Aside from the value of the effort itself, being the first to do something carries an extra boost of PR value that normal innovation doesn’t. This week I’m hoping to get the “what can we be first at?” juices flowing with three, simple ideas.

There’s a demographic out there that many folks in the biz called cord-cutters. These are the people who, in an effort to unplug or save money or whatever, nix their cable package for some other alternative.

Sometimes that alternative is nothing, but more often than not it’s a streaming solution that get’s them much of their original entertainment via the web rather than coax.

Though I never had cable TV in the first place, I suppose I’m in this group.

The Story
We don’t watch a lot of anything around here. Friday night’s are “pizza and a movie” nights, weekends sometimes mean an RSL or Utah State Aggie game, but even still we were looking for a solution to some of those things we watched the most.

That solution was Roku.

Are there other options? Sure. But for $50, we got a streaming stick and it’s worked perfectly for our needs.

The Opportunity
And it seems we’re not along because last fall Roku reported selling their 10,000,000th device.

As I browsed the relatively few sports channels that were available, I saw almost nothing about skiing. So, I looked at what it would take and found that not only does Roku have a fairly straightforward API, and there are even a handful of services that make it even easier to get started.

In other words, even for the limited resources of ski areas, it wouldn’t be hard to get started.

The Gist
This reminds me of a time 5-6 years ago when the Ustreams and Justin.tv’s of the world were at there prime. Seeing millions of users there, I created nothing more than a 5-minute commercial for my business, used software to turn it into a neverending live stream, and pushed play.

Did my sales triple overnight? Of course not, but I did get a good bit of traffic and, yes, a few sales.

That’s what I see here. Extra distribution for your videos with, potentially, not a ton of extra work, with the bonus PR boost of being the first resort to do so.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.