Treemo to build a home for concerned multimedia producers

The growth of user generated multimedia doesn’t appear set to slow down any time soon and new company launches in this space don’t either. For those interested in combining photos, video, audio and text in one community the newest entry to the space is today’s launch of Seattle, Washington’s Treemo. Revenue sharing, Creative Commons licensing and a hardware recycling program are the key points of differentiation so far. People unhappy with the corporate influence on other sites and who are heavy mobile users are liable to like Treemo.

The company, known prior to launch as HyperMob, is made up of executives with extensive experience in mobile technology. Much of the site will be cemented if and when it builds up a critical mass of users, but there are some basic qualities that make it stand out now.

Treemo has all the standard content sharing community features but will differentiate itself with revenue sharing and a socially responsible twist. The site enables both desktop and mobile uploading and Oliver over at MobileCrunch has a review of the mobile angle today. Mobile is particularly important at Treemo as the site offers a mobile browsing application in xHTML and converts videos to 3GP mobile format.

Users can chose whether to allow advertising on video and audio pages and receive part of the revenue derived therein or decide to keep ads off their video pages. Company founder Brent Brookler told me that revenue sharing will start once a critical mass is reached and that the split will probably be 50/50. Beyond advertising revenue, some sort of premium service level (as yet unannounced) will be made available.

There’s also drag and drop file management, flash embedding and public or friends network permission levels.

While Flickr has a 20MB monthly upload limit on free accounts, and YouTube has a single video file limit of 100MB, Tremeo’s monthly limit is 200MB and 20MB for a video file. Good for photographers and very short video suitable for mobiles. There’s a 1 GB total storage maximum.

The biggest way that Treemo is likely to draw users is through the social responsibility angle. It’s based in the Pacific Northwest, hotbed of liberal geeks. There’s full support for Creative Commons licensing. Cameras can be donated through Treemo to a variety of 501c3 organizations for aspiring student photographers and thus be written off at tax time. Treemo gives three months of premium service in exchange for the donations and puts an icon next to user names of people who have donated. Mobile phones can be donated through Treemo via Ripmobile in exchange for coupons at a variety of electronics stores. Treemo will also launch a series of contests targeting “socially conscious” multimedia content producers soon.

There’s not yet a way to export your files from Treemo, but I urged the company’s founder to make it as easy as possible and he assured me that there would be at least some way to do so soon.

As an increasing number of users from the dominant media sharing communities grow dissatisfied with the corporate influence on those sites, and as user generated multimedia proliferates, I think that some number of people are liable to like Treemo’s approach of enabling them to turn off ads or share in revenue, apply CC licenses to their work and participate in a community dealing with the huge issue of e-waste.