Exclusive - While YouTube is reportedly paving the way for a major content push in collaboration with studios and networks, its not-so-small competitor Dailymotion isn’t sitting still either. The company has inked a deal with AnyClip to brings thousands of full-length feature films and 50,000 fully license movie clips to its popular video sharing platform.
AnyClip works with studios like Universal and Vivendi, with more deals coming soon, to gain access to full-length films rather than only promotional material, unlike competitor MovieClips. Focused on a B2B model, AnyClip works together with distribution partners to fill their websites with licensed clips. → Read More
5min has struck a deal with Dailymotion to bring 200,000 how-to videos about sports, fashion, health, travel and more to the Paris-based video sharing site. This follows 5min’s recent deal to power Answer.com’s newly launched Video Answers.
5Min is one of the largest how-to video networks, with more than 110 million video views a month and 30 million unique visitors across 800 partner sites. 5Min syndicates videos from about 1,000 online video producers, including CBS, Hearst, Scripps, and WatchMojo. → Read More
Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner.
Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins.
With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals. → 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
Paris-based video sharing site Dailymotion has released an iPhone app. In fact, two versions exist. A free to download version (iTunes link) that is supported by ads and a premium ad-free version that costs €4.99, which seems a little on the high side, although that depends on how intrusive those ads are to you.
Like the plethora of competing iPhone video offerings, Dailymotion, which as been called the French YouTube but has much wider reach across continental Europe and elsewhere, is at a significant disadvantage compared to the Google-owned video sharing site, which comes pre-installed on the iPhone. That said, the functionality provided by Dailymotion’s iPhone app at least matches YouTube’s offering. → Read More
Video sharing site DailyMotion has raised another €15 million ($22.1 million) in financing, reveals an interview with CEO Cédric Tournay with French business website Capital.fr (translated version). PaidContent followed up with a report in English earlier this morning, and we’ve confirmed the news with Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, an early backer of the company.
Tournay, who joined as CEO just a couple of months ago, tells Capital.fr that the venture recently turned profitable, but that additional investment was required to fund its steep growth. He expects a 50% increase in turnover in 2009 and 2010, and says DailyMotion currently serves 1 billion video views per month. → Read More
Dailymotion, sorta the YouTube of Europe, has inked a deal with the much-maligned OLPC folks to “explore collaborations involving Dailymotion’s technology and selected educational content to benefit underprivileged children globally.” Sounds important. Unnecessary snark aside, it actually sounds like one of those “good causes” I like so much. The deal is such that the OLPC folks can now benefit from Dailymotion’s infrastructure to have kids create and share videos of their experiences using the built-in camera in the XO Laptop. To that end, Dailymotion has even gone to the trouble of creating a subdomain, olpc.dailymotion.com (that’s for XO Laptop users, regular folk will have to use dailymotion.com/group/olpc), where you’ll find all sorts of educational goodness. But, since online it’s “cool” to hate on the OLPC folks for trying something different, maybe we should just tease them for each and every effort they make. → Read More
Here’s an interesting Q and A session with a panel of experts in the rich media industry — mostly online video – that took place last Tuesday at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. The members of the panel: Ron Bloom, CEO, MEVIO Mike Hudack, CEO, Blip.tv Steve Liddell, CEO, Panther Express Joy Marcus, General Manager, DailyMotion U.S. Perry Wu, CEO, BitGravity → 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
A new joint copyright alliance that includes CBS Corp., Dailymotion, Microsoft, NBC Universal, News Corp.’s Fox and MySpace units, Viacom Inc. and Walt Disney Co is due to launch Friday, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Google is noted as not being a member of the grouping, but in discussions to join. The group will address copyright-related issues including video piracy, with a focus on using technology to eliminate copyright-infringing content and blocking any infringing material before it is publicly accessible. Google launched anti-piracy technology on YouTube Monday.Viacom sued Google over YouTube content in March. → Read More
French social video site DailyMotion has raised a $34 million round from Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity, a division of Allianz AG. The new round comes on top of $9.5 million in previous financing from Atlas Ventures and Partech International. The round puts DailyMotion’s total financing beyond that of their competitors, even MetaCafe’s $45 million total financing. Dailymotion’s executive chairman, Mark Zaleski, said the new funds will “allow us to reach operating profitability”. These larger investments may be a sign of increasingly competitive times or a desire to take their companies all the way to a public offering. YouTube only raised $11.5 million to reach their exit. DailyMotion has faired well in the competition for second place amongst video sites. They currently attract 37 million visitors a month. Some of this success is no doubt due to the viewers drawn to pirated content hosted on the site. For instance you can still get complete episodes of The Office. They were also recently found guilty of copyright infringement in July. This is despite implementing Audible Magic’s fingerprinting technology back in June. However, as others have, they are seeking to clean up their act. When they launched in the U.S., they announced they would seek legal content deals and begin rewarding top content producers. Today’s announcement is more specific, highlighting plans to negotiate deals with makers of music, movies and TV shows. Dailymotion has already signed deals with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. Another French company Blogmusik cleared its record in France, signing a deal to continue streaming music as part of a suspected revenue sharing plan. U.S. based Pandora is still kept from going international because of the webradio royalty rates. → Read More
Paris based DailyMotion has always been available in the US, but today they’re launching a US based operation headed up by Joy Marcus, former senior vice president of global marketing at Time Warner. Dailymotion is one of the largest social video sites jockying for the distant second position after YouTube, with 4.7 million unique streamers in April (YouTube did 53.5 in March) according to Comscore. According to Comscore, however, DailyMotion users spend 4 times as much time on videos as MetaCafe users. However, MetaCafe’s downloadable player can skew the data. The move makes sense for the site, since the US is DailyMotion’s second largest market outside of France. To differentiate they are planning on nailing a social video trifecta: offering professional content, contextual advertising, and paying top content producers (companies or individuals) through their MotionMaker program. There’s no word on the specific premium content offerings, but they are forming a specialized creative and programming team. Danny Passman, formerly of MTV Networks and a development executive at fuse and VH1 will head up this team. They have also brought several other MTV executives on board. Catherine Mullen, former General Manager of MTV UK and Ireland and executive vice president of fuse, will be leading international content acquisition and development initiatives. Head of their German operations, Werner Brell, also previously worked for MTV Networks. DailyMotion says they plan on monetizing the videos through banner and “innovative forms” of in-video advertising. They also say they will have “contextual in-stream ads”, which makes me suspect they will use interstitial video ads. Implementing an advertising platform into their site is not trivial. Determining a video’s content in order to link ads to it is a complex problem we looked at in our roundup of startups taking on the video advertising problem. There is no word on how DailyMotion will split the revenue with producers, but they may follow MetaCafe’s lead and only dole out cash to the top producers (which pays $100/20,000 views). Although social video sites like DailyMotion are running a distant second to YouTube, the fight for second place is still important. These sites offer an important opportunity for content publishers to hedge their bets against YouTube and make sure Google doesn’t dominate all of their online distribution. → Read More
YouTube is clearly the most popular video sharing site on the web. But limits on video length, DMCA takedown notices and billion dollar lawsuits have damaged YouTube’s ability to facilitate serious copyright infringement. The smaller guys are now stepping in to fill the void. Full length copies of well known TV shows and/or movies are readily available on a number of YouTube competitors. Watch, for example, The Office on DailyMotion, Scrubs on GoFish, or SouthPark on Veoh (update: GoFish and Veoh have apparently removed the shows I linked to). And if searching for the shows on these sites is just too much work, there are other sites that aggregate and organize this content, and embed it on their own sites. Watch any episode from any of the 11 seasons of SouthPark on Allsp.com. And new site VideoHybrid is in a class of its own, with dozens of full length movies and virtually every popular TV show. VideoHybrid even gives statistics showing exactly how many times copyrights have been violated. Its not clear if the MPAA and networks just aren’t focusing on these smaller video sharing sites yet, or if DMCA notices are simply being ignored. These sites aren’t hiding out and trying to evade the law – they’re funded by well known venture capitalists and, in Veoh’s case, copyright holders. And GoFish is actually a public company. → 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
