• October 4th, 2011

    AnyClip Brings Thousands Of Full Films, Movie Clips To Dailymotion

    dailymotion

    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

    February 23rd, 2011

    Dailymotion shoots for video-powered apps, slowly opening up developer API

    Dailymotion, the French-born video site and YouTube competitor, has quietly launched a public Application Programming Interface (API) for third-party apps that want to integrate some, if not all, of its features.

    Available as an SDK for JavaScript, PHP and Objective C (iPhone, iPad and Mac), with ActionScript (Flash) and Python also under development, Dailymotion’s initial API offering, however, appears to be a work-in-progress. The company says that it will “eventually” support the full gamut of Dailymotion’s core functionality, including video upload, playlists, channels etc. offering the ability to integrate “Dailymotion modules” into any site or application, such as on iPhone, iPad, Android, Bada, and Windows Phone. → Read More

    January 25th, 2011

    Confirmed: Orange acquires 49% of DailyMotion for €59 million, rest to follow

    Rumors have been flying around for the last week about a possible acquisition of DailyMotion, the French-born equivalent of YouTube. And the first half of the 2-part transaction has just been confirmed; Orange will acquire roughly 49% of the company for approximately €59 million (€58.8 million) with the rest to follow shortly.

    Advent Venture Partners, an investor in DailyMotion since 2007, said that investors were actually not seeking to sell the company, which has apprently been profitable since the latter half of 2010. However, the company did seem to be burning cash prior to that point; over $68.5 million had been raised with some of Europe’s top tier VCs in 3 different rounds of funding. → Read More

    September 16th, 2010

    5min Brings 200K How-To Videos To Dailymotion

    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

    February 28th, 2010

    The Ten Most Likely M&A Deals In Online Video


    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

    February 7th, 2010

    How To Make Money In Online Video

    Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on the state of online video by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan. He is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.

    In Search of Profits

    Ten years ago, web companies didn’t generate much revenue.   These days, web companies are some of the most profitable around.  Online video is where the Web was ten years ago: in investment mode as video companies that are generating high revenue are not necessarily the most profitable. Are those companies suffering low margins because they’re investing in the future or are they fundamentally lower-margin businesses? → Read More

    January 5th, 2010

    State Of The Vlogosphere: 70% of Video Blogs Are Hosted On Five Sharing Sites

    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

    December 21st, 2009

    Dailymotion lands on iPhone

    [France] 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

    December 21st, 2009

    Dailymotion Lands On The iPhone

    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

    October 8th, 2009

    Dailymotion bags another €15 million

    Video sharing site DailyMotion has raised another €15 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

    October 8th, 2009

    Upon Hitting Profitability, Dailymotion Raises $22 Million 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

    September 3rd, 2008

    Dailymotion, OLPC strike deal to introduce kids to the wonders of online video

    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

    August 17th, 2008

    Web Censorship Is So Bad in Turkey That Blogs Are Shutting Themselves Down In Protest

    It doesn’t take much to get your Website banned in Turkey. Pretty much any complaint to a lower court can get a Website blocked in the country. Websites including YouTube, DailyMotion, Alibaba, Slide.com, and some WordPress blogs have all been banned, usually because of some purported slight to the Turkish government or Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. (The Youtube ban was the result of a sophomoric video claiming Ataturk was gay). The problem has gotten so bad that Turkish blogs are now banning themselves in protest. The fake bans started with Firat Yildiz, who put this message up on his blog: Bu siteye erişim kendi kararıyla engellenmiştir which roughly translates to: The access to this web site is prevented by its owner’s free will. Then another Turkish blogger, Selim Yoruk, created this page with a piece of code that lets any blogger easily add the same message to his homepage. Nearly 200 Turkish blogs have (temporarily) shut themselves down in this manner. The point is to show Turkish Web surfers what the Internet would look like if the censorship continues unabated. The protest will last until Wednesday. → Read More

    August 9th, 2008

    Trends in rich media consumption and delivery

    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

    June 3rd, 2008

    Veoh Raises Another $30 Million From Intel Capital, Adobe, and Gordon Crawford

    Is there room for a video-sharing site besides YouTube? Intel Capital, Adobe Systems, and media investor Gordon Crawford are placing their bets on Veoh, which is announcing a $30 million series D financing. Intel Capital is leading the round, and previous investors Shelter Capital, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Michael Eisner and Jonathan Dolgen also participated. This brings the total Veoh has raised to a whopping $70 million. Veoh wants to move beyond the PC to mobile devices, and is putting a lot of resources behind developing its behavioral ad targeting platform for video. The announcement also comes a day after Veoh started blocking access to all but 33 countries (plus U.S. territories) in an attempt to focus on the most lucrative markets (and, no doubt, reign in some costs—video streaming is expensive). The countries being blocked, including many in South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, represent less than 10 percent of Veoh’s audience. That audience, globally, is growing at a nice clip. The company claims 28 million monthly unique viewers, who on average spend 100 minutes a month on the site. And the avreage length of videos watched on Veoh is 10 minutes. ComScore counts 18.5 million global unique visitors, as of April, and another 8.7 million who watch on the startup’s P2P software client, VeohTV. If you add the two together (the red and purple lines in the second chart below), it comes to 27.2 million, which is about the same as the total reported by the company. That combined total would put Veoh’s audience right below Metacafe’s (28.9 million) and DailyMotion’s (34.6 million). And it is growing much faster than either one (538 percent over the past year, versus 70 percent growth for DailyMotion and 50 percent growth for Metacafe). Of course, Veoh and all of these second-tier video sites still pale by comparison to YouTube, which boasted 300 million unique visitors worldwide in April. CrunchBase Information Veoh DailyMotion Metacafe Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

    April 2nd, 2008

    Korea's Pandora.TV Looks To International Markets

    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

    October 18th, 2007

    Big Anti-Piracy Alliance To Be Launched Friday

    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

    October 10th, 2007

    Happy 1st Anniversary YouTube and Google; Now Move Over a Bit

    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 → Read More

    September 12th, 2007

    Revver: $1 Million In User Payouts In First 12 Months

    Social video site Revver has paid $1 million to video producers and their affiliates over the past year, the company says (pdf). Today also marks the service’s one-year anniversary. Revver generates revenue from pre and post roll advertisements that play in video content in their embeddable player. Revver splits revenue 50/50 with video creators after paying 20% off the top for video distributors (sites that embed the video become distributors). This implies total revenue of $2-2.5 million in the last year depending on if there are distributors to be paid. Of course, if they have sweatheart deals with some content providers, that revenue total could be lower, even significantly lower. Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well. → Read More

    August 30th, 2007

    DailyMotion Raises $34 Million; Another Copyright Infringing Success Story

    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

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