I love finding services that bring value to small businesses. Viewbix falls squarely into that category.
ViewBix comes from the founders of Qoof, who gave agencies and advertisers a way to easily create interactive videos. The need for customization, however, tended to bring a lot of friction to the selling process.
For SMBs, it was pretty much completely out of scope. This was frustrating for Qoof’s founders, who were noticing growing demand in that vertical. → Read More
At F8 on Thursday, The Social Network will by all accounts be making its official foray into music, with scrobbling and music content galore headed straight for our news feeds. Ahead of Facebook’s new music service, Vimeo is announcing its own musical news, thank you very much, that has some interesting implications for artists and filmmakers and music technology. You may know Vimeo as the quality YouTube alternative that’s long been a place for semi-pro videographers, filmmakers, and Vloggers to host, share, and present their video content. Today, Vimeo is taking its long-awaited leap into the music world with the “Vimeo Music Store” — a custom-designed music licensing solution that will allow Vimeo’s video buffs to search for, discover, and license songs for both non-commercial and limited commercial use. → Read More
Turkish courts have famously banned video sharing juggernaut YouTube several times since March 2007. The site still isn’t accessible, despite the fact that Turkey’s president Abdullah Gül used his Twitter account last June to express disapproval of the country’s blocking of YouTube. Gül at the time said he had instructed officials to find legal ways of allowing access.
But now we’re getting multiple tips about Turkey imposing a new ban on video sharing site Vimeo (an IAC company), and chatter on Twitter suggests this is in fact the case – see #censorshipinturkey and #vimeo for more. → Read More
Roku is on a tear lately. After launching the Flixster movie trailer channel a few weeks back, the Vimeo channel will hit the channel list later day today, making it the 50th streaming video channel on the network. And what a great service to bring to the device. Vimeo might not be as popular as other video sharing sites, but its content is superb. There are really nice videos Vimeo from a wide range of users and they’re available for viewing in their full HD glory on your HDTV via a Roku media device. → Read More
Media search and discovery site MeFeedia this morning released its first State of the Vlogosphere report since 2007. The main take-away: video blogs have exploded since the last update, but most vloggers stick to the best known video hosting sites for distribution and promotion purposes.
No surprises there, but since MeFeedia’s video search engine self-reportedly tracks over 30,000 video sources across the Web, the company slapped some interesting numbers on the most apparent trends. → Read More
Every minute, approximately 20 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube, so it won’t surprise you if I say that it’s impossible for any human being to watch everything on there in the span of one lifetime – provided anyone would even want to.
The standard of quality of videos that are uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing platforms like Vimeo or Blip.tv is subject to debate, as is the ability for the operators of the websites to put in such good filters that the best videos across a variety of categories get featured rather than the most popular (most viewed) only.
VidQue, for one, aims to build a better mousetrap by applying what you could refer to as a social filter to videos shared online. → Read More
The lack of Flash support on the iThings (i.e. phone, touch) and all but one Android device has made it rather difficult for Flash-based video sites to penetrate the ever-expanding smartphone video-consuming market. While YouTube has implemented a workaround for this problem (by encoding each uploaded video in both Flash AND as .mp4 files), other sites (arguably with less resources) have been much slower to rollout a fix while waiting for Adobe and Co. to get this mess straightened out. That was, until today. → Read More
It is early days for HD video on the Web, but already we are starting to see jostling for position in this nascent part of the Web video market. Less than two months after YouTube started streaming high-definition videos in a major way, CEO Chad Hurley is now claiming bragging rights as the biggest HD video site on the Web. At a panel today at Davos, he said:
We feel we have the largest library of HD video on the Internet.
If you look at YouTube’s HD category, five pages with about 100 HD videos come up. Hulu’s HD gallery, in contrast, only has six videos. Vimeo’s HD gallery has 178 videos. But CBS has at least 1,000 (and it is not clear how many of those are on YouTube in HD quality). → Read More
YouTube has been criticized in the past for not offering the experience already being offered on services like Viddler or Vimeo where users can upload large file sizes and input video information while it’s being uploaded. But in an announcement that should make its users happy, YouTube has finally seen the light and has started offering a new Upload process redesign that will more effectively compete with other services in the space.
According to the company, the new video uploader, which has been in private beta for some time, is now available to any users who wish to opt-in. Once users opt-in to the new uploader, they will quickly find that they can input metadata like the clip’s name, description, and tags while it’s uploading, as well as upload multiple videos at once to streamline the uploading process. More importantly, the new YouTube uploader will allow users to upload files up to 1GB in size, instead of its previous 100MB limit. → Read More
The Chronicle Project over on Vimeo took Nikon’s latest DSLR, the D90, and pitted its HD video capability against a true, $5200 high-def camcorder, the Panasonic HVX200. It’s a tad surprising that while the HVX does beat out the D90 in resolution and clarity, the D90 has better color depth and an overall fine picture. Camera geeks will point out that both pictures could be better with proper white balancing, a lens hoods, and a VR lens on the D90, but you really should check out the video ’cause it does a great job illustrating the point of these new DSLR’s can record great HD. Jump over to Vimeo to see the HD version - after all, the video is comparing HD cameras. → Read More
Pandora.TV, South Korea’s largest user generated video site, is expanding into new markets with additional language support and features. Pandora.TV launched in 2004 and has grown to become the “YouTube of Korea,” ranking as the countries 24th most popular site according to Alexa (comScore data is not available) with 20 million monthly unique visitors, 2.5 billion monthly page views with 2.5 million hosted videos. Notably the company has taken $16 million over two rounds from Altos Ventures and DCM, said to be the largest foreign investment made in a Korean internet startup. Pandora.TV offers a mix of YouTube style videos and Live streaming. Like YouTube, videos can be embedded, voted upon and comments left on each page. A key selling point is unlimited video storage. As of today Pandora.TV is now available in English, Chinese, Japanese as well as its native Korean. New features rolled out with the international expansion include HD quality video playback (H.264 codec support), multiple video upload (up to 5 files simultaneously), unlimited category creation and site widgets. Pandora.TV has also claimed cross-browser support as a new feature, however the Live Streaming service requires a download to view and stream that is only available to Windows users. CrunchBase Information Pandora.TV YouTube Vimeo DailyMotion Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Jakob Lodwick, the co-founder of IAC owned video site Vimeo, left the company today. The reason? Apparently Lodwick didn’t see eye to eye with the IAC brass on creative issues, and specifically had a run in with IAC chief Barry Diller three weeks ago. That’s not surprising, given the picture Lodwick chose to include with his goodbye post. A source close to Lodwick says “he was let go.” Lodwick’s girlfriend, Julia Allison (who made a scandal at our August Capital party last summer – see video here), wrote a blog post saying “Dear Jakob, I wish I hadn’t found out you left the company you’ve been with for the last seven years from your blog. Love, Julia.” Lots of drama out in NYC this evening. CrunchBase Information Vimeo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
New figures released by comScore show that YouTube remains the outright leader in online video. Based on videos viewed, Google owned sites (YouTube + Google Video, but mostly YouTube) commanded a 28.3% market share in the United States in September with Fox Interactive Media (FIM) sites (MySpace and others) on 4.2%. The figures (see chart) demonstrate that YouTube doesn’t dominate video viewing as much as would be expected, suggesting that the long tail is alive and well in the sector given the top ten video sites only hold 45.2% of all videos viewed online. The unique viewer numbers for video destinations also show Google leading, but by a smaller margin of 39.4% vs 22.6% for FIM sites. These figures are for people visiting the actual video sites themselves suggesting that much of YouTube’s dominance comes not from YouTube.com itself, but from people embedding YouTube videos (28.3% of all videos viewed vs 4.2% for FIM). Notable in its absence from both top ten charts is the IAC owned Vimeo, who according to this post fired founder Jakob Lodwick today. Clearly Vimeo isn’t performing although it has positioned itself well with support for HD video. IAC usually takes long term positions in companies it owns (Ask.com for example) so it’s not on Deadpool watch yet but you’d expect IAC will be looking at ways of improving its performance going forward. CrunchBase Information YouTube MySpace Vimeo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Fast growing movie-centered social network Flixster has been making the rounds with potential buyers, we’ve heard from multiple sources. And IAC may have submitted a letter of intent in the last week or so. The San Francisco based company has had a meteoric rise since launching in January 2006, although Comscore suggests growth has stagnated over the last few months – worldwide unique visitors went from just over 12 million in May 2007 to just 8.4 million in September, a drop of about 30%. Compete and Alexa show a similar decline beginning in May, but with a subsequent full recovery and then some. IAC’s offer, we’ve heard, may value the company at $150 million. However, IAC has a tendency to do complicated investment deals where they get a minority or majority stake in the business v. an outright acquisition. They own a majority stake College Humor/Vimeo (same parent company) and GarageGames, and a minority stake (rumored at 25%) in iLike through an investment by subsidiary Ticketmaster. Flixster may not be very interested in a partial buyout, but interest from IAC could lead others to enter a bid, too. More on this as it develops. CrunchBase Information Flixster CollegeHumor Vimeo GarageGames iLike Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I’ve been tracking a number of sites that offer flickr-like services for video. I’ve taken a look at as many of these services that I could find. The most well known is YouTube, which we profiled in August and which recently raised venture money from Sequoia. But there are at least eight others worth looking at as well. In addition to YouTube, these are CastPost, ClipShack, DailyMotion, Grouper, OurMedia, Revver, Vimeo and vSocial. Instead of writing individual profiles on each of these, I’ve created a quick chart that give a basic overview of the features. I’ve included only those companies that provide a web-based (v. client) service that hosts the videos on your behalf. Because of these requirements, great services like VideoEgg (profile) are not included. Here’s the chart. I’ll update it as needed. Most of these companies convert video to Flash. This reduces file size significantly and also allows most platforms and browsers to easily view the content. Two, Vimeo and DailyMotion, convert files to quicktime instead. A couple do not convert the files at all. One benefit of those services which do not convert is that the files can be downloaded by others, emailed, etc. QuickTime format can also be downloaded. One service that has a unique feature is Revver. Much like FruitCast for podcasts, Revver will auto-insert advertisements directly into your videos and share revenue with you. A couple of additional notes. Grouper has not launched their video publishing product yet. When it does launch there is a good chance it will involve a client download which would remove them from this list. Also, while I’ve noted which services allow tagging of videos, there are a wide variety of tagging options within these services, and many of them also provide comments, rankings, etc. and which are not noted in the chart. Finally, the tools to allow blogging, friends lists and other sharing are varied and more useful in some products than others. Which product is best for you depends on what types of features are most important to you. UPDATE: I’ve updated the chart above with more information. People have left great comments and have included new companies I’ve missed. If you are associated with those companies, please email me relevant information and I’ll include it in the chart. The most interesting comment is from Vinu, who tells us that he heard a rumor that Flickr will → Read More
