Social video hosting and sharing site Magnify.net is launching an iPhone app to let users submit videos to a Magnify video channel from their 3GS. iPhone users can shoot, upload, store, and share their personal videos on any Magnify-hosted channel. The app, which is free, is currently available on the App Store.
Last year, Magnify added social networking features to its video channels, which can integrate video from across the web (YouTube, AOL). Magnify is using these features to create white-label video platforms and communities for various businesses, including Zappos, New York Magazine Mediaite, and The Weather Channel. In fact, Magnify has seen significant growth in this side of the business. → Read More
Magnify.net has steadily grown its white label video platform in a highly competitive environment. Over the past year, Magnify has accumulated over 50 big name clients which are using Magnify’s video technology, including Zappos, New York Magazine and The Weather Channel. Today, Magnify is announcing its latest catch, Dan Abrams’ recently-launched media news site Mediaite and its sister gossip news site GossipCop.com.
Mediaite, according to Abrams, is similar to Gawker and Huffington Post in that the site analyzes and reports on news relating to all things media. But Abrams hopes to differentiate Mediaite from its competitors with innovative content features, including a video platform. For example, Mediaite publishes a power grid which categorizes and ranks players in the media industry (1581 from 380 media companies to be exact) with the help of a proprietary algorithm. → Read More
With the news surrounding the implosion of Joost and the startup’s move towards providing white label video platforms for companies, we thought it would be a good idea to check in with one of Joost’s new competitors. As we wrote in our post about Joost’s prospects as a white label video community provider, there is already plenty of competition, including Brightcove, Magnify, and Ooyala.
Brightcove is perhaps the best-known player in the space. But another one which has been relatively successful in creating interactive video sites for brands is Magnify.net. The video hosting and sharing platform, which launched in 2007, is rapidly growing its white label service and is expected to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year, according to co-founder Steve Rosenbaum. → Read More
Producing and editing compelling video is only half the work involved in publishing video content to the web. Once finalized, video needs to be formatted and converted to the proper version, or transcoded, to adapt content to the proper format.
Startup HD Cloud, a video encoding and transcoding business, wants to become the “the FedEx of web video” is offering automated, high-definition video encoding in the cloud for large-scale media firms. The SaaS allows video content owners to automatically encode and distribute videos, with HD resolution, to a range of web sites.
HD Cloud has also already signed on a big name customer, Magnify.net, a video publishing platform and social network. HD Cloud’s services will be used to transcode videos for Magnify.net’s 52,000 enterprise clients, including Weather.com, New York Magazine, Zappos.tv, LiveEarth, and BlogHer.com. → Read More
Online footware and apparel retailer Zappos.com is partnering with video hosting and sharing platform Magnify.net to launch a “BoxBreak” campaign to engage the retailer’s customers into building a video community around Zappos. BoxBreak will encourage customers to first capture their experience (via video) of opening a Zappos box when it arrives and then upload the video to Zappo’s Magnify.net sponsored channel. On the site, customers can vote for the best video and each month the customer who made most popular video will receive a $100 gift certificate to Zappos.com
Last year, Magnify added social networking features to its video channels, which can integrate video from across the web (YouTube, AOL). Magnify is using these features to create a video platform and community for various businesses, including Zappos, New York Magazine and The Weather Channel. → Read More
New York-based Magnify.net has raised $1M in a Series A round involving Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, Rose Tech Ventures, Active Angel Investors, Ogden Capital, Gideon Gartner, and Chris Anderson. The company is also claiming to have attracted 30,000 publishers and over three million visitors per month. Each publisher on Magnify.net sets up a so-called channel where they can aggregate user generated videos found across the web on places like YouTube. Magnify.net also recently added webcam broadcasting capabilities so presumably this figure includes webcam channels as well. CrunchBase Information Magnify.net Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Video clips from local TV news affiliates are making their way onto the Web through a service called ClipSyndicate that’s been in beta for more than a year. The service, which is owned by New York City startup Critical Media, has more than 200,000 archived news clips and adds about 1,000 a day from about 200 local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, along with video from Bloomberg TV, the AP, UPI, and the New York Times. About 350 niche Websites are participating in the beta—including Military.com, Construction.com, and PetHealthFocus.com—and they collectively serve up two million ClipSyndicate videos a month. Now ClipSyndicate is spreading its API to video search sites like AOL’s Truveo and other services like Magnify (which we reported earlier) and Lingospot. For instance, ClipSyndicate videos come up in regular video searches in Truveo and play in an embedded ClipSyndicate player. On this Magnify page for Barack Obama, the “Obama News” videos come from ClipSyndicate. And Lingospot, which creates an in-text search bubble when you mouse over a linked term (see left), can show ClipSyndicate videos in its bubbles. You can even find ClipSyndicate videos on Bebo, although you have to look hard and there is no official deal yet with the social networking site. To get a sense of the entertainment value of some of this stuff, here is a news clip from a local Oregon station about a man with blue skin who is moving to California in search of more tolerant neighbors: http://xml.truveo.com/eb/i/3421598497/a/4c86ff7dda1f7b769d520f50a4658f1d/p/1 Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com. ClipSyndicate serves ads with the videos and splits the proceeds as follows: 30 percent to the content producer (i.e., the local TV station), 20 percent to the API partner or Website where the video is seen, and 50 percent for itself. (Although the beta and APIs are available by invite only, the company plans to open up participation to all comers by the end of the first quarter). Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan tells me that he is getting $50 CPMs on the video ads sold through his salesforce compared to $8 to $12 CPMs from backfill video ad networks because the videos tend to appear on extremely targeted sites. Think Yummy Chummy ads on PetsHealthFocus. His sweet spots are mortgage, pets and animals, and health sites. He also claims that he is seeing close to three percent click-throughs on his graphical banner ads → Read More
Magnify.net, hitherto a platform intended primarily for collecting and sharing videos found around the web, is broadening its focus with the release of a service that lets you record video clips directly into the browser using a webcam. While such functionality is nothing groundbreaking, Magnify.net is apparently hoping that its method of collecting video recordings in so-called “channels” will make it a platform of choice for video bloggers. It is touting an ongoing series by Chris Brogan called Attention Upgrade to illustrate the potential of these channels, which display clips (ironically with text descriptions that summarize their content) in a blog-like, reverse chronological fashion. The most notable thing about these channels seems to be the ability for other Magnify.net users to leave comments in the form of videos as well (although apparently only to the channel as a whole, not particular “posts”). If the company were to add the ability to add comments to posts themselves, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this platform facilitate the types of conversations developing on the new Seesmic. In fact, we could see better discussions emerge since they’d have a clear topic of conversation (the video blog post itself) on which to focus. In any case, count this new feature as another development in the conversational video scene that also involves the likes of Justin.TV and Kyte, and could really come of age in 2008. CrunchBase Information Magnify.net seesmic Justin.TV Kyte Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Video discovery and broadcast service Magnify.net has partnered with ClipSyndicate to give users the ability to search and embed content from a variety of mainstream media sites. Magnify.net users will have access to content from providers including ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates, Bloomberg, AP and Fox News. The additional content allows for the creation of new channels that can be used to build communities around topical news and niche markets. Magnify.net has a sample site covering the Barak Obama campaign here; I presuming that it’s meant to demonstrate the tech alone given how awful the design is, so it might be best to ignore that part. Magnify.net is currently serving 12 million+ page views per month and over 22,000 publishers. See our previous coverage of Magnify.net here. CrunchBase Information Magnify.net Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Video discovery and broadcast service Magnify.net has launched a new platform for the aggregation of web video. The new platform offers “a complete customization toolkit” that aims to make it easier for users to create branded online broadcast channels, discover and integrate Web video, and analyze visitor statistics and activities. New features include: The “Magnify This” video grabber browser bookmarklet gives channel admins the ability to embed a video from any of the most popular video sites into a magnify channel with a single click. (supported sites are YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe, Daily Motion, and Blip.tv) Multi-editorial rights are now available, enabling group collaboration for Magnify.net powered sites. Icon Customization gives admins the ability to replace the standard Magnify.net navigation icons with their own User-controllable thumbnails so than an alternate graphic can be created to represent each video. Home page mini player module allows channels to show a pre-selected video when visitors arrive, as well as enabling visitors to view other videos directly from the front page Cross channel playlists that allow for cross-promotion playlists. Other new features include a “latest activity” module that tracks live activity on each site, enhanced statistics report that provides server level stats broken down into various components, and video counters. Magnify.net cite three existing sites using their service as going particularly well: QPNN.com, RCUvideos.com and YouSurfTubes.com. For those not familiar with the service, Magnify.net offers a white label video portal service that is not dissimilar to Ning, but obviously without the social networking. Magnify primarily doesn’t host videos (although this is available for members), instead it provides a space where users can display their favorite videos from other sites. See Michael Arrington’s March review here. Magnify.net launched an advertising program for portal owners in August. → Read More
Video startup Magnify.net will today invite Magnify.net site owners to participate in a beta test of its new advertising program, the “AdShare Network.” The AdShare Network gives site owners the ability to earn directly from their video channels, both from the network itself and by allowing users to deploy their own ad inventory. We first covered Magnify.net in March; Magnify.net allows publishers to create their own video channels, and populate it with videos from other sites, including YouTube, Revver, Yahoo Videos and others. The new advertising network gives current and prospective users a better incentive to create video channels other than by offering a quality service: money. As the site relies on videos pulled from external services, Adshare Network is not offering video advertising, only traditional advertising that can be displayed around videos on the network. Magnify.net recently passed 10,000 user generated video channels and hit seven million page views in July. → Read More
Magnify.net is a new video startup that is different from the rest of the crowd. Unlike YouTube and dozens of others, it isn’t focused on building a portal around user-uploaded videos. Instead, they are allowing website publishers to create their own video channels, and populate it with videos from other sites (like YouTube, Revver, Yahoo Videos, etc.) that allow embedding. The result is a highly targeted niche video site that integrates very well into existing content websites. To see it in action, see this channel that they created for TechCrunch. There are a ton of publisher settings to allow customization, but the general idea is that we would add this to the site, and allow readers to add their own videos that they think will be interesting to this audience. I’ve set the TechCrunch page up so that any reader can add video (direct from their computer, via a search feature or by pasting the actual video URL from a video site), and it will go into the collection after at least three others have reviewed it and it has at least a 5/10 rating on average (or an admin approves it). Videos that are approved can be rated, commented, tagged, shared, etc. Magnify.net also offers a RSS feed of all videos on the site, so readers can subscribe and stay up to speed on new videos. Here’s an example of deeper integration with TechCrunch: One of our recent posts showed a Joost commercial. This video has also been added to the video site where others can interact with it as well. This is actually perfect for the new CenterNetworks experiment where Allen Stern is calling for companies to send in demo videos of their products. They should set up a Magnify.net channel to organize these – the ratings feature is already built in. I’d like to get these videos onto TechCrunch as well, and readers can simply add them. I’ve also been adding startup demos from ScobleShow. If startups have demo videos that they’d like to have this audience see, this would be a good place to add it. There are other features as well that I haven’t mentioned (playlists, widgets, etc). The site is still very much in beta and needs some work on flow and the user interface (some features are hard to find). I’ve also noticed it runs very slow. Magnify.net was founded by Steve Rosenbaum → Read More
I was Digital Hollywood today rubbing elbows with content creators and distributors in San Jose. On the agenda were several entrepreneurial forums where local startups pitched their companies to an audience of competitors, peers and venture capitalists. Given the words “Digital” and “Hollywood” can cover a lot of ground all of the companies generally fit the themes of the conference. I saw some interesting companies, some of whom haven’t been profiled yet on this site. Here’s a rundown: TurnHere TurnHere was founded by Brad Inman who founded HomeGain. Staying within the community arena but moving to the world of travel, TurnHere creates and distributes travel and “local experience” films. They employ 2000 independent filmmakers around the world, with 250 trained in the 90 second “Turn Here” style, which includes a local as narrator to capture the right flavor of a place. The firm experimented with different lengths, but is gravitating towards 90 second to 2 minute features in our short attention span world. The business model is centered on local advertising and advert films in the profiled regions. I watched several films in both genres and they were great. I am really impressed by the site and the films. The food makes you salivate, the sites make you want to hop in your car. RallyPoint Started by Jeff Allen, Managing Partner of Rocket Systems, who is taking a break to be CEO, RallyPoint aims to bring the Internet (and interactivity) to your TV. Inspired by a desire to talk smack to friends while watching sporting events, it will offer an array of products like chat, voting, game show participation, pop up alerts, auction watch through applets overlaid on broadcasts. They will create their own device and hope to be integrated with other devices as well. Another device in the living room scares me, but the company is in its very early stages, so they’ll presumably be testing the concept. They plan to offer their service through subscription, targeting the market of people getting score updates on their SMS phones. Sounds like Wink and some other startups from another era, maybe the time is now. Mediazone Funded by Naspers, a large South African media company, but based in the Silicon Valley, Mediazone is a secure P2P video delivery platform that supports media portals and live premier events. They recently did live coverage of 300 matches on 9 courts for Wimbledon. There’s → Read More
San Francisco, CA
