Yet Another Flash Video Sharing Clone Gets More Funding
It's interesting this: that yet another video sharing clone site has got funding. A site called Veoh has just secured a series B round of VC funding – yet it looks EXACTLY like YouTube (who got funded a while ago) – which has many clones, with slightly different ideas on how the person who shared the video can make a cut of the profits from ads too.
Veoh must have some serious content juju through Michael Eisner – ie: Possible deals with the likes of Disney etc to 'share' THEIR content on this type of site. The big media companies have been looking closely at places like YouTube quite alot, since people started ripping off, uploading and sharing their copyrighted content. So, they will probably try to shoehorn their content in there, amongst the dancing schoolgirls and street ninjas, then hope all the rad kids click on the stars, pumping the content up to the top pages. NOTE: No RSS found yet here. Very odd.
What I don't understand though, is when the people at Veoh are asked by the VCs: "So, what differentiates you from so-and-so (YouTube, for example)?" – What on earth do they say? "Errrr….. YouWhat? Never heard of it – *ahem* Video2.0!!! "… ??
I'm sure that people from Spark, such as Bijan Sabet will also bring some clout with their track record when it comes to developing the business partnerships that could no doubt follow soon. He's had his eyes on web delivered media for quite a while.
Maybe people should do a quick search on 'video sharing' on Google and find lots of comparison reviews around like this one, from DV Guru.
People say 'Ohhh, the Flickr of video'.. etc. But that's simply not the case. YouTube for example, lets you upload your videos, which they then run through an encoding server to convert to Flash Video (.FLV) and then serve then up for people to rate, tag and comment on – and them to make healthy ad revenue from all the hits (thank you very much). As far as I know, you CANNOT download the original – or another fomat, like Google video's PSP, Divx, etc format options.
My money is on systems like click.tv, and jumpcut and the like, which let you annotate the content with time-triggered text (eg: searchable mojo) and other media and stuff. [btw: I am also building such a system]. Come back SMIL, all is forgiven!!!
This content needs ENRICHING – by the viewers/listeners/readers.
UPDATE: Just found another great url with a matrix comparison of 40 online video sharing systems. SO MANY are identical! I also note that Revver lets you download the originally uploaded video files.
UPDATE2: Just read this on We Are The Media where it appears that Veoh had once 'hijacked' video podcaster and bloggers' content and pumped the content into thir system with no credit to the original authors/producers. Ooo.. bad!