Worldwide Reggaetón

This time it's personal for the Otálvaro brothers.

With the help of VJ José Dávila (left), Antonio (second from left) and Noah Otálvaro (far right) have watched the number of monthly hits on their website, barrio305.com, increase fourfold since partnering with streaming media provider Brightcove.

For the last eight years, Noah and Francisco Otálvaro have helped their father, Carlos, build the family business, WallStreet*E.com, into one of the top five online brokerage firms in the United States. In their free time, the Miami-born brothers of Filipino-Colombian descent immerse themselves in Miami's Latino culture, where they discovered a burgeoning underground youth movement revolving around cars, women, and music. With the help of another brother, Antonio, a design school graduate and former art director for Colors magazine, the Otálvaros began posting videos on the Web to document the scene.

Using seed money from WallStreet*E, the three Otálvaro brothers amped up their web presence in January 2005, naming their new site Barrio305.com, a reference to Miami's area code. About the same time, the Puerto Rican reggaetón music scene exploded on the U.S. mainland, and Barrio305 was one of the first websites to capitalize on it by offering music videos and other original content to one of the fastest growing demographics in the U.S. — bilingual, bicultural Hispanics ages 14 to 30. “This is the first time something this big has happened in the Latino community, and we realized it pretty early,” says Noah, referring to the music genre that mixes Spanish-language hip-hop with complex Caribbean rhythms. “We happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

By July, Barrio305 was averaging more than 30,000 visitors a month. But the site's defining moment didn't come until last fall, when it became one of a handful of beta test sites for Brightcove, a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology company that hosts video and provides a syndication-based revenue model for web-video publishers. Using the Brightcove platform, Barrio305 is able to stream 480×360 video — roughly two-thirds the NTSC size.

Thanks in part to Brightcove's robust video platform, more than 145,000 online users pointed their web browsers to Barrio305 this February. From the beginning of the month to the end, the daily average of video viewed on the site jumped from 12,000 minutes a day to more than 30,000. And usage numbers show that visitors watch video segments longer on the site — an average of 12 to 13 minutes per viewing versus the industry norm of two to three minutes.

“Barrio305 is really all about providing programming to an underserved segment of the population,” Noah says. “Of course, it has to be something you're passionate about, particularly in the early days when you're not being funded.”