Rooster Teeth

Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC., is a production company located mainly in Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, California. Founded by Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Geoff Ramsey, Jason Saldaña, Gus Sorola, and Joel Heyman in 2003. 1

Rooster Teeth began with the production of Red vs. Blue, which premiered in April 2003 and is still in production, making it the longest-running web series of all time. The company later branched out into live action shorts, series, comedy, and full animated productions. Other projects include reality shows, video game development, entertainment news programs and podcasts. In 2015, Rooster Teeth released its feature film debut Lazer Team, a science fiction action comedy. The company hosts an annual convention, RTX, in multiple cities around the world.

The company’s videos are regularly released on its own website and YouTube.

While attending the University of Texas at Austin, Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum collaborated with actor Joel Heyman on a 1997 independent film called The Schedule. Working for a local company named Telenetwork, Burns later met Geoff Ramsey (then named Geoff Fink), Gustavo Sorola, Dan Godwin, and Jason Saldaña, and the five formed drunkgamers.com, a website where the five reviewed various video games while drunk. Sorola and Burns said that the name change from ‘Drunk Tank Podcast’ to ‘Rooster Teeth Podcast’ was for the same reason that ‘Drunk Gamers’ was changed to ‘Rooster Teeth’: Nobody would give games or sponsor something with ‘drunk’ in the title “because it was so unprofessional.”

On October 4, 2004, Rooster Teeth publicly launched an online community and social networking website as a way to stay in touch with fans while maintaining their own platform for distribution. 2

Sponsorships To host their own videos, Rooster Teeth paid a co-location facility $13,000. The cost from server fees prompted Rooster Teeth to implement a site wide program called “Sponsorships” in 2003 which gave paying members access to content before being offered to the public, extra site features, and exclusive merchandise. 3

On July 1, 2016 the Sponsorship program was rebranded as “FIRST” and offered a new option to upgrade with such perks as: a 10% discount on all Rooster Teeth items, first access to live event VIP passes and a box of merchandise carrying a value more than $60. 4

References


  1. How Red vs. Blue Built an Empire and Invented a Whole Genre↩︎
  2. Rooster Teeth Five Years↩︎
  3. Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns on pioneering online-only video↩︎
  4. Rooster Teeth Expands SVOD Play↩︎
Last updated byAnonymous on March 10, 2020
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