The long, sad tale of video site Veoh seemed to be in its final chapter when founder Dmitry Shapiro declared the company was filing for bankruptcy back in February. The copyright litigation with Universal Music Group proved to be too costly and too distracting, even though Veoh won a summary judgement in its favor. But hours before Veoh was actually about to file the bankruptcy papers, an unlikely suitor appeared: a seed-stage startup in Los Angeles called Qlipso.
Qlipso ended up buying the assets of Veoh, including its Website, filtering, recommendation, and backend technology, video library, advertising deals, and still-substantial audience. ComScore estimates that 14 million people a month still visit Veoh. Qlipso, on the other hand, is a startup developing a virtual room platform where people can share videos and other Flash media, while chatting via text, video chat or avatars. I spoke with Qlipso CEO Jon Goldman by phone today to ask what possessed him to do the deal. → Read More
Editor’s note The following guest post was written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo.
Yesterday’s final implosion of video site Veoh, which declared bankruptcy after burning through $70 million of venture capital, was a long time coming. A lot of so-called smart money went into Veoh: investors included Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Intel’s venture arm, Spark Capital and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. And it was hardly an isolated incident. Joost, another high-flying video startup launched by the founders of Skype, went through $45M in VC money before ending up in a fire sale. Who’s next? → Read More
As video sites on the Web struggle to find a business model that will pay their mounting bandwidth and storage bills, many of them are trying to reinvent themselves. Veoh, which has raised a total of $70 million, had to cut 35 percent of its staff earlier this month and the site seems to be losing steam. Unique visitors are down 18 percent from their high a year ago to 15.2 million worldwide, and users of its desktop app VeohTV are down 40 percent to 7.2 million worldwide, according to comScore (see chart below).
Founder Dmitry Shapiro is now back as CEO and he is pouring the company’s remaining energy into a new product launched six weeks ago called Video Compass (read our review). Since launch, it has been downloaded 800,000 times, and is currently being downloaded at a rate of 25,000 a day. Video Compass may amount to a Hail Mary pass to try to save the company. It is an attempt to spread video search across the Web by bringing you search results when you don’t even know you are looking for videos.
The way it does this is through a browser add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer that is triggered whenever you do a search on a growing list of sites, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and even YouTube. In the past few days, it just added Twitter Search, MySpace, Hulu, DailyMotion, and Metacafe. Up next will be Flickr, Photobucket, and Facebook. → Read More
In the world of Web video, either you are YouTube or you are in trouble. Today, well-funded video site Veoh laid off 25 people, the company confirmed today. The layoffs were brought on by a restructuring, as the company shifts focus away from its standalone site, says founder and now-reinstated CEO Dmitry Shapiro. Shapiro replaces former CEO Steve Mitgang. With both today’s layoffs and cutbacks last November, the company is now left with 45 employees, says Shapiro. We have added the latest round to our Layoff Tracker.
Shapiro says that the company is doubling down on its video search browser plug-in, Video Compass, in an effort to engage consumers with videos at times when they wouldn’t normally be watching them. Video Compass adds a video recommendations whenever you conduct a search on Google or elsewhere on the Web. Veoh adds over 25,000 new Video Compass users daily. Veoh’s standalone video playing site is having difficulty competing with the bigger players in the game like YouTube and Hulu. Still Shapiro maintains that Veoh’s site remains popular among consumers, generating more than 200 million video streams each month from content publishers such as ABC, CBS, ESPN, Viacom, and Warner Bros. Comscore says Veoh’s site had 15 million unique views worldwide in February 2009, down from 18 million last August, plus another 7.2 million for its VeohTV app, which has also been losing viewers (see chart below). Shapiro says that the site alone reaches over 23 million unique users each month.
So what went wrong? Shapiro says that the video search business model is still immature. → Read More
Live video on the Web is starting to take off, judging by the massive jump in traffic that Justin.tv is witnessing. According to comScore, the live video site’s global audience saw a massive jump from 9.3 million unique visitors in January to 15 million in February, which is about the same number of people who went to Veoh and nearly twice as many as visited Hulu.com. Of course, Hulu is only available in the U.S., where it is fourth most popular video site, and its videos are watched on other sites as well. In the U.S., ComScore only shows Justin.tv attracting 1.4 million people in February. So most of its audience and growth is global, with particular strength in Spain, Brazil, Germany, and the UK.
Quantcast, which directly measures all three sites, shows a similar trend. Globally, Justin.tv has 22.1 million monthly uniques, compared to 15.8 million for Hulu, and 11.9 million for Veoh. While the U.S. numbers are 3.9 million for Justin.tv, 14 million for Hulu, and 4 million for Veoh. (Ustream.tv seems to be the second-largest live video streaming site with 6.7 million global monthly visitors and 1.4 million in the U.S.). These are all site numbers, Quantcast also measures “network” numbers which presumably includes videos embedded elsewhere, and those are about double the site stats for each service. Justin.tv itself claims 1,800 percent year-over-year growth in unique visitors based on its internal Google Analytics numbers. → Read More
Things are not going well for Universal Music Group’s in its lawsuit against video-sharing site Veoh. First, the Los Angeles judge, A. Howard Matz, ruled last month that the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act do apply to the case, contrary to UMG’s request for summary judgment.
On Monday, Veoh scored another point in the preliminary legal sparring that always precedes the main event. The same judge threw out the part of the complaint that named Veoh’s investors as defendants in the suit. UMG had tried to argue that Shelter Capital, Spark Capital, and Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company were guilty of “vicarious copyright infringement” and “inducement of copyright infringement” (yes, those are actual crimes) because they effectively control the company and sit on its board. → Read More
Popular video site Veoh has just released a new version of its browser plugin, Veoh Video Compass. The plugin, which is available for Firefox 3 and IE7, presents a selection of videos relevant to your search queries and the pages you browse in an unobtrusive ribbon at the top of your browser. It’s a nifty feature that seems to work pretty well, effectively adding a video search to compliment whatever you’re looking at on the web.
At launch Video Compass works on Google, Yahoo, and most popular search engines, using your search query to suggest videos and related queries. The plugin is also gradually adding support for contextual matching, which tries to identify keywords on the page you’re browsing and offers related videos. Right now the feature works on selected portions of Amazon, Best Buy, WalMart, Wikipedia, and IMDB.com, and the company plans to continually add more. → Read More
For those Web companies that comply by it, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is turning out to be their best friend. Last week, Universal Music Group (UMG) was denied a summary judgment by a Los Angeles court in its copyright infringement case against Veoh. (Court order embedded below). UMG wanted a summary judgment against Veoh, arguing that it could not hide behind the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, which state that Web services are not liable for the copyright infringement of its users if it takes certain steps to prevent it.
This is the second time a summary judgment has been denied to a company trying to sue Veoh for copyright infringement. (The last time it was a porn company). These orders are setting important legal precedents not just for Veoh, but for YouTube and others also facing DMCA lawsuits. → Read More
Here is the stark reality of online video: nobody is making much money and the enthusiastic projections for online video advertising going from $500 million in 2008 to more than $5 billion in five years will undoubtedly be pared back in the coming weeks as analysts revisit their numbers. (Those numbers are from August—eMarketer).
The writing is already on the wall. YouTube is resorting to selling off video search results to the sexiest bidder and just today announced that it is extending overlay ads in YouTube Partner videos to embedded videos on other sites (previously these would only show up on YouTube itself). It is pulling out all the stops to try to get those revenues flowing. Meanwhile, smaller video startups such as Veoh and Revsion3 have already cut back on staff and shows in order to survive.
There is plenty of video inventory, just not a lot that advertisers want. And even the videos produced and distributed online by the TV networks are bringing in only a fraction of the advertising dollars that they do on regular TV. NBC CEO Jeff Zucker’s fear that the Web will turn “analog dollars” into “digital pennies is coming true. According to Dean Denhart, the CEO of BlackArrow (a company that provides an ad-management system for on-demand video across both cable and the Web), mainstream video fetches an average of about 50-cents per thousand viewers per hour watched on broadcast and cable TV, compared to 5 cents per thousand viewers per hour watched for the same video on the Web. → Read More
Owners of the SanDisk Cruzer line of flash drives might be interested to learn that its now possible to launch the Veoh Web Player directly from the U3 interface that pops up when the drive is inserted into a USB port. You can use the Veoh software to schedule and download various types of web video directly to your Cruzer drive to create and ever-changing, on-the-go content library. The Veoh feature will be available on new Cruzer flash drives and can also be installed separately onto existing Cruzer drives by going to www.sandisk.com/veoh and downloading an update. Full press release after the jump. → Read More
Online video site Veoh is laying off 20 people, or 18% of its staff of 110. The move comes a month after Paidcontent reported layoffs in Veoh’s Russian office in St. Petersburg, which CEO Steve Mitgang says was a strategic decision rather than a financial one, as Veoh wanted to move its development staff to San Diego (where it has hired a replacement team).
This round is more of a financial move, given the new economic reality. The company insists that it is still strong on a financial front, and expects to be profitable next year, although CEO Mitgang admits profitability could be pushed out a quarter. Despite the somber news, he is confident Veoh will emerge as one of the few surviving video sites in what will no doubt be a coming shakeout. → Read More
This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.
But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.
After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573 → Read More
Without much fanfare, Joost has finally turned on the browser version of its Web video service, as we noted it would last month. The new site is all based on Flash, and lets you watch old Bruce Lee flicks, Sci-Fi movies like The Fifth Element, and clips from Barely Political and Comedy Central.
The Flash site comes almost exactly a year after I wrote a post pointing out that Joost’s peer-to-peer software approach would not work and that it would have to switch over to Flash-based video, just like every other Web video service. People don’t want to have to launch a new piece of software to watch video on their computers. They want to watch it in their browsers (so they can quickly surf to another page when they realize how much the video they are watching sucks—or, if it doesn’t suck, quickly switch tabs when the boss walks by their desk).
It took Joost a year, but it has finally realized that the Web is where it’s at. Now all it has to do is compete with Hulu, YouTube, Veoh, DailyMotion, and the hundred other video sites out there. → Read More
Attorneys representing online video sites around the country are salivating today over the Veoh summary judgment decision (I know this because I’ve spoken to a few of them). In a nutshell, here’s what we learned today: If you take reasonable precautions against copyrighted materials on your service, you may be ok. And oh yeah, if you are going to get sued, try to get sued in federal court in northern California, because the judges there are a lot more Internet-friendly than some other federal judges we’ve seen.
Specifically, the court said that online video sites are protected under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA if they: → Read More
Finally, a judge who may have actually visited the Internet once or twice before deciding a case. Judge Howard Lloyd, a judge on the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, threw out adult entertainment company IO Group’s 2006 copyright infringement case against Veoh today. At the time Veoh had some user-uploaded porn on its service that belonged to IO Group. Despite quick takedowns from DMCA notices, IO Group sued anyway. → Read More
If behavioral targeting is the great hope for display advertising on the Web, can it work for videos as well? Web video startup Veoh thinks it can and is bringing its behavioral targeting advertising program out of beta today. The ads are targeted at one of nine groups, including viewers interested in action videos, cars, pop culture, sci fi, anime, and family fare. Veoh groups viewers into these interest groups based on their past viewing, searching, browsing, tagging, and commenting activities on the site. The ad-targeting technology uses some of the same underlying algorithms as its recommendation engine, and were both developed by chief scientist Ted Dunning. He previously built the recommendation engine at MusicMatch (later bought by Yahoo) and credit-card fraud detection algorithms at ID Analytics. The company claims that during the beta, ads that were behaviorally targeted performed twice as good as ads that were not. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to make ads work on Web video—from YouTube to VideoEgg. A big issue is the quality of the video inventory out there. Many advertisers don’t want to risk associating their brands and products with user-generated video. That includes a large portion of the 100 million videos a month watched on Veoh. Also, for behavioral targeting to really work, it needs to be done at Internet scale. Veoh not only needs to prove that it can provide better response rates to its video ads, but that it has a large enough inventory of advertiser-safe videos to matter. To do that, it would have to somehow monitor video-watching behavior beyond its own site (which it could do via partnership agreements) and become more of an overall video ad network. It would then have to make sure it doesn’t get tangled up in some of the privacy issues that behavioral targeting for display ads are running into. Veoh raised $30 million in June (bringing its total capital raised to $70). Update: Here’s a video interview from BeetTV with Veoh founder Dmitry Shapiro. It is from last month when Veoh announced its last round of funding, but about 1:45 in he starts talking about advertising and how they do targeting. Like everyone, Veoh is experimenting with a lot of different types of ad units (display banners, pre-rolls, post-rolls, overlays, sponsorship, etc.), but says “you just need to be smart about what you show to whom. I think that is really → Read More
Today, Intel Capital announced new investments in eight startups totaling $60 million. Below is each company, along with the size of the round they just raised. (Not all would disclose when I asked during the conference call). And while Intel led most of the investments it was not the sole investor, so the total adds up to more than $60 million. Accertify (fraud management for online transactions): $4 million round. Grid Net (energy management and smart grids for consumers): size not disclosed, but GE Capital and Catamount Ventures also invested. HealthiNation (online health videos): did not disclose. Internet Mall (Czech-based online retailer targeting Central Europe): $45 million (28 million Euros). TOA Technologies (mobile workforce management): $13 million Veoh Networks (Web video): $30 million Vostu (Ning-like social network for Latin America): $1.3 million seed round. Vriti Infocom (education marketplace in India): did not disclose. Intel was the only investor → Read More
Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel. TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn and in front of DateHookup. I am not exactly sure what to make of that. I guess Compete thinks we’re hot. CrunchBase Information YouPorn Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
