Itech startup of the month.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Colorado Cutting Edge - Athletic Motion Inc. - Brief Article

ATHLETIC MOTION INC., DENVER

www.athleticmotion.com

FOUNDED: JANUARY 2000

LAUNCHED WEBSITE: JANUARY 2001

INITIAL LIGHTBULB: "When I was a little kid, I was obsessed with snowboarding," explained Athletic Motion President and CEO Bryan Sise, who founded the company in Durango with his brother, David Grossman, "I used to sit down in the den watching a snowboarding video. I would rewind it again and again and again, then watch it in slow-motion."

Fifteen years later, after dabbling in professional snowboarding and getting an MBA, Sise saw his onetime obsession as a wide-open niche during the Internet gold rush: a Web site packed with instructional video clips of "extreme" sports moves. Sises initial plans had to change, however. After Athletic Motion relocated to Denver in 2001, one roadblock after another -- the bandwidth bottleneck, what Sise labeled an "essentially faulty" revenue scheme, and an increasingly hostile VC market -- impeded the company's path to profitability, leading Sise and Grossman to retool the business plan and streamline the operation.

This fall, after laying off half of the company's 12 employees and slashing overhead, Athletic Motion took its assets -- video of professional athletes in action and dozens of marketing alliances -- and repositioned itself as a manufacturer of interactive DVDs.

IN A NUTSHELL: "One of the core concepts is that sports instruction can be most efficiently accomplished by focusing on particular movements, techniques and tricks, and using video to depict those tricks," Sise explained. To this end, Athletic Motion enlisted several freelance videographers to shoot professional skateboarders, snowboarders, and other cutting-edge athletes in action. The company then built an online archive of clips.

While the company still has a strong presence on the Web (attracting about 50,000 unique visitors a month with a "very frugal" marketing push), Athletic Motion is now squarely focused on producing and selling DVDs. It released its debut product, Skateboarding Motion Vol. 1, in September. "The Web site in and of itself wasn't generating the kind of revenue we projected," Sise said. "We have since almost entirely reinvented ourselves."

In terms of its instructional bent, the "DVD is a lot like the Web site," Sise said, "but because it doesn't have bandwidth constraints in the way the Web site does, it allows for full-screen video, multiple angles, background music, voice-over -- all sorts of enhancements...