There’s currently a thread on Techmeme based on this blog post from Pingdom about the downtime of most of LiveUniverse’s services for the past couple of days. We’ve been getting tips about this since last Thursday, and tried contacting founder & CEO Brad Greenspan (also the founder of MySpace) for an explanation to no avail.
Pingdom caught the fact that the light has gone out for the websites Revver (which we’ve declared dead or at least struggling for life before), LiveUniverse.com and PageFlakes, but missed other unreachable properties such as Peerflix. The only websites that seem to be holding up for the time being are LiveVideo, Yikers, Glumbert and MeeVee, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for those to stay online for much longer either.
Update: per comment below, PageFlakes is back, may I suggest you back up your data if you’re an active user?
Update 2: Revver’s back too, with a message saying that they’ll be down 5PM PST January 28 but they’ll be back up in the evening. We now know that didn’t happen. → Read More
We’ve been getting a lot of tips from people who have been having problems reaching the Revver website lately, getting videos uploaded or playing the ones already hosted on the platform. We haven’t paid much attention to them so far, because every time we check, the site seems up and we experience no trouble playing videos.
But something is definitely up. → 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
New figures from Nielsen’s new VideoCensus product reveal that women prefer mainstream media video content online, where as men prefer user generated content. According to Ars Technica, the figures show women aged 18 to 34 were twice as likely as men of the same age group to watch network TV shows streamed from sites such as CBS.com or Hulu, where as men aged 18 to 34 were over twice as likely to check out user-generated video sites as women (YouTube and others.) The figures relate only to streamed content, and therefore excludes iTunes and downloaded content from P2P services such as BitTorrent. Even if we discount the figures fully (Ars suggests men are more comfortable with BitTorrent therefore MSM content is not counted correctly) its a strange anomaly. Why would women prefer professional content and men preferred user content? and is it possible to obtain an answer without being completely sexist in a conclusion? No doubt Nielsen and competing services will test the theory in the coming months. If it’s proven to be true, it may well affect the focus of sites in both spaces, and will most definitely affect the types of advertisers these sites attract. (image credit: icanhascheezburger) → Read More
CNET is reporting that video sharing site Revver is trying to sell itself for $300-500k, a measly price given its total funding of $12.7M. The company apparently has fallen on hard times, with over half of its staff leaving in the last 18 months and having accrued a debt of $1M. So far the company has had no luck finding a buyer even at such a low offering price. Both LiveUniverse, a “network of entertainment Web sites”, and Microsoft’s Soapbox (i.e. MSN Video) have considered buying Revver but neither has bitten. Is Revver on its last legs? It sure looks like it. Let us know in the comments if you have any more information regarding their situation. CrunchBase Information Revver Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It may seem weird, but I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day when I see ads in my viral video. eMarketer expects online video advertising to nearly double in 2008 to $1.3 billion, but no one’s really nailed a scalable ad platform for video. However, Google’s been quietly testing their own system and there are a bunch of other startups tackling it as well. There are a couple key issues they’re all struggling with as they try and generate the greatest amount of ad revenue. There’s still some uncertainty about where to put the ads (pre/post/interstitial?). Even the type or length of the ad is up for debate. A recent study found longer ads were more effective at branding, while conventional wisdom has cast doubt on users sitting through the longer plugs. After deciding on the format, determining the content of the video in order to generate relevant ads is yet another tough problem. It’s also a dire matter for big brands that don’t want to risk being associated with inflammatory content. Finally, these ad platforms will need publishers, advertisers and a marketplace to trade in. Here’s a look at what people are doing in video advertising: Definitely the team to watch, YouTube is treading carefully, experimenting with text ads running along the bottom of the video that users can click on for a full video ad. They’re going to be testing the system with some of their top content producers and word on the street is that the terms are pretty good. Revver splits ad revenue 50/50 with publishers. They run ads at the end of viral videos, which might mean that people are still paying close attention after watching the main content. However, this also means they lose some precious real estate to help drive traffic to other videos on their network like YouTube does. Revver filters the content themselves, tying in the appropriate ads. Similar to Revver, VideoEgg helps publishers deliver and monetize their video inventory. It’s a very hands on approach suitable for larger brands that have tight control over the quality and context of their content. They serve up over 20 million videos daily across their EggNetwork. Ads show up alongside lead ins to other videos as well. ScanScout’s technology scans each video and determines content, with ads delivered contextually to match each scene. They run text ads along the bottom of the videos based on → Read More
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has hinted future plans of revenue-sharing at YouTube in the coming months. The BBC is speculating that the ads might take the form of 3-second pre-roll, but Chad Hurley didn’t mention that in his comments. The millions of YouTube videos is a huge inventory that finally gives advertisers a real reason to start investing in the creation of video ads and begin using Google AdSense Video. I believe there will be three parties seeking compensation: Video content owners — owners of original content. (An audio “fingerprinting” copyright system has been in the works for a while, which will match videos up with content owners, in order to compensate audio/video content owners.) Video content creators — users that mash-up content into custom creations. Publishers — user/company that displays a video on their website to visitors. One of the many questions is whether ads will appear on YouTube videos that are displayed on websites outside of YouTube.com. If I’m a publisher, I’d want the option to make revenue on a video I publish — but if I’m a publisher (user) on MySpace, MySpace is the ultimate publisher. MySpace is loaded with YouTube videos, but MySpace doesn’t allow external advertising on their website. Also, MySpace has been blocking external widgets randomly and without explanation, so I would imagine that YouTube wouldn’t take a chance by displaying ads in videos that are seen on MySpace pages. Google is already in bed with MySpace, which could lead to rev-share discussions of ads within YouTube videos that stream on MySpace — and also ensure that YouTube doesn’t ever become an unexplained banned victim of MySpace. YouTube competitors have worked to differentiate themselves by compensating video content creators, but once YouTube enters this game with their top-dog status already — I question what would make a user go to a lesser-visible video site such as Revver, Guba, Metacafe, etc. Competitors have been struggling of recent — Revver lost two founders and Guba lost its’ CEO and two executives. Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas. CrunchBase Information YouTube Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
User created video sharing site Revver has landed an intriguing partnership with a new UK TV station called FameTV. Revver users will be able to opt-in for TV broadcast and those selected will be shown on FameTV. Viewers will vote for their favorites by SMS and revenue sent to Revver will be split 50/50 with the video publishers. This is the kind of partnership we’ve seen fomenting in previous deals like PodShow’s Sirius broadcasts, the podcast fueled radio station KYOU and Rocketboom on Tivo. Revver is very 2.0, with post roll still frame ads, revenue splits for publishers, social bookmarking integration and an API. Unfortunately, they’ve had a tough time building the kind of critical mass that YouTube has. Aside from a handful of high profile video series (Ze Frank, Ask a Ninja, Lonelygirl15) there’s not a lot of good content on the network. Perhaps it’s the revenue sharing that brings less authentically creative and more profit driven amateurs to make up the bulk of the content at Revver. I don’t know. A TV partnership may or may not help. This kind of partnership is in some key ways different from the trend of paying top users. It may be more effective in terms of quality to glean a select few content creators and pay them well than to skim from a large set of content and pay many people only a little. Blogburst (our coverage) appears to be taking the à la carte approach for text content. Only time will tell which approach will work best. For now though, classic British comedy will face challengers at least larger in number than ever before. → Read More
Jason Calacanis says in an AOL memo he’s posted that his model for Netscape has been vindicated by the recent conflagration at Digg and rapid growth of page views at Netscape. He says recent events are proving that top contributors to social media sites need recognition and approval, if not payment, in order to continue doing the hard work required to make a social site vibrant. Mike Arrington has called Calacanis’s move to hire top users away from other sites by offering to pay them a huge red flag for Netscape, but I disagree with Mike and think current developments in spaces like social news but especially video sharing indicate that rewarding top users may be a solid strategy. (Update: See comments below where Mike says I’ve inaccurately described his position and he clarifies.) I don’t think it’s as clear yet as Calacanis does, but I can’t think of a more interesting question to look at. As social news works itself out, advertisers seek to get into places like MySpace and YouTube and the line between amateur and pro continues to blur – there’s a number of things unfolding that could change media in the same way as bloggers at the Democratic National Convention went down in history as a key turning point for that medium. When Yahoo! bought Flickr they said that one of the system’s biggest appeals was that users built the community for free. According to Calacanis’s logic, that’s not be the direction things are moving in these days. There’s a lot of evidence to support that opinion; these sites are being made viable by the work of rewarded top users combined with high quality, very unorthodox corporate advertising. To put the recent debates about Digg (our coverage) and Netscape (our coverage) in context, here’s an overview of some of the key events unfolding right now that are blurring the line between amateur users and professional content producers. Here’s some bullet points for this meme: some top Digg users feel unappreciated Netscape’s hiring top contributors is helping grow page views fast according to Calacanis a top YouTube user turns out to be a professionally produced work YouTube users are going pro and pros are succeeding in YouTube MySpace isn’t a training ground anymore – it’s a sales platform the Revver video community has stars of its own and they’re getting paid people hate Paris Hilton. Details below. → 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
