Lazada’s former Indonesia CEO has ditched ecommerce for this live video streaming site

“We’re different from YouTube because you dictate what’s going to happen,” explains Thomas Damek, founder of Zeemi.tv, which went live just last month in Jakarta. Zeemi.tv aims to be Indonesia’s first online stage for creating, watching, and interacting with live entertainment content.

“It’s quite captivating when you see it,” says Damek. “As the audience, you become part of the performance. So without you there, the performance would be different.”

Still in its beta phase, Zeemi.tv’s user experience is relatively straightforward. Once on the site, visitors may choose from a handful of popular channels and see which ones are streaming live at any given moment. After selecting a channel of interest, users can send messages to the live performers in a chatroom-style message box to ask questions or make requests about specific content.

All viewers are rewarded with a certain number of points that they can use to buy and send cute icons as gifts to performers as a way to show satisfaction. These gifts include adorable icons that range from everything including puppy dogs and roses to champagne glasses, cupcakes, and teddy bears.

Damek says Zeemi.tv will only broadcast live content, and only target Indonesians. “With it, you offer the audience [a chance] to be much closer to the stars than they normally would be,” he explains. Damek claims there is no way he would want to start another YouTube. Instead, he describes Zeemi.tv as an engagement tool, and a way for users to get a better entertainment experience.

Damek is also the co-founder and former CEO of Lazada Indonesia. Prior to that, he held staff positions at McKinsey & Company, Hero food and beverages, and JP Morgan Cazenove in London and Europe.

See: These two entrepreneurs are taking Indonesia’s TV shows global

A round about monetizing method

“We don’t force people to buy anything,” explains Damek. “But the gifts serve as an incentive for better content, and it’s actually one of the ways we plan to monetize.” The incentive for Zeemi.tv performers to create top-notch content is that all the gifts they receive from viewers can also be redeemed for real-life cash. Viewers will soon be able to pay for points that allow them to purchase the gifts (similar to buying the cute icon stickers on the popular chat app Line). They can also receive points for using services that fall under Zeemi.tv’s list of subsidies, like utilizing the service of a partnering telco vendor or making purchases with a partnering credit card brand.

Damek hopes Zeemi.tv will make money for itself by extracting a small percentage of the transaction each time a user buys points. He did not comment on the size of that percentage, or on how much money performers can earn per gift redemption. He explains, “whenever there’s a transaction we’ll take a bit, but then [we] hand the most of the money over to the users. We really want to enable people who are entertaining to make money.”

Damek claims that his competition is really anyone (not even necessarily in Indonesia) who creates live engagement. According to him, this ranges greatly and includes big names like Facebook and Buzzfeed, but can also be local radio and television stations. He says, “No one in Indonesia is doing directly what we’re doing. We have a lot of performers that range from crazy beatboxers to stand up comedians, musicians, singers, and indie artists. We also do a lot of things with local bands too.”

Keeping it clean