giants, the BlackStar trio seems unfazed. ‘Large companies moving from real world operations into Internet retailing tend to overcook the formula’ is how Collins puts it. ‘They also use the technology to automate, removing the human element. Our approach is to make the site more personal to the user – to create closer customer relationships, not more distant ones.

    In fact, BlackStar.co.uk thrives on the challenge. When amazon.com came knocking on BlackStar’s door last year, with a view to acquiring partial elements of the company, the reaction was one of flattery, tinged with a touch of defiance: ‘We told them – in not so many words – to get lost.’

  • A True British Success Story

    Black Star is a true British success story. The UK’s biggest video store, Black Star brings an innovative, highly customer-driven approach for the emerging market for goods bought on-line. Two factors – customer obsession and continuous innovation – lie behind its drive to become a pioneering global force in e-business. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the groundbreaking, privately-held company sell more than 60,000 videotape and DVD titles, including every release currently available in the UK, compared with an a verage of around 2,500 titles in a traditional High Street outlet.

    Black Star is on a high growth curve. Launched early in 1998 they have consistently achieved an average sales growth of 40% month on month, and currently have customers in 78 countries.

    All items are delivered free and within 48 hours in the UK, and with monthly promotions on hundreds of titles, Black Star provides a compelling alternative to High Street video shopping. Purchases are used on-line using a secure ordering and transaction and processing system that excepts all major credit cards, cheques and money orders. Once dispatched all orders are tracked automatically until they reach their final destination – the customers letterbox.

  • A Well-Packaged Site

    Billed as Britain’s biggest video store, this smartly presented site offers an extensive range of popular videos, digital video discs and widescreen films in 20 large categories. Useful features include a hit-list button that lets you earmark videos as you browse and a video hunt facility that helps you search for deleted or hard-to-find videos. There are plenty of supporting features and guides catering to niche tastes such as World Cinema and Stand-Up Comedy, as well as a choice of useful search options. Exemplary online help and contact information complete a well-packaged site. 5/5

  • An e-commerce star

    Four years ago in Northern Ireland, Black Star video (www.blackstar.co.uk) was set-up to be an effective video distribution service in a new market. From its small opening it now has markets in 89 countries, of which the UK is their single biggest market at 50%, followed by the US at 16%. Ireland pitches in with about two per cent of the market.

    Black Star is the brainchild of Darryl Collins and Tony Bowden who, along with Jeremy Glover, got it off the ground in 1995. Tony Bowden had already set-up Northern Ireland’s first Web design company, and together they were looking for a project to make use of the new technology. Out of about 30 different and diverse projects, they settled on a video distribution company. According to Jeremy Glover, they had been watching the success of Amazon on the Internet and decided to apply the same tactics that Amazon use for selling books to Black Star’s video sales.

    Of course, Amazon operates on a much larger scale than Black Star. That said, the principles are the same, and Black Star has tens of thousands of video titles in its database, as well as a smaller stock of DVDs.

    It started off very small, though, and fortunately for the fledgling company, the Web design could all be done inhouse, though as Glover says, at the start Tony Bowden’s programs were a lot better than his designs. However, the inhouse design meant that setting-up costs were much lower, and site maintenance costs were practically nil.

    As the company grew, though, things had to get more professional, and to this end the company of course got new programmers and also a professional Web designer to maintain and upgrade the site. According to Glover, only 30% of the business done by Black Star is front end, with their being many other facets to the operation.

    There are different programmers assigned to the different departments in the company, such as a programmer in charge of customer care, and another looking after marketing. It is a far cry from the original set-up.

    There is also a powerful internal email system with a full-time e-receptionist to help speed up the whole process. In fact the whole site is a very powerful one. Go to the details page and, with your video of choice, you not only find a blurb, with the year, the director, the distribution company, but you have the ability to browse for videos under all manner of different categories. So you can search for other videos under such headings as the star, the production company, the country of origin, even other videos costing a similar price. You can search for films by languages, and to facilitate the global market you can even select the currency of choice when paying. All transactions are done in Sterling, but by selecting, you can convert the price into your own currency at its most up-to-date price.

    Most of Black Star’s advertising is done off-line in a large number of major UK magazines, mainly the entertainment ones such as Empire and Total Film, and also in various Internet magazines. Any ads that they take out are full-page, full-colour ads, demonstrating the company’s commitment to professionalism. They also advertise a small amount online, with banner ads in some of the shopping directories, but it is mainly in magazines. People tend to know about Black Star before visiting the site, and it has “millions of visitors”, says Glover, but people tend not to make purchases the first time they log in. There is still a small amount of reticence about shopping online, with people wary about inputting their details. With annual growth between 20 and 25% it would seem that there is an ever increasing confidence about buying online. And about Black Star.

  • Online video store and all-round success story

    It might sound like the worst sort of ’70s sci-fi trash, but Black Star is the UK’s biggest online video store. It has grown rapidly since it started selling films online just over a year ago. The site aims to stock every video and DVD on release in the UK. But there’s no movie news or gossip here. Even a link marked ‘Oscars ‘ has no mention of Gwynneth Paltrow blubbering over her statuette – just a list of past winners of the Best Picture Oscars, including Braveheart, French Connection and Forrest Gump.

    And talking of things being like a box of chocolates, this site lets you search for videos by their subject, name, star or director. The diversity of what’s on offer is huge – from children’s comedies like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to serious titles dealing with death and the role of women, such as Like Water For Chocolate. The Belfast-based company has over 50,000 titles on offer, and an express checkout takes only seconds to process your order. Security is tight, and you can check when Black Star receives your order and when it dispatches it to your home. It will even send you an email telling you which stage your order has reached. Once you’ve placed an order, the site will recognise you the next time you visit. And you’ll probably want to return – Black Star offers 20 per cent discounts on a changing list of titles, and charges nothing for postage and packing. You can even compile a hit list of all the films you’d like to own.

  • Video Retailer Is One To Watch

    With the advent of digital TV you could be forgiven for assuming that the days of the humble pre-recorded video-cassette are numbered. I don’t believe a word of it and, fortunately, neither does Black Star, which claims to be the UK’s biggest video store.

    Design

    With a name like Black Star, it is perhaps fitting that the design is generally dark and moody, bordering on the drab. The layout is very familiar, adopting the white background, minimal graphics and heavy use of coloured boxes favoured by 99 per cent of book/music/video retailers online. But, the simplistic use works well on the Net, allowing speedy browsing and easy navigation.The video information pages are well thought-out, with decent sized images of the cover art and easy-to-read fact boxes. The only oddity here is the ‘add to hitlist’ button in addition to the more standard ‘add to basket’ button.

    Not exactly inspiring then, but highly functional. 8/10

    Content

    As is becoming expected of a major e-commerce site, there is a vast database of products available, from obscure art-house to Hollywood blockbusters laden with special effects. Many are offered in a bewildering number of formats, such as widescreen, limited edition boxed sets, Dolby Surround and DVD.

    While it may lack the sample video clips that some of the US Web sites have, and the almost obsessive detail found at the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), there is plenty of information available about each video, including running time, format, a brief synopsis, release date, rating, director and main stars. Certainly enough to encourage a purchase, especially considering Black Star will ship the video anywhere in the world completely free of charge. A key feature of the site, and one that is becoming increasingly popular, is the order tracking facility. Consumers are starting to demand access to this information from retailers, so it is certainly a wise investment. 8/10

    Use of the medium

    As with most Web sites that are built on an enormous database of products, a powerful, yet easy to use, search engine has been placed at the top of the screen. This is certainly a vast improvement on previous sites that required a click on menu button and lengthy delays to download search forms. These days successful e-commerce sites need to be fast and convenient to keep the shoppers from heading off elsewhere.

    One of the most superb features of the site is the cross-linking built into the product database. Whenever a user looks at the full information on particular title, the director and actors are presented as links, which bring up a list of other titles directed by or starring that person.While this may seem an obvious use of database technology, it is a million miles away from having to hunt through the shelves of the local video retailer, and a powerful linked-selling tool. I ended up finding out about a video from my favourite musician that I did not even know existed, and I consider myself to be his greatest fan. Simple and brilliant…

    Summary

    As you can see it is incredibly difficult to find fault with the Black Star Web site, with just about every vital aspect of online shopping well and truly covered. It is easy to navigate, has a comprehensive database of titles, is keenly priced and, most importantly, actually makes the shopping experience easier than its high street counterparts. With the optional gift-wrapping service available for an additional £2, Black Star makes shopping a piece of cake.

  • Online Video Store Fast Forwards

    A Belfast-based online service offers a selection of 50,000 videos posted free to anywhere in the world.

    Imagine having a video shop nearby with 50,000 titles in stock. It’ll track down the videos you want to buy and deliver them direct to your home at no extra charge.

    That, more or less, is the service on offer from an upstart and fast-growing online video store in Belfast (www.blackstar.co.uk). Except, of course, its marketplace is not the greater Belfast area, but ranges far afield from its street address at the Ravenhill Road, taking in Australia, America, New Zealand, Asia, Africa, all of Europe and just about anywhere else between.

    Black Star video, which launched in March 1998 bills itself as “the UK’s biggest video store” and claims to have customers in 76 countries and a British customer base of 20,000 registered users. This accounts for about half its total customer base. Another 18 per cent or so are in North America, 25 per cent in Europe and 10 per cent elsewhere. With the average high-street video shop carrying 2,000 to 3,000 titles, it’s not hard to see where online video retailers find an audience. Add free postage to anywhere in the world – a feature few online video stores offer – and Black Star becomes a very attractive source for videos indeed, says co-founder Mr Jeremy Glover, one of the firm’s three co-founders who serves as marketing and publicity contact.

    On the other hand, the Black Star website lists Mr Glover’s job title as “creator”, while co-founders Tony Bowden and Darryl Collins go, respectively, by “destroyer” and “preserver”.

    It may sound a bit like Zen and the Art of Video Selling but actually, the quirkiness is part of what sets Black Star apart from online conglomerates like Virgin. com. For example, all 20 employees get a Web page on which they can give their own mini-biography and each then lists his or her 10 favourite films (Mr Glover’s include LA Confidential, Pulp Fiction, Diva, Hear My Song and The Graduate). Mr Bowden eschews any personal information for a snippet of anonymous verse.

    “We put that human touch in because at the end of the day, you buy from humans, not from a computer,” says Mr Glover. Nonetheless, the data-crunching power of computers give Black Star the edge on bricks-and-mortar stores that keep customers coming back. Some regular buyers pick up several videos a week have spent more than £1,500 he says. And although one of the co-founders has a background in film – Mr Collins has directed many television adverts and produced the award-winning film Korea – Black Star could just as easily be an online bookstore or music store, or even, Mr Glover admits sheepishly, an online wedding services site.

    The three, with combined backgrounds in marketing, film and technology, had already decided in 1997 that the Web was the place to start a new business.

    Video won out for a range of reasons – besides Mr Collins background. First, the company needed to finance itself as it was built, so an online retail site fitted the bill. In addition, the extensive British databases on film and video already existed, so Black Star could get plenty of ready-made content for the site, everything from the cover shot of the video to reviewers’ comments and list prices. “With music and books, those databases don’t exist in the UK,” notes Mr Glover. And, he says, “to a large extent, videos are presold” – customers come to the site knowing what they want. For example, video buyers can search not just by title but by director, actor, distributor, catalogue number, genre, price or language. However, if they know what they want – and most come for the massive back catalogue or for more obscure films, not current hit releases like Titanic, which Black Star offers for £9.99 – buyers then tend to browse and pick up another title or two on a visit. The average purchase is £30, says Mr Glover, or about 2 and a half videos. The special Titanic offer has helped the company draw new customers, it has nearly doubled its registered customer base, and has also got some industry notice. “It was a loss leader at £9.99, but over 50 per cent who bought it got something else as well, and 70 per cent came back for additional purchases,” he says.

    In addition, after they put the title on sale the marketing director of Titanic’s distribution company contacted them, asking who Black Star was and what it did. Apparently, says Mr Glover, he’d been besieged by calls from other traditional video retailers demanding to know if the company had cut a special distribution deal with Black Star. “Certainly, traditional high street retailers are waking up to the threat that online retailers are going to present,” says Mr Glover.

    But if Black Star offers free postage woldwide – and that’s for airmail – and also offers regular discounts on titles, doesn’t that make its profit margins painfully tight? “It was squeezing us a lot harder at the beginning,” he admits. “But it was a decision we made based on customer desires.”

    He notes that the typical shopping experience for an online shopper goes pear-shaped at the point the purchase cost is totalled and postage and handling has to be calculated. “They’ve gone through the buying process and suddenly their hit with all these extra charges,” he says. “Now you’ve totally mislead a customer.” He figures they lose 13 to 15 per cent of the cost sale by paying for the postage but says the effect of doing so has been enormous, generating repeat customers from all over the world for whom Black Star becomes a cheaper source of videos than the neighbourhood shop.

    While growth initially ran at a very healthy 40 per cent a month, it has settled now into a comfortable 25 per cent month-on-month. Mr Glover realises he is sitting on a company which will likely prove an attractive acquisition as the European Internet market develops. “I have no doubt the offers will come,” he says. But for now he is more interested in running and building the company.