You could say we were less than enthused when writing about the launch of Graspr last September. The nascent instructional video site captured our attention because it was led by an ex-Yahoo VP, but it didn’t really do anything to stand out from the crowd.

It turns out we weren’t the only ones to notice the service needed a little something extra. Graspr has shifted its strategy away from developing a destination site for instructional videos and towards an aggregation and syndication network for those videos. Along the way, it has also picked up $2.5 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and angels. And it’s rolled out a new design with additional functionality centered around what it’s calling “connected learning”.

Graspr now has a feed tool that pulls instructional videos from across the web and includes them in its repository of content. These videos fall into 17 categories such as home improvement, food and drink, sports and recreation, and crafts. They are then syndicated out to a network of publishers that want to compliment their existing content. About 200 such publishers have signed up during a closed beta period of the syndication service, although CEO Teresa Phillips thinks there are about 2,000 sites per category that would make good partners. These are mostly sites that provide text-based instructions and want to integrate more rich media into their offerings.

As for making money off this network, Graspr intends to run video overlays and split the revenue three ways between itself, the content producers, and the end publishers. There is also an opportunity for advertisers to sponsor video players and wrap them in their branding (apparently educational service companies are the most eager to build their brands in this manner). In the longer term, Phillips anticipates that product placement will become an increasingly important way for Graspr to monetize its videos.

Will the strategy succeed? It’s too early to tell, but if Brightcove is any indication, Graspr should resist setting its expectations too high. We hear that its syndication platform - albeit intended for a broader range of content - has been only a modest success. Perhaps Graspr will find that its publisher niche is particularly eager to integrate 3rd party video content - especially if that video can be monetized effectively.

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Not a week after we derided Brightcove for its difficult user interface in a story about newly emerged competitor Delve Networks, the Cambridge-based video hosting company is releasing a completely rebuilt version of its service into private beta.

Existing SaaS customers now have the opportunity to try out Brightcove 3 Beta, which will be made available to new customers sometime in the Fall. Development on Brightcove 3 began about nine months ago and has focused on three primary areas: a new publishing model, support for long-form video and, last but not least, an improved user interface.

The new publishing model centers around Brightcove’s first server-side API, which allows publishers to deeply integrate video meta data into their display pages. Publishers can choose to highlight related videos in ways that make the most sense for their content (perhaps by organizing them into lists that can be browsed by topics or names). They can also display descriptions, and choose URLs, that optimize SEO. As far as monetization is concerned, in-page advertisements can be synchronized with in-video ads to make for more effective impressions.

Brightcove has never put any limits on the lengths of the video uploaded to its platform, but until now it never tailored the delivery of longer video to users’ technical capabilities. The new version places Move Networks (a platform that specializes in the delivery of long form video) in its sights by adjusting delivery quality based on bandwidth and computational power. Brightcove wishes to become the single platform that publishers use to deliver both short and long form content, without requiring users to install a proprietary plugin, as Move Networks does (Brightcove delivers its video through Flash).

Finally, Brightcove 3 has been blessed with a new user interface that doesn’t require publishers to skip around between tabs to address different parts of the setup process. An iTunes-looking control panel takes advantage of drag-n-drop and batch editing capabilities, which should streamline the addition and editing of videos.

Brightcove is certainly one of the biggest, if not the biggest, video platforms for web publishers. According to internal statistics, the videos on its platform are viewed by 135 million uniques per month, and revenues experienced 500% growth in 2007. Publishers include Discovery, National Geographic, Showtime, and several other big media companies.

The company hopes that this release will help it expand internationally (it already has a strong presence in the UK and has taken direct steps to establish one in Japan). Brightcove is also soliciting non-media companies like non-profits and governmental organizations in addition to integrating more deeply into existing publishers’ websites.

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The Pluggd team is used to switching gears. The startup began in February 2006 as a destination site for podcasts. But after witnessing iTunes “suck the air out” of the market, it began developing speech recognition technology for video that could identify particular topics within news clips and other diverse content.

The venture, which was started by two former Amazon Web Services employees, has taken another step in the video direction by launching a full-blown Brightcove competitor called Delve Networks. Development began in earnest about ten months ago when Pluggd raised its Series A; the site went live just yesterday.

Like Brightcove - and several other platforms such as Maven Networks, Move Networks, and Ooyala - Delve Networks wants to manage and deliver video content for medium and large web publishers. Its management panel places uploaded videos into channels that are delivered through a customizable Flex-based player. Videos can be tagged, sorted into genres, and viewed through filters. The entire management experience is meant to be a large step up from that of Brightcove (and having suffered through Brightcove’s confusing user interface myself, Delve’s UI certainly appears much more intuitive).

Delve Networks is still putting the pieces together on some of the functionality publishers have come to expect, like analytics for tracking how videos are consumed. But the company has already rolled out is its primary differentiator: the same in-video topic highlighting technology it developed earlier while called Pluggd.

Publishers have the option of attaching a heat map of sorts to their videos. The map shows up below videos as a variously colored bar, which ranges from blue to red and activates when the user types in a particular topic. For example, if you’re watching a clip about a golf tournament, you can enter “Tiger Woods” and the bar will show you where the commentator spends time discussing and showing footage of that famous golf player. The topics are automatically detected by a combination of speech and contextual analysis, so publishers don’t have to break down their videos manually.

CEO Alex Castro tells me this technology engages viewers more effectively, and therefore monetizes them better as well. While the company is still working on the player’s user interface (and moderation panel for that matter) it has already signed up several beta customers including CNET, Intel, Small Screen Network, Jaudible, Bikini.com, and Wallstrip. Pricing has yet to be nailed down completely, but a free version for trial purposes will be made available in the next few weeks.

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Web video distribution player Brightcove is entering the Japanese market with a new subsidiary called Brightcove K.K. Rather than use some of the $86 million it has already raised, Brightcove sold off a piece of the subsidiary for $4.9 million to Japanese investors, some of whom will also act as sales and distribution partners. Participating in the round are Dentsu (biggest advertising company in Japan), J-Stream (biggest content delivery network in Japan), Cyber Communications (biggest online ad network in Japan), and existing Brightcove investor Transcosmos (Japanese media conglomerate).

Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire says in an e-mail:

Japan is an outstanding market for Brightcove, with exceptionally high broadband penetration rates and the 2nd largest media market in the world. Amazing, online video (commercial, monetized online video) in Japan is a nascent industry

We have majority ownership and control over this subsidiary, and will be hiring a general manager as well as a staff of technical, sales, marketing and operational staff to build the business.

However, Brightcove K.K. also has several significant strategic partners who are collectively investing about $5M into Brightcove KK, and who are also going to act as sales and marketing agents for Brightcove in Japan. We don’t plan to build a lot of direct selling infrastructure in Japan, instead leveraging the robust sales teams and customer footprints of our partners.

J-Stream will be offering Brightcove video streaming as a service to its customers, while Dentsu and Cyber Communications will be selling ads across the Brightcove K.K. network.

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Investors are betting big on video streaming provider Move Networks. The Utah-based company just announced that it raised $46 million in a C round of venture financing. The round was led by Benchmark Capital, and also included Cisco, Comcast Interactive Media, Televisa, Steamboat Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. That brings the total raised since December, 2006 to $91.3 million. (Competitor Brightcove has raised $86.2 million and Maven Networks was bought by Yahoo for $160 million in February).

When it comes to streaming HD video on the Web, Move Networks is becoming one of the preferred video streaming partners for many major media sites, including ABC.com, Discovery.com, ESPN.com,and Fox.com. According to the company, it collectively streams videos to 6.5 million people a month, who average 50 minutes of viewing time per session. But Move requires that viewers install its own proprietary video player as a plug-in to their browsers. So in a way it competes with Flash, which is getting better all the time. (Brightcove is taking a different approach by experimenting with BitTorrent and other technologies to create high-quality video experiences through a Flash player). High-definition streams still tend to run into network bottlenecks and slow connection speeds at people’s homes. Whoever can solve or bypass these problems will become adopted by more video sites as the demand for HD video rises.

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Brightcove is pulling the plug on Brightcove.TV, its consumer-oriented video showcase. In an e-mail to the site’s members, Brightcove says that it will no longer be accepting video uploads after December 17. The YouTube-wannabe site was never one of Brightcove’s strengths, which is serving video for professional and semi-professional content creators. That is something that the company will continue to do, primarily through its customers’ own Websites and in embeddable players throughout the Web (like the one below). This is not the end of the world for Brightcove, which should still have some of that $60 million it raised last January to plow into its main business.

I asked Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire why he decided to throw in the towel on Brightcove.TV. His response:

We are not throwing in the towel on Brightcove.TV, we are eliminating its use as an end-user sharing service. Note that the vast majority of programming on Brightcove.TV are professional channels published by media businesses that use our overall platform for their websites and syndication. It will continue to operate as a content showcase of pro publishers using the Brightcove Platform.

He further states in this blog post that the eight million monthly unique visitors to Brightcove.TV (as reported by comScore) is “dwarfed by the adoption of our Internet TV platform by media businesses around the world.” He counts 4,000 such media publishers, who collectively attract “over 120 million uniques visitors per month across thousands of websites.” Brightcove.TV was always a sideshow.

Even though Brightcove.TV will continue to operate and showcase videos from Brightcove’s partners, it will no longer accept videos from consumers. I am tempted to put it in the deadpool, but will refrain for now. If it disappears completely, or arises Zombie-like in the future, we will let you know.

Maybe the problem was that not enough regular people uploaded their clips to Brightcove.TV in the first place. Instead it is filled with cheesy trailers like this one for, ahem, Dead or Alive:

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Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience - which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position - we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.

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BitTorrent has been getting somewhat of a bad rap. Although BitTorrent itself sells copyrighted content over its P2P file sharing protocol, the service has become better known for less than legal downloads from sites like “The Pirate Bay”. It has been particularly popular for pirating because it easily distributes the cost of transmitting files across the network of users downloading the file.

Now BitTorrent is taking another try at legal torrenting by applying the power of peering to content its partners want to be shared, free files and streaming video. The new service, BitTorrent DNA (Delivery Network Accelerator), uses torrents to assist in sharing these files with their users. It effectively creates a virtual network of viewers’ computers that will share amongst themselves to speed up downloads for popular files from your servers.

The peering arrangement sounds a lot like what BitTorrent currently does, share large files amongst many user. DNA’s big difference, however, is that it does this more transparently. Viewers don’t need to search for tracking files and deal with a torrent download manager, but instead simply install a new BitTorrent client (around 330 K) that handles everything when they come to a DNA enabled site. For example, when you’re on a site and halfway through watching a movie or downloading a file, DNA shares these files behind the scenes with other users that need it too. If you’re concerned about sharing being too much of a drag on your bandwidth, you can go into your control panel and shut off the “download acceleration”.

The main selling point is that BitTorrent should reduce your bandwidth costs, meaning publishers can hold on to more of their ad revenue. The savings is expected to be pretty significant, with BitTorrent saying their customers can shift as much as 80% of their content delivery to the P2P network. Brightcove, one of their launch partners, will be using the peering technology to serve their high bandwidth video content for a new product, “Brightcove Show“.

By teaming up with BitTorrent, Brightcove hopes to take on Joost by allowing its network of Web video publishers to stream broadcast-quality, full-screen videos (possibly even up to HD-quality) without the need for a separate, walled-garden application. The videos will just stream directly from the Web, with bits being pulled from other people’s computers who have the BitTorrent DNA client and have watched a particular video, combined with bits delivered from the Limelight content-delivery network when there aren’t enough BitTorrent peers available to do the job.

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When I wrote a post earlier today suggesting that YouTube was not the first to use a Flash overlay advertisement for online video, I didn’t realize I’d be getting so many emails and comments disputing exactly who first invented the unit.

VideoEgg has certainly been doing this for a year or so. In a comment to that post, though, an (unconfirmed) ex-YouTuber says the idea was “discussed long ago inside the company” and follows up with:

All other video sharing websites that came out around the time YouTube emerged were still using Quicktime or Windows Media. YouTube might as well accuse VideoEgg of stealing the idea of using a Flash video player.

Next up was Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan, who emailed me to say that Adbrite has had their own overlay product for nearly a year. He also pointed out that I wrote about it. The ad unit is less sophisticated, but it is certainly a Flash video overlay ad unit.

And finally, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire sent me a long email saying they’ve been doing this as far back as October 2005. He also says the ad units are not particularly popular with advertisers:

I caught your post on VideoEgg taking credit for video overlays as an ad format vis a vis the latest YouTube ad product introduction.

To reinforce this point, while I don’t want to claim “invention”, we were certainly very well ahead of the market when we introduced video overlay ads back in October of 2005, just as YouTube was getting their first pirated episodes of The Sopranos on their site. At the Web 2.0 conference that fall, Brightcove debuted our beta service and as part of that both demo’d and discussed how we wanted to changing video and television advertising with new formats that could engage the user in a non-intrusive manner while creating opt-in ‘takeover sponsorship’ units that a marketer would be excited about. We demo’d overlay ads from Coca Cola running in a MTV Networks channel that we were just launching with them. The New York Times covered this debut.

We subsequently demo’d and introduced these formats again at AdTech in New York that fall, and if you speak with any number of a major content owner brand partners, it has been part of our platform since then, along with a wide range of other innovations in video ad formats, policies and targetting mechanisms.

Interestingly, despite having been 18+ months “ahead of the market”, to our disappointment, there has been extremely limited uptake by the advertising community around these formats. There are a lot of factors behind this limited uptake, including:

- the advertising community buying video have been very focused on leveraging existing creative and buying patterns in the online video space
- most content publishers and media owners have been focused on getting the ‘basics’ up and running, and also responding to the RFPs from marketers and advertisers, which are almost 100% focused on basic short-form video commercials
- for premium brands and content, the basic pre-roll and companion banners are yielding extremely attractive CPMs and there is little evidence that :15 ads have any negative impact on end-user viewership behavior — in fact, our own metrics show that sites that run without any ads, and then introduce :15 pre-rolls and banners achieve identical usage and performance (e.g. no drop-off in users because of ads) on their content.

Nonetheless, we remain very bullish about ‘composite’ video advertising formats that combine overlays and unique and non-intrusive calls to action with deeper interactive marketing experiences. We’ve been pushing this for years and only now are starting to see the publishers and media owners that we work with begin to take an interest in these formats. I believe this is because we’re now entering a phase where content companies are looking at ways to maximize yield and revenue within their content, and they are introducing more mid and long-form content which require, by economic necessity, a different suite of formats to deliver a good user experience.

So where does that leave us? Maybe none of these startups did - Om says it all goes back to old school television. We’ll see if VideoEgg’s patent filing is unique enough to be issued. But they’ve already said they won’t be using it offensively to stop others from doing this. The market will sort it all out.

cartoon credit: the amazing Hugh MacLeod

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Fox Entertainment Group have announced the selection of online video provider Brightcove as the single online distributor of Fox network television programs

Starting immediately, Fox Broadcast Net, FX and Speed is available via ad-supported Internet video channels using Brightcove technology with more content to follow.

Brightcove has existing agreements with CBS, Discovery, MTV Networks, National Geographic, Showtime, Rainbow Media, Buena Vista TV, Dow Jones, BSkyB and the New York Times, although none so far have been exclusive as this new deal is said to be.

As Beet.tv notes, the deal will also allow embedding of Fox programs on external sites.

Brightcove is backed General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, AOL, Hearst Corp and IAC to the tune of $59+ million.

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