VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

Deirdre · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 10:57 am Post subject: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Once upon a time, there was a pay-to-play VO operation called iPROexchange.
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Hart · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 11:20 am Post subject:

Once I bothered to register for the article: Interesting. Never heard of iPROvoice or iPROexchange before.

I suppose it would be a copyright violation to copy and paste the article huh?

B
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Frank F · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 11:38 am Post subject:

Well, I thought it interesting... if you want the name, it's available - according to ICANN.

From GoDaddy:

Deirdre · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 11:51 am Post subject:

This was the first pay-to-play site I ever tried lo those many years ago.

I got as much out of it as they got in the end.

Sorry about the "register-to-read" glitch. I found an ancient e-mail from those days and looked in Google to see what they were doing. I wasn't asked for a password when I first went to the article-- this time I was.

This is an info-mercial masqueading as "human interest".

Here's the first part, may God have mercy on my copyright-busting soul:

Hart · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 11:52 am Post subject:

I'm assuming that's because it's defunct.
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bobsouer · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 4:49 pm Post subject:

Deirdre · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 5:14 pm Post subject:

bobsouer · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 5:40 pm Post subject:

Hart · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 6:10 pm Post subject:

Bob,

Things got confusing there, I should have edited that. Frank mentioned that www.iprovoice.com and www.iproexchange.com are available. I was replying to Frank's comment by saying I assume that's because the company is out of business, and while I was typing that Deirdre posted in.

Congrats on #400!
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Brian Hart Productions

bobsouer · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 6:58 pm Post subject:

Brian,

No worries. Thanks for clearing up the confusion.
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Bob Souer (just think of lemons)
The second nicest guy in voiceover.
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lisaloo · Guest

For what it's worth, the owner of iPRO is a friend of mine. Good idea, great people. I never really discussed what happened to the business with him, but one guess would be that Voicebank may have been a factor. iPRO was developed in NY, and had a lot of support from the agents, casting and acting community int hat city. That said, I think that Voicebank may have made a bigger impression with the ad agencies and agents on a national level the year before - and using two such similar services may have proved impractical for many folks.

Voicebank did not charge individual talent to participate at the outset; rather, the majority of agent-represented VOs were listed there because the agent paid to subscribe. A plus for iPRO, however, was that talent could manage their own demos, and so on.

In a nutshell, the two services were similar but not identical, and although they both kept moving toward even greater similarity, in the end Voicebank probably had a bigger market share when it mattered most.

The impact of 9/11 on the commercial business in NY can't be overlooked, either. iPRO was really getting a foothold, and then . . . well, you know the rest. Some businesses survived the year or more that followed and some were casualties.

Again, this is mostly just speculation. Oh. It's also a fact that the owner also chose to make some "quality of life" changes for his young family -- so that could have been an issue, too.

Lisa L.

Deirdre · Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 7:37 am Post subject: