VideoEgg, a service that allows users to take video from virtually any device, transcode it to Flash and upload it for viewing on websites (see our posts on VideoEgg here) will be announcing the acquisition of Popcast in an hour or so.
This news follows yesterday’s announcement by Internet TV company Brightcove that they have acquired Seattle-based metaStories. Look for more development in this space Internet TV players consolidate and define themselves around YouTube, the best known service.
As a side note, Popcast was founded by Rob Lord, who is also founder of the recently released Songbird media player. See here for our posts on Songbird.
has anybody noticed the metacafe made it to alexa 282 ?
Any idea how much they paid?
Metacafe is a great site and product
Honestly, a little consolidation in a crowded market may help these folks focus on monetizing their services in realistic ways.
metacafe barely shows up on ask.com/websearch.com
http://ranking....rl=metacafe.com
So metacafe is nearly purely early adopters still.
Anyone have any idea what the burn rate of these companies is? From the sounds of things if these services try to monitize they will get sued for copyright infringement!
Here’s a news “flash”. How about a friggin volume control? That’s my biggest pet peeve with Flash animations, is that they’re blaringly loud and they typically have no mute or volume control.
Converting everything to flash is pretty much useless IMO.
Opps made a mistake in the link..
I ment to link to video egg…
My biggest (really only) issue with videoegg right now is that you can only transcode videos that are 5 minutes or less in length.
I tested VideoEgg a few weeks ago and thought it needed a little more time in the skillet.
The lip synch on my final Flash video was way off. I’m sure this will change over time, or it may have been an anomoly.
Michael, if you like, upload your stuff to Audioblog.com (oops, gotta start sayin hipcast, heh)… we let you transcode virtually any video format to flash and quicktime for ipod video… a single file must be 256 MB or less. So that’s a bit beyond the 5 minute limit. No plugins, nada.
Our certifyr score is low tho, so I dunno if we fit with the mojojujr. /smirk
Since the subject is in our Space I hope you don’t mind a little self-promotion.
If VideoEgg and BrightCove are driving consolidation, I guess we at Vidiac.com are creating a fracture in the IPTV market, by allowing people to start their own “YouTube” for free under their own URL. We’ve been operating for a year now, and our banner site (http://videos.streetfire.net) alone pushes over a million videos a day. We now have 250 sites using our service and are growing exponentially. And the big news? We’ve been profitable for the last two quarters
on 7 digits on annual revenue.
Anyhow there are many great sites out there offering video service MetaCafe is a good example, and I personally think that VSocial is doing the best from a features/design perspective. You also have Veoh.com, Vidilife.com and more than a dozen others. The “Consolidation” in my perspective is going to be communities augmenting their brand with video service, rather than a centralized web-site. The reason we have been able to maintain profitability is we’ve grown around focused channels of like content. For Example, we have a Paint Ball web site that attracts paint Ball viewers, who then in turn upload their paint ball videos. This creates natural channels around genres.
Can anyone get VideoEgg to work? It keeps telling me I need to install WMP 10, which I just did – and it still has an issue.
No support on the site that I can see.
Video Egg is a good start, but as with most of the next generation of video startups, they are only enabling one portion of the overall feature set that most consumers really want out of a video sharing site.
Check out HomeMovie.Com next week as we launch the next version of Afiniti – Our web-based video editing & sharing platform that has been in place since 2001:
– Unlimited live capture of video from your digital camcorder and transcoding from existing files on your computer. 5 minutes? 5 hours? no problem! Use our web-based editing tools to create your scenes after the fact.
– management & editing tools for the your digital video, photos and music on your local computer
– 10 hours of free video synching with your online account for sharing or archiving.
– Sharing with family & friends in a private network, or attach to your blog
– processing for non-digital tapes for only $5/tape (up to 10 hours) into MPEG2 video and web-compliant windows media 9.0
– availability of all of your video scenes as iPod-compatible video downloads for you or your friends and family
– and much more.
I can only sit back and watch with amusement the noise that this space is generating once again in the VC community. We started during the last period of euphoria around consumer video sharing. Remember Earthnoise? LifeClips? and the host of others?
Thank god we were self-financed and could make the $3+ million we’ve invested actually go to developing real technologies that people would use and want to pay for in end-product.
Another interesting player in the Internet TV space is http://www.mediazone.com
Do you think this was a wise decision?