Online video is growing up, and so are the young video stars who first found an audience on YouTube like Fred (Lucas Cruikshank) and iJustine. Both are part of the Collective Digital Studio, a talent management company of sorts for Web video stars. Today, the Collective is announcing an exclusive distribution deal with Blip.tv on behalf of its video artists, who can opt into the deal. Other Collective video producers signing up with Blip.tv include The Annoying Orange and Freddie W.
The addition of the Collective’s videos to Blip.tv’s arsenal is significant. Blip.tv is currently serving about 300 million video views a month. The Web shows that the Collective is bringing to the table attract about 200 million views a month. There is some slight overlap, but Blip.tv CEO Michael Hudack expects the deal will help Blip cross the 500 million views per month line by the end of the year. → Read More
YouTube is now showing approximately 3 billion videos a day. A growing proportion of those are shown with ads—more than 2 billion a week—and YouTube as a business is expected to pass $1 billion in revenue next year.
But when it comes to making money, some videos do better than others. For YouTube, it is all about scale, and networks of loosely aligned online video producers scale better than individual shows and viral-video phenoms. In fact, there is a brand new department inside YouTube called Networks. The purpose of the department is encourage the formation of these outside networks which then use YouTube as their distribution channel. → Read More
Blip.tv started five years ago with a focus on helping budding video producers manage and distribute their shows across the Web. Slowly but surely, though, it’s become a video destination in its own right with 3 billion cumulative video views—currently closing in on one billion a quarter. In light of that growth, it is now fully embracing its destiny as a video destination with a redesign that puts the most popular blip.tv Web series front and center.
In the exclusive video interview above, CEO Mike Hudack takes us through the new look and features of the site. When you go to blip.tv, the first thing you see now is a grid of tiles for popular Web series. As you mouse over each one, you can view the latest show from that series in the main player on the home page, or click through for a more immersive experience. → Read More
Online TV network blip.tv today announced the closing of its third round of institutional capital, which effectively more than doubles the amount of money the company has secured to date. The Series C round was led by Canaan Partners and existing investors Bain Capital Ventures.
The company says it will use its new funding to accelerate the growth of the independent Web shows that the network hosts and distributes, expand its content services team, grow its international advertising sales force and develop new products for both viewers and producers. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan. Previously, he wrote about the State of Online Video, and 12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising. In part 3 today, he examines how videos are found and consumed online. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo , a producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 110 million streams since 2006.
To try to understand—let alone guess—the future of video advertising, one needs to start by looking at the biggest trend in media over the past few decades. In November 2006, Bear Stearns Cable and Satellite analyst Spencer Wang published a study called “Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment”. While Bear Stearns has since been acquired by JP Morgan and is now a mere footnote in business books, the study’s findings are more relevant than ever. Let’s examine 8 key factors behind online video consumption → 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
Did you know that Failblog serves up 22 million video views per month, and Engadget gets at least 2.3 million monthly views for its gadget videos, while Joystiq gets another 2 million? All three blogs use Viddler, which is now selling ads directly for its top content providers though its just-launched Viddler AdWorks. Advertisers can see a directory of the top three dozen video producers on Viddler and buy ads on their videos (overlay, pre-roll, and post-roll).
Viddler is selling ads against 30 million views a month collectively from those top producers, out of a total of 36 million views for all the videos uploaded to Viddler. Failblog, which puts up videos of pratfalls and people acting stupidly, on its own accounts for 73 percent of Viddler’s video ad inventory, and is a big reason Viddler’s total views have gone from 10 million in January, 2009 to 36 million in August, 2009. After that, the most popular Viddler producers are Engadget and Joystiq, which are both owned by AOL, followed by niche video like WineLibraryTV (142,424 monthly views) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal marketing videos, which get only 27,070 views per month). → Read More
Mike Hudack, the founder of Blip.tv, just landed a major set of deals to expand the distribution of his Web video network. The biggest deal is with YouTube, which for the first time will allow Blip.tv to place its own ads in the YouTube player on behalf of the Web video creators who use Blip. Hudack is also announcing distribution deals with NBC Local Media for regular TV starting in New York City, Vimeo, and Roku set-top boxes. It is also expanding existing deals to show Blip videos on Verizon FIOS, Tivos, and Sony TVs with Ethernet jacks.
About 50,000 different shows have been uploaded to Blip, where video creators can then spread them across the Web, iTunes and set-top boxes. According to the company, Blip is doing 72 million video streams a month to a worldwide audience of 22 million people. Only 4 percent of those views are on Blip.tv itself. → Read More
For most people, watching Web video is predominantly a streamed experience on your computer. But an important and substantial portion of Web video is still downloaded to be watched later, or transferred to a different screen (usually an iPod, but sometimes a flat-screen TV). The problem with downloads is that they don’t fit neatly into the advertising model that rules most other Web video.
Earlier today at the Beet.TV Online Video Summit (which I co-moderated with Cnet’s Dan Farber and Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser), blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack revealed that his company has found a way to dynamically insert ads from DoubleClick into video downloads on iTunes and elsewhere. → Read More
New York-based online television network blip.tv has closed its second round of institutional capital, led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company had previously closed a round of funding (June 2007) with Ambient Sound Investments, the venture capital vehicle of the foursome that made up Skype’s founding engineering team. On both occasions, we tried to obtain more information on the amount of investment, but the company is not disclosing how big the its war chest currently is.
Update: a regulatory filing has revealed the amount was $5.2 million.
It is also not clear whether Blip.tv is making any money. Web video is still a phenomenon in search of a business model. Blip.tv is still carving out a name for itself in a crowded market. Grabbing onto the safety line of this cash infusion will give it some more time to establish itself. → Read More
Very few would argue with the statement that video is hot right now. From the cultural phenomenon of YouTube, through to the rise of live streaming services, money is pouring into startups from content creators through to service providers. Getting into video isn’t as easy as setting up a blog, so here’s some advice of which direction to head in. The basics Obviously you’ll need a camera to get started in video; if you’re a Mac user you might have a cam built in, but if not web cam’s are fairly cheap. Alternatively people like Chris Pirillo stream from a professional video camera, but even a second hand older model can also work, for both live and recorded shows to computer. For camera effects, CamTwist for the Mac is free and fully featured with effects such as text, clocks, image overlays, Picture in Picture, and much more. Fix8 (our coverage here) offers cartoon style overlays if animation or funny faces are more your thing. Recording You’ll have two ways of recording a video: local or to the web. Local could directly on to a camcorder through to Quicktime or something in-between. Quicktime Pro (between $30-$45) does the recording and it’s a quick and easy solution. To the web means recording your video directly to a website; the advantages are that you don’t have to upload it and it’s available immediately, however depending on your internet connection the recording quality can be significantly poorer than recording a video locally and uploading it. YouTube offers the direct recording option and is an obvious candidate, but the Live streaming services also allow you to record to their services and even distribute your video out to sites like YouTube later. I’ve also found that the quality of the live stream services can often be higher in recording than YouTube. Streaming Live Live in the newest sector in online video with venture capital being spread around a range of services. Live offers some advantages over doing recorded video alone (although they are not mutually exclusive); streaming live means you can interact with and network with your audience while creating archive footage than can be distributed later. Companies in this space include Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, Mogulus, BlogTV, Stickam and others. All of the services have strengths and weaknesses and you should explore each one, but if you haven’t got time for that I’d recommend Justin.tv or Ustream.tv. → Read More
Here’s a video match made for the Web. Revision3, the video playground of Digg founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, is teaming up with Blip.tv to syndicate all of its shows. That includes Diggnation (shown above with hosts Alex Albrecht and Rose), the GigaOm Show, Web Drifter, and Tekzilla. Some of these shows are already popular, especially Diggnation. And they are distributed in many ways—through Revision3″s Website, through iTunes, as embedded videos. By signing this deal, Revsion3 expands its reach to Blip.tv’s audience. Blip.tv has done a good job of finding and highlighting the best original Web video shows, including Wallstrip, Alive in Baghdad, Rocketboom, and (back in the day) The Show with Ze Frank. So Revison3 will be in good company. Blip.tv sells advertising against the videos and splits the revenues with the producers, so it is incremental revenue for Revsion3. CrunchBase Information Blip.tv Revision3 Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The popular daily videoblog Rocketboom is joining online video network blip.tv, which will now host all of Rocketboom‘s videos and sell ads for the show. Rocketboom joins a growing crowd of other top videoblogs that can be found on Blip.tv, including Wallstrip, TreeHugger TV, Alive in Baghdad, and Goodnight Burbank. As with most of those shows, the relationship between Rocketboom and blip.tv is not exclusive. For instance, Rocketboom will continue to sell ads on its own site. But the more top-quality shows that blip.tv can sell ads against, the stronger its position becomes in the embryonic world of Web-only video. With its launch this morning on blip.tv, Rocketboom gains a new sponsor in Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program. And blip.tv is concurrently launching a new ad unit, an Flash-like overlay that can be seen on Quicktime downloads (the kind you get off iTunes). According to blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, these ads will be viewable on iTunes even though Apple generally prefers the paid-download model to ads. Blip.tv has offered pre-roll and post-roll ads on video downloads for about a year, but this is the first time a mid-clip overlay is available. Overlays, which usually look like a banner that pop up during the video, are preferable because, Hudack tells TechCrunch “pre-rolls have the potential to turn off viewers and post-rolls don’t get watched.” Eventually, blip.tv will have the capability to track how many times each ad is viewed or clicked on as well. Up till now, such metrics have been more common for streaming videos than for downloads. → Read More
Three online video startups announced a partnership this morning that will allow users to edit their videos on Eyespot and publish with a single click to Blip.tv and Veoh. This sounds like a smart move for all involved as editing and remixing ups the ante on features for video sharing. Partnering with another startup already providing the service may make more sense that building it into an existing feature set. Hopefully the partnership will mean a deep integration between Eyespot and the other companies; more than a distribution partnership, a technology partnership would be really interesting. New York City’s Blip.tv was selected to provide the underlying technology for CNN’s user generated video section, CNN Exchange, launched last month. San Diego based Veoh provides 10 minute flash previews of long videos that can be downloaded in their full length through the company’s peer to peer desktop client. The company announced an undisclosed amount of funding from Shelter Capital Partners last week and has also received funds from Spark Catial, the Torante Company and Time Warner. San Diego’s Eyespot allows drag and drop video editing online and positions its site as a community for remixing videos uploaded for that purpose. Competitor JumpCut offers similar functionality and has a small promotional partnership with Fox Atomic, an arm of Twentieth Century Fox. The company has received angel funding from Michael Robertson, the man behind MP3.com, Gizmo Project, Ajax Launch and countless other projects. Eyespot currently limits file upload to 50 MB and it will be interesting to see if when these partnerships take form that limit is lifted for Blip and Veoh users. The prospect of contributors to CNN’s Exchange being able to quickly edit their submissions before submitting them is interesting, though CNN may be more interested in unedited footage. This is a smart move that will help each of these companies offer a fundamentally compelling feature that the big sites simply hosting video do not. → Read More
FireAnt released some impressive and beautiful software earlier today. The company first launched in January 2005 with a downloadable Mac client that allowed users to aggregate video blog content and watch and/or download it to a device. A Windows client was relased in May 2005, which includes the ability to transcode video from the original source into the specific formats needed for different devices. Until now, the FireAnt site was basically where you went to download the client. Today FireAnt released new versions of the clients. But they also released a website service that is totally awesome. The FireAnt site is now a full videoblogging directory that allows users to tag and rate videoblogs, subscribe to feeds and queue them up for watching or downloading. You can also watch any videoblog directly on the website in its original file format (this last point is important). The website and clients fully syncronize, so any videoblogs added or removed from your que on the site will automatically sync up with the client (users may use the website at work, and have the client installed at home along with their PSP, video iPod or other device). The result is an extremely versatile, file-type-agnostic videoblogging ecosystem. A tool like this was needed to allow videoblogging to expand to more users. FireAnt works closely with other videoblogging services like Mefeedia (a directory and aggregator) and Blip.tv (a service which, among other things, provides a great platform for videobloggers to host their content) to ensure that they are all launching compatible platform and application services. This coopetition is good for the industry. Let’s see how long it can last. FireAnt has relocated from New York to San Francisco. Joshua Kinberg and Jay Dedman are the founders (there are seven or so employees now). Jay also worked with Mefeedia founder Peter Van Dijk to form the first video blogging email list before either company was founded. They are now tracking nearly 5,000 legitimate video blogs…up from only a handful a year ago. → Read More
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