Steven Starr is the producer of FLOW: For Love Of Water, and the founder of Revver.
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Steven Starr was born on Long Island. Starr started his career in high school as a volunteer journalist at WLIR-FM in New York, pursued a degree in Radio, TV and Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and worked his way through college as a campus journalist, a DJ, CBS Records college rep, and a concert promoter for Bob Marley & The Wailers.
After starting in the mail room at the William Morris Agency in 1980, Starr launched a homevideo and an audiobooks division, packaged television and screenplays, then headed the New York Motion Picture department. His clients over the years included Andy Grove, Joseph Papp, Larry David, Ang Lee, Andy Warhol, Ziggy Marley and Tim Robbins.
Starr left Morris in 1991 to produce Johnny Suede, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival, and to write, direct and produce Joey Breaker, winner of the Audience Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.[1] He then co-created and produced the Ace Award series nominee The State for MTV and CBS, and worked with the Marley family on a variety of estate projects, including a Bob Marley biopic.[2]
Starr went on to focus full-time on media democratization, as a co-founder of the Los Angeles Independent Media Center, and founding CEO of AntEye.com, a user-generated video site where video creators, voted on by their peers, were awarded micro-pilot budgets in various categories. Despite thousands of submissions and a first-look partnership with HBO, by mid-2000 bandwidth costs were prohibitive and AntEye became unsustainable.
To address the bandwidth problem, Starr co-founded Uprizer with Freenet Project founder Ian Clarke and Rob Kramer. A pioneer in P2P and funded by Intel and others, the goal was a zero-cost bandwidth solution for independent creators. After Hummer-Winblad was named in the Napster lawsuits, Uprizer re-oriented as an enterprise software solution, Starr and Clarke departed to continue working on Freenet, and Uprizer sold to Redux Holdings.
Starr was then approached by the Pacifica Foundation to reorganize KPFK, the largest progressive radio signal in the US. After helping to restore community and financial controls he started ChangeTv, a user-generated digital cable network designed to filter online video onto cable and reward creators, advised by John Perry Barlow and Amnesty International's Jack Healy.
After financing proved difficult, Starr repurposed ChangeTv into an online creator marketplace, bringing on Ian Clarke, Andrew Clarke, Oliver Luckett and Downhill Battle as consultants, focusing on how to reward online video creators in direct proportion to virality. After raising capital from the syndicate that funded Skype, Clarke and Luckett were named co-founders and the Revver beta launched on October 29, 2005.
Revver split advertising revenue 50/50 with creators, and gave 20% of advertising revenue off the top to syndicators. To allow sharing of Revver videos, the upload license enabled redistribution under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Creative Commons License. Although a lot smaller than sites like Youtube, Revver’s creator-centric business model had a significant impact; numerous video sites started offering advertising revenue share to creators.
In 2006, Revver was awarded the Most Influential Independent Website by Television Week, nominated for an Advanced Technology Emmy Award, and honored as one of the 100 most promising startups by Red Herring. In 2007, Revver announced it had paid out its first million dollars to online creators and syndicators. In February 2008, Revver was sold to LiveUniverse, which abandoned the creator/syndicator revshare model, starting a precipitous decline in users.
Starr stepped down as Revver's CEO in June, 2007 to finalize production of Irena Salina's feature-length documentary about the global water crisis entitled FLOW: For Love Of Water, and launch a Right To Water campaign to add a 31st article to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, Article31.org.
FLOW premiered as a Grand Jury Prize nominee at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Competition, going on to win a variety of festival awards, including the International Jury Prize at the Mumbai International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the United Nations Film Festival. FLOW was released theatrically by Oscilloscope Labs in September, 2008, and then invited to screen for the UN General Assembly on the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where the first 50,000 signatories to Article31 were presented to the President of the General Assembly, Father Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann.
On July 28, 2010 a resolution was presented by Bolivia and co-sponsored by 35 countries, calling on the United Nations General Assembly to recognize the Right To Water. Despite opposition from the U.S., the U.K. and their allies, the resolution passed with the support of 122 countries, representing more than 5 billion of the world's population.
Starr then co-executive produced the Academy Award-nominated, urban farming documentary The Garden, released in April 2009.
In July 2009, Starr joined CitizenGlobal as Chief Programming Officer, continuing to focus on media democratization, and became CEO in 2011.