After years of hype, virtual reality is finally coming to your living room, and soon. Like, in a couple months soon. That's when Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony Morpheus will all be released, which means the time for VR to emerge as a medium is finally at hand.
But even if the hardware is finally consumer-ready, what will we actually watch when we strap on those bulky headsets?
That's the question a VR startup called Jaunt is trying to answer. And as you might imagine, the answer seems pretty valuable: On Monday, Jaunt announced a new round of funding led by The Walt Disney Company for $66 million.
Essentially, Jaunt is trying to build everything but the headsets themselves, which it's leaving to the Oculuses of the world. Instead, it's working out how to get movies, TV shows, news broadcasts, and live events to all the various VR devices that's will ship in the coming years.
It has built cameras to shoot in 360-degrees, software to make those files work on any viewing device, an app to bring it to mobile (where the company's fastest growing audience is), and a fully-fledged studio to make VR films. Now, it's looking for partners to use those resources to fill the Jaunt ecosystem with the content they make.
"We want to be one of the few bookmarks in the VR world," Jaunt CEO Jens Christensen told BuzzFeed News.
A partnership with ABC News — announced just last week — is an example of what Jaunt intends to do. For ABC's inaugural VR broadcast, Jaunt gave a news team one of the early versions of its "Neo" camera to bring to Syria and record an immersive broadcast from Damascus. The results can now be streamed on the Jaunt app — available for free on iOS or Android — for anyone with Google Cardboard, or any other device that turns a smartphone into a virtual reality viewer, or on a browser at ABC's website.
"We need to partner to have a meaningful content library," explained Christensen. "They can go off and do the filming and then use our platform."
That's why this round of funding — Jaunt's Series C — is so important. It is, in Christensen's words, a "strategic round." A way to pick who it's going to partner with, and a way for companies — like Disney, CAA, and Axel Springer SE — to get in before VR takes off. For Jaunt, the investments are a way to solidify partnerships before they happen, and create the foundation for a pipeline to fill its ecosystem with. For companies like Disney, they answer where, if (or, more likely, when) it starts to work in virtual reality, it's going to put that content.