Everybody wants to get in on social networking and user-generated video. Reality Digital, a white-label YouTube that lets media sites add video-uploading and social-networking features, raised $6.3 million in a series B financing. OpenView Venture Partners was the sole investor in the round. The company previously raised $2 million in a series A from private individuals in November, 2005. In addition to video-uploading, Reality Digital’s platform can also handle audio, blogging, mashups, mobile uploads, profiles, forums—pretty much any feature that you’d see on MySpace or Youtube. It also includes a full management suite that lets companies monitor usage and manage advertising campaigns. Customers include MTV Networks, the Travel Channel, Lonely Planet, and the Daily Reel Reality Digital also powers the back-end of Adobe Premier Express, which is Flash-based software for creating video mashups. Reality Digital competes with KickApps, VSocial, and VMix. CrunchBase Information Reality Digital KickApps VMIX Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
If you had stopped by video sharing site VSocial before today you may not have thought much of the service, its sparse UI made it look like just one more also-ran. This week the site relaunched and is making a serious play to monetize customized white label video players. With $1.5 million in funding from Ron Conway and Consor Capital, VSocial is aiming for a mid market price point on short form video. It may well be able to monetize on the growing demand for video networking sites, but I don’t know how happy to be about that. Early showcase examples of the company’s products don’t look terribly stable, well designed or appealing to me. Perhaps with recent funding the offerings will be improved but the company has been around since 2002. The service looks to me like it was just waiting for something like GooTube to yield a mass of companies feeling left behind and wanting a quick and dirty video networking component. That’s just my judgment, though. You can click through to the product showcase examples below and decide for yourself. The company offers three different products. The first is called VConnect MyBrand. This level of service allows publishers to add their logo to the player, watermark over the video and “call to action” link back to their own site. The MyBrand player costs $75 per month for business use. VSocial’s advertising partner can run preroll, post roll or text ads with a 50/50 revenue split between VSocial and the video publisher. Here’s VSocial’s showcase customer for this product, amateurgolf.com. The player looks good. The second product is called VConnect ProPublisher. The company calls this level of service a turnkey solution for video enabled microsites. This service costs $500 per month plus a 30% ad revenue cut. The showcase example of this that VSocial has to offer is a Chevy page on gas consumption reduction. None of the videos ever loaded when I went to the site, it’s on a VSocial domain and if it’s a turnkey microsite some one designed it very poorly. The top tier of service is called VConnect for Enterprise Communities. It’s a preconstructed social networking service with video at the center of the strategy. Every part of site functionality at Latino video network Voytv.com is provided by VSocial. There are quite a few features and no shortage of ads. The service costs between → 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
