SuperSummit Launches Its Network For Live Events And Online Courses

SuperSummit, a London-based startup, today launched its platform for online live video interviews with experts out of beta after testing the service for a few months in Italy. During the beta, the company built a community of about 50,000 members and created over 300 hours of video interviews in English and Italian with the likes of Brad Fed, Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. All of this content can currently be accessed for free.

The early focus on Italy doesn’t come as a surprise, as founder Marco Montemagno is Italian. He previously hosted an interview show on Sky News for 12 years where he interviewed everybody from Jeff Bezos to Al Gore. Before that, he was a professional table tennis player, ranking third in Italy during his heyday, but it’s an easy guess that his experience with TV is what shaped the idea behind SuperSummit.

The company says its ultimate goal is to add disruption to the education market, but it also wants to offer an alternative to what it calls the “coldness and insularity of webinars” and the lack of interactivity associated with pre-recorded video courses.”

Presentation SuperSummit 2014

The team is mostly going after the lifelong learning sector market. The company believes it has found a gap in the market between basic online videos and massive open online courses (MOOCs). While SuperSummit doesn’t offer courses or degrees, it does give its users instant access to information from experts in a live conference format.

Besides the videos themselves, the team is also focussing on building a community around the content through live Q&As and discussions around the content that helps users interact with the videos in real time.

Looking ahead, SuperSummit aims to add content from businesses and advertisers to its platform as well. They will be able to host their own events on the platform (for a fee) and tap into the existing network of SuperSummit members. In return, the service will take care of the landing page, archiving, payment collection and video.

The company is hosting its first major event later this month — with a focus on presentation techniques — and will start hosting more of these live events at a regular pace after that.