Mydeo is an online video streaming service, primarily aimed at consumers and/or SMB’s, that might have slipped under your radar. Today they are launching a newly redesigned service which promises to offer an improved user experience, a new pricing model and better performance to boot but let’s be clear Mydeo is not another gootube wannabee.
Unlike YouTube, Mydeo gives you the freedom to upload videos of any duration and any resolution of your choice and better still they allow you to do so without compressing or transcoding them in the process.
Unlike YouTube and most other online video sites, Mydeo doesn’t claim any copyright to your content or distribution rights, so you won’t find that embarrassing video from your company Christmas party being rebroadcast on thousands of blog sites in the future.
Unlike YouTube, there are no adverts on Mydeo and no adult content is all allowed either because Mydeo are proactive members of the Internet Watch Foundation.
Unlike YouTube, Mydeo is not a social networking site, people don’t visit Mydeo to view your video(s) or share their comments. Instead Mydeo simply enables you to choose how people will consume your video content, either by sending them an email link to it or placing it on your blog via an embedded link .
In either case the content is rapidly streamed at whatever resolution the user wants and plays through the windows media player.
So who does use Mydeo? Cary Marsh (Mydeo’s MD) tells me “the split currently is around 70% consumer and 30% small business.” Their membership demographics are equally interesting. Clearly the social networks cater for a younger audience – but Mydeo’s target market reflects where their membership is highest; in the 30-55 age range with a peak around 30-35 i.e when people have kids and buy their first expensive camcorder. Cary adds that they have members in over 180 countries and 90% of their revenue now comes from outside the UK.
For a number of reasons, Mydeo is one of the companies on my watchlist. I have been tracking them for over 10 months now. I think they have the potential to be a great UK success story for a number of reasons. Firstly Mydeo were very smart about raising their seed capital by getting a DTI grant for technical innovation. This puts them in a very strong position right now when negotiating their first VC funding round in order to expand their profitable business model.
Secondly when a company starts to develop their own virtual ecosystem, it’s a sure sign that the product has reached a critical tipping point. Currently Mydeo are the only European company to successfully partner and integrate their video streaming service with Windows MovieMaker and recently Muvee technologies integrated their third party video editing software. In addition ISP’s such as Tiscali and Orange broadband have recently built co-branded sites with Mydeo.
Finally it seems I am not the only one who has Mydeo on their watchlist. It seems Cary is up for one of those “Women in IT” Blackberry awards this year. The Awards ceremony will be held at Old Billingsgate, London on Thursday 2nd November 2006. One thing that struck me as slightly odd is the fact that Euan Semple is the only male on an all female judging panel. How and why did you get that gig Euan? In any case good luck to Cary with the awards and the relaunch.
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