Extract from an interview with Will Rowe from Protein.

Extract from an interview conducted with Will Rowe, founder of the Protein brand that is currently evolving to embrace both ProteinTV.com and the news feed ninfomania.com. Ninfomania was Protein's first offspring, starting as a feed to just fourteen and has grown organically to become one of the most highly regarded feeds on the net for the astute 'techno generation'.

Will talks here on the dynamics of the inception of the Protein brand, the strategies required to be maintain an 'independent' operation and digital futures. The all-new and improved Protein platform will house a cross sectional plethora of news feed and experimental digital shorts from the most progressive visual terrorists from across the planet. Sign up now at Protein.com.

M: How did Protein come about?
W: The first project was really the news feed 'ninfomania', which started in Dublin. The first incarnation was a web site, which I soon realised I couldn't manage and maintain. So I set the feed up as an email. The whole concept of Protein as an organisation, whether it is ProteinTV or the news feed, is all the same - to cut through all the information and content out there. I was sat on this pipe in Ireland getting all these feeds and thought that it would be nice to get just one - really short and sharp. It would come to me on a Friday afternoon and cover everything that I wanted to read about from that week. That was it, so I put it together and sent it to fourteen people - basically my mates and those who I knew would be into it. The first one was three press releases that I just hacked together. From that it was getting forwarded to mates of mates of mates. The mates of those mates however, were getting annoyed that they were being asked each time when the next one was coming out, so they forwarded their e-mail address to me and a mailing list emerged. It got to the point when they were forwarding it to their whole mailing lists. The scene started to grow in that organic, viral kind of way.

M: And ProteinTV, how did that channel come about?
W: Basically from the feed. Protein evolved into this brand that housed all the projects. We knew streaming was coming up and we were in a fortunate enough position to do something about it. We approached the ICA, which had just got all the kit in from Sun Microsystems, but nobody was using it. We had the people, all we needed to do was bring them in. We pooled all the content from the people on the news feed, through which we were promoting their film festivals (ResFest). Then we thought, about how we were going to present and structure it. Then this comes back to Marcus. He wanted a little desktop video screen, so that when he was working he could just fire up this little stream and view it from his peripheral vision. It wasn't really MTV it was subtler. A bit of music video, then a bit of streamed art that you could subliminally consume but in a linear format, as opposed to clicking things. We basically did that every month, kind of like a magazine. We got loads of press out of it, because we were the first in the UK to do it. There were lots of people streaming, but nobody was taking the now broadband approach to it. We were able to promote the channel through the news feed, and the news feed through the channel.

With this whole evolution, how the market has changed and how the Internet has grown up, then the question becomes how to make money out of it. We've spoken to lots of guys, loads of money on the table but there was something to me that didn't make sense. You spend five years building something that is yours and it's your baby {in respect to the news feed}. I want management control otherwise you just loose it… Continuing on about integrity. That is what makes me get up in the morning. If that gets lost, then you have lost everything. That's what I fight for and that's what keeps the focus.

M: And with broadband, will you be in a position to take advantage of its introduction? Is it an expensive proposition for an 'independent'?
W: ProteinTV was always effectively a broadband site from its inception, yet was able to work from a 33K modem. Now we can do it through a 2MB pipe, we can deliver all the trimmings. Equally it's about being realistic in the approach, taking it step by step. We've very much taken a more chilled approach.

We're not in for the short game, which is really what the other guys are doing from a more commercial angle. So from that perspective, we are keeping it really focused and tight. We do it right and we do it right each time…it all comes down to the brand and making that brand 'stick'. People know that we've been there since 1995 and that means something to a lot of people beyond brand awareness.

M: And the future for the net?
W: The future is always going to be students and open source. That's what makes the Internet. You can't contain that whole underground movement and it's going to shift towards that as the bigger sites start to stake their territory and start imposing more commercial realities.

M: And any thoughts for the future?
W: Broadband is definitely the future, it always has been…You might get a better connection, but the site you surf to is equally dependent upon a server and how fast that connection is. It's really about understanding how the Internet works, the fundamental core packet switching, routers, modem racks and all that tech. That's how we got ProteinTV to work through a 33K modem. We knew what made the stream work and maximised the cable.

To conclude. Firstly, you can never know enough 'tech' and secondly, you can never have enough bandwidth - and that's life. It's exciting to learn about and to read about because it's all converging organically, organic computing and bio-technology, but within a computer space.