After weeks of rumors, Baidu finally confirmed today that it has acquired the online video business of Shanghai-based PPS for $370 million. PPS will be merged into iQiyi, Baidu’s video platform Baidu, to form China’s largest online video platform by the number of mobile users and video viewing time. The sale is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. PPS will continue to… → Read More
As more viewing moves to mobile, tablet, and connected TV devices, the amount of viewing that happens online during the prime time hours continues to increase. And according to video ad startup TubeMogul, brands who serve advertisements during that time are seeing greater awareness and brand favorability for their products. → Read More
According to the latest data from comScore, U.S. Internet users watched 39 billion online content videos in September. That’s up a bit from the 37.7 billion video views the company reported in August, though the total number of unique viewers dipped to around 181.5 million from 188 million in the previous month. In total, comScore reports, 85 percent of U.S. Internet users viewed online video last… → Read More
Vimeo is a great site that’s done a lot for independent online video creation and publishing, but one thing that’s been missing from its platform is a way for creators to make money directly from their movies. The video network now offers that, thanks to a new Tip Jar feature rolling out today. It allows Vimeo Plus or Pro members to add tip buttons to any video content, so that users can click and… → Read More
So much for the YouTube competitors. The owners of Veoh, a video portal that claims to have millions of users worldwide, has said it has enlisted the help of Equity Partners CRB to explore strategic options for the company, including a sale. “The company intends to focus solely on commercialization of its proprietary social video offerings,” owners Qlipso said in a statement (embedded below). The… → Read More
Ivi.ru the “Hulu of Russia” that offers streamed premium TV and films from international and local big-name content holders, has raised another $40 million round of funding. The investment was led by Baring Vostok, a private equity firm, along with existing investors ru-Net, Tiger Global, Prof-Media and Frontier Ventures. Oleg Tumanov, ivi.ru founder and CEO, tells TechCrunch that the funds will… → Read More
Online video — helped along by the rise of tablets, better broadband and a flood of content from YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and many others — has seen a huge rise in usage in the last few years; and while PCs remain the most common way to consume it, thanks to consoles like the Xbox, even TV screens are becoming popular for online video consumption.
According to a new study out from NPD… → Read More
Online video site Viki has made a big business out of aggregating content from around the world, covering 150+ languages in all, and making it accessible to all by crowdsourcing translations from its community of users. Now that pool of viewers is set to get a little deeper with a new distribution deal with Renren, known as the Facebook of China, which will see Renren create a special channel… → Read More
A new chapter today for Rutube, the YouTube of Russia: the user-generated video site, long competing against YouTube in its home market and losing, has redesigned and is now turning itself into more of an aggregator that will host content from Google’s video giant as well as Vimeo, as part of a new content injection that will also include full-length feature films. Rutube has also announced an… → Read More
Back in 2007, Bismarck and Belsasar Lepe and Sean Knapp left Google with aspirations to revolutionize in-video advertising. Ooyala didn’t quite revolutionize advertising, but it has found more than a little success in what has become a very crowded market. The company’s video player now delivers cross-device content to over 6,000 domains, reaching nearly 200 million viewers, and the company claims… → Read More
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki. On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year — BBC Worldwide participated in a $20 million Series B round that also included SK Planet, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others — and a content licensing deal… → Read More
Looks like the final frame has been reached for Joost, the online video service originally started by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and then eventually sold to the Adconion Media Group: Adconion today announced that it would fold in and rebrand Joost Media into smartclip, a video advertising company that it bought in November 2011.
The company says it is making the move in… → Read More
Eric Elia (@ericelia) is a member of the founding team at Brightcove, and is currently the vice president of TV solutions. Brightcove, a video and app solutions provider, went public on Feb. 17 on the NASDAQ and now trades with a market cap of $509.3 million.
When we started Brightcove seven years ago, we expected a five-to-10-year transformation period until we reached a world of purely… → Read More
The online video market in China is a fragmented scene led by national businesses where companies like YouTube don’t even get a look in; but today sees that market move one step closer to consolidation, with the news that the two largest video portals, Youku and Tudou, will be merging in an all-stock deal, to take control of nearly half the online video market in the country.
The merger caps… → Read More
Online video service Brightcove will price its IPO between $10 and $12 per share, according to a new filing with the SEC.
The company first filed for the IPO back in August of last year, saying it wanted to raise up to $50 million. Now, $50 million is at the lower end of its price range. If Brightcove sells the maximum number of shares (it’s set to sell 5 million shares, plus an extra 750,000… → Read More
Lately, we’ve been seeing more and more big television events come with an online streaming counterpart. Big sporting and televised events are showing up online, with the 2010 Olympics seeming to be one of the first big global events where both viewers and media publicly recognized the power and potential of carrying an event like that online.
For the first time ever, the Super Bowl is being… → Read More
At this point, video is just a regular part of the web. But how is it gaining on regular TV watching. Just in terms of audience reach, Nielsen estimates that almost 145 million people watch video online in the U.S., compared to about 290 million who watch traditional TV. So the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population.
For all the video people… → Read More
There are no shortages of “predictions” articles, here I look at a dozen things that won’t happen in the world of online video in 2012, even though they should.
1) We Will Have Standards and Definitions (No, we won’t)
By the end of 2011, the online video industry didn’t yet have a common definition and standard for a video view. It also wasn’t sure if the… → Read More
Blip Networks, which operates Blip.tv, is raising more money. According to an SEC filing, the New York City company sold $6 million worth of stock beginning on December 22, 2011 in an offering that could expand to as much as $11.1 million. Presumably, this is part of a Series D offering, since Blip raised a $10 million Series C in May, 2010, almost 18 months ago.
Blip is trying to become a … → Read More
VC (TechCrunch contributor) Mark Suster published an article on his personal blog about one of his portfolio companies, Maker Studios. Other players in that space include The Collective and Fullscreen.
While Mark is clearly rationalizing his investment, his reasoning is worth understanding. However, I could not help but wonder if one of the excerpts in this piece will make any difference… → Read More
Netflix and Hulu are the two leading video streaming services on the Web when it comes to mainstream TV shows and movies. More people watch Netflix online than Hulu, and have since about 18 months ago. In November, 2011, comScore estimates that Netflix.com attracted 26.6 million unique visitors, versus 20.2 million for Hulu
But a better metric to compare the two is how much time people actually… → Read More
Up until now, Twitvid has been the largest repository of videos on Twitter other than YouTube. It’s essentially been the TwitPic of video, and it’s done a good job with 40 million video views per month and 12 million unique visitors. But people mostly come to Twitvid from social links, they don’t stick around.
CEO Mo Al Adham wants to change that by turning Twitvid into a social network for… → Read More
Online video is booming and the are tons of small video companies across production, advertising, distribution, and technology. Yet we have yet to see a serious attempt to roll up the industry. The reasons, I submit, boil down to egos and greed.
What is a Rollup?
Historically, large private equity firms have “rolled up” various small companies in a given market through mergers or… → Read More
Here’s some good news for web video publishers and producers. Online video advertising budgets are expected to jump sharply in 2012. Brand advertisers who purchased online video ads this year are projected to spend 47 percent more next year. These numbers were released this morning in the second annual “Video State of the Industry Survey” by Adap.tv and Digiday.
For advertisers that didn’t… → Read More
Livestream is unveiling a major upgrade to its live video service today. It won’t be fully rolled out until December, but you can see a preview of it here or watch the video below. The new player brings a few firsts to live video: an adaptive bitrate which can adjust dynamically based on the viewers bandwidth up to HD quality (720p); an instant playback DVR feature; a live blogging platform to… → Read More
comScore’s online video stats for September are in, and in today’s non-news, Google Sites again ranks as the number one source of online video views. Google Sites, which derives most of its traffic from YouTube, served 18.6 billion videos in September, which made up 47 percent of the 39.8 billion videos viewed on the Web last month.
What’s more, Microsoft Sites and Viacom Digital both… → Read More
In 2007, I published a post that aggregated a series of projections for where online video advertising would be in the future. One estimate, set in 2004, of the expected size of the US online video ad market by 2009 was $657 million. A year later, there was a 2009 estimate at $1.5 billion. According to the IAB, the actual number for video advertising in 2009 was $908 million (and grew to $1.4… → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo.
The rise and proliferation of cable grew the total pie for television, leaving networks with bigger businesses even if their share of the pie shrunk. While the network-to-cable shift was evolutionary, the television-to-web transition is revolutionary. Nonetheless, TV’s Traditional Media… → Read More
A new study by Yahoo (embedded below) shows that online video watching habits are shifting. People are watching longer videos and watching more at night during primetime. The chart above shows when people watch videos online. The blue line is today (2011) and the dotted line is two years ago (2009). The two lines show more than a 30 percent divergence during primetime.
So what changed? Peak… → Read More
Brightcove was issued a broad patent for the “Distribution of content,” which covers the basic features of a professional online video platform. Patent No. 7,925,973, which was applied for on August 12, 2005 by CEO Jeremy Allaire and CTO Bob Mason, describes some of the basic features of all professional online video players such as customizable players, digital rights management, and… → Read More
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