No sooner did I proclaim Motionbox the best online video sharing service (mostly for its editing and deep tagging tools), than a new contender arrives on the scene. San Francisco based stealth startup Jumpcut, founded by Mike Folgner and Ryan Cunningham, just launched minutes ago.
In my mind there are now two distinct types of video sharing services. The first is the YouTube crowd and its dozens of clones, which allow easy uploading of files which are then transcoded into flash, and tagging of those files. The goal is to get video and page views, and it’s working.
It’s working so well, in fact, that it raises questions on their business model. YouTube is free but has very real bandwidth costs from showing these videos. They are dealing with this in two ways - by degrading the quality of the flash video files to reduce file size, and by raising another $8m from Sequoia, raising the total to $11.5 million.
The second group does what YouTube does, but also has some basic editing features. Included in this group is Grouper, Motionbox, Jumpcut and, to some extent, YouTube. Grouper and VideoEgg require a client download to use the service. Motionbox and Jumpcut don’t, although Jumpcut says they’ll have one as an option soon. With these last two, the editing occurs online, and therefore facilitates editing by a group on a shared video.
Jumpcut, as the newest entrant, has some really spectacular features, that should encourage video mashing between users. It’s editing features, also using Flash, are better than what I saw with Motionbox. Any video can be cloned (unless restricted by the publisher), and other clips can be added to the cloned video. Sound files can be added to either overwrite existing audio or mix in with it. They also allow a number of “transition” features as effects. Overall, its pretty cool. Check it out by clicking “remix” on this video screen.
Like YouTube, finished videos can be kept private, shared or made public. Jumpcuts provides code snippets to allow video playback from blogs and other websites as well. Unlike Motionbox, Jumpcut does not have a deep tagging feature, although Mike Folger says it is being built and that “it’s fairly straightforward using the Flash development tools”.
The service is currently free and allows uploads of up to 50 MB (YouTube allows 100MB). A paid service will be available soon in the $5/month range, and Jumpcut will also have a client install available to allow users to do some of the editing and transcoding work before uploading it to the Jumpcut server.
Overall, the service is eerily similar to Motionbox. Jumpcut has slightly better editing features, and Motionbox’s deep tagging is a definite feature win. Both of these services will be very useful for creating a single video from a group event where lots of different people are recording video - a wedding, for example. Jumpcut has angel funding by Westlake Venture Partners and Great Oaks Capital.
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I got an email from myspace this morning saying they host videos now. I’m surprised no one is talking about this yet.
Eyespot is another video “mixing” site I ran across recently.
I can’t accurately judge the difference between Jumpcut and motionbox, SINCE MOTIONBOX ISN”T LIVE YET. Come on.
Uhh, why would people *really* need this when people have Movie Maker and iMovie? It is easier, faster, free, and better features. The only bonus is you can grap clips to include in your own video, but that doesn’t make it 2x better. Doesn’t make business sense…
If you have 1m possible free clips to choose from, and you and your friends are uploading videos and trying to top each other, you can see how the social aspect of this is what’s interesting, John, not the actual ability to remix movies.
In addition to what Ted said, you don’t have to be *at your own computer* to us jumpcut. In fact, you don’t need your own computer *at all*.
This is the next hot thing to hit the internet . . . bashers beware. At least someone is thinking of all of us who are looking to push the online experience beyond the static iMovie model. Keep it up!
So, YouTube now has the funds to expand even more rapidly (in addition to the “35 million videos being watched daily on YouTube”). It can buy more servers, more disk space, more bandwidth. Life just became a whole lot tougher for these other video sharing sites.
How long before YouTube adds “online editing” features ? Are these new entrants simply going to be “Idea Banks” for the market leader ?
However, the market isn’t entirely decided yet. I haven’t been too impressed with the YouTube experience.
MetaCafe (Benchmark Capital) is bigger then all of these players, with a very fancy client and a super-efficient content filtering & ranking engine. I can’t understand how come they were never mentioned here (except in comments, i did a search). They are the digg of videos.
The big difference between Napster and YouTube is that YouTube has “substantial non-infringing use”, which was the critical legal issue in the Sony Beta-max case. If a product or service has “substantial non-infringing use” than it can not be held liable for contributory copyright infringement. However, individual users could be sued for copyright infringement.
I was a VP at the original Napster so I am fairly familiar with the legal issues. I wrote a blog about this today at
http://dondodge.typepad.com/th.....issue.html
It seems these sites are offering basic video editing features so that people don’t have to buy the $1K Adobe Premier or Apple Final Cut Pro.
#10 - I find downloading software no mater how pretty rather annoying just to interact with a site, considering the other online-only options. That’s why Grouper, Veoh, and MetaCafe don’t suit a lot of people (many are too slow to load anyway). But Grouper and Metacafe have evolved to not require clients, so I am warming towards them.
#12 - There are many cheap solutions that will have you up and running in no time for those that want cheap home videos editing, aside from the fact that many have iMovie and WMovieMaker built-in.
Ted, yes, but I have no desire to make movies with clips I didn’t take and try to beat out my friends, but then again I am not in highschool. Maybe a certain demographic might be into that, but I doubt if that is the same demographic that would pay $5 per month for the service. Am I wrong?
Patton, don’t most people do things on their own computer? Sure some will do it on *any* computer, seeing as I do 95% of stuff on my own personal computer, who cares? Please help me understand…
With so many video services there’s even an attempt to commoditize the video hosting/sharing. Check out
http://www.vidiac.com/
They can set you up with your own video.techcrunch.com service that has all the goodies.
Oh, to add to things, I’d like to see a new video website come out with a business model that can actually break even… I only know of 1 so far.
Getting VC funding and hiring a bunch of people won’t help. At least the jumpcut guys got Angel funding and not VC funding. With Angel funding at least they could sell for a resonable amount of money, plus actually keep some themselves if the don’t prove out their business model…
#15 Alex,
While I wouldn’t say we’re “trying” to commoditize this space, we did recognized back in 2004 when we launched that it would be commoditized very quickly and so focused more on an ASP business model than building our own super-portal like YouTube. At last count we have more than 300 YouTube like sites, but our site owners tend to make interest-specific sites such as sports, techtv or other hobbies rather than an “all videos here” type portal like Google video or YouTube.
Thanks for the plug!
Our Beta 1.0 Launched early 2004, and to the best of my knowledge we were the first dedicated free video hosting service. Since we are self funded and our Alexa reports our corporate site rather than all 300+ video sites we provide service for, we’ve stayed out of the spot light. That said we are about a third the size of YouTube in terms of videos streamed and unique visitors.
VSocial, VidiLife, VideoEgg, YouTube, Veoh, etc etc have all done fantastic jobs rolling out feature rich services. Since we’re self funded our development budget is obviously meeker, we can’t match these other sites toe to toe there. That said I think they’re on a different growth arc from us looking for the “Clear Channel” consolidation of this market. So, exciting times ahead for all of us! I for one am looking forward to popping a beer, kicking back and seeing what happens.
-Adam
http://www.vidiac.com
The business model is quite obvious: show general or relevant video ads before the videos start. This could be in addition to a premium membership arrangement like Flickr. I think YouTube’s popularity will start a new cottage industry of tiny ad agencies developing specifically for YouTube et al. Other partnerships with large ad agencies to tie in TV ads with content on Youtube (such as you have to watch the cliffhanger ending exclusively on YouTube) could also generate good revenue. The only question is when YouTube will actually start focusing on all these things. They’ll probably get bought out by a media company by then to make these ideas easier to implement.
There is a third category: Video entertainment, which is led by Metacafe. bubbles up the best videos.
Looks like there is a new video sharing website being introduced each day. How much space can there be for all these free video sharing websites?
This post is as crazy as your post about some non-entity called collective x challenging LinkedIn. The notion that one of these sites is going to displace youtube is absurd. even google video may no longer have a shot, but that at least is a real challenge…
I agree that these types of companies will make money by video ads.
What I notice about jumpcut is that their editor is a Flash app. Cool, but then this
Skittles promo site has *the same* functionality, albeit limited to clips from popular TV shows. Looks to me like the “Flash-video-mashup-app” is already a commodity! I actually think the Skittles version has a cleaner interface.
Mike, perhaps it makes sense to hold judgement a bit before announcing “the best video sharing site so far”. I wouldn’t want to start seeing that headline every day!
When you serve over 100 Million PVs per day, generating a ton of cash is easy. Even at a eCPM of $1, run the math. IPO.
some of the best videos on these sites ARE commercials… advertisers can post videos as easily and freely as anyone else.
Thank you Mike for the post and the write up.
I’ve been watching this thread, and I just have to say that the comparison of our site to either eyespot, the skittles promo, or the (currently available) editing functionality of videoegg or grouper is completely ridiculous. Please try it out before you pigeon hole it into the “flash toy” category.
Editing on jumpcut is, believe it or not, much easier and faster than using even simplified desktop editing programs like iMovie and MovieMaker. I made a 20 minute video today out of dozeons of different assets and timed it to music in about 10 minutes; there are no missing core features, everything you need is there, and editing is instant, no rendering, no large files. As an added *bonus* on top of all that your friends and family might actually get to see the movie you made, and (wait there’s more) even add their stuff and make their own version. And thats not to mention the creative and artistic aspect of making and editing movies (documentary shorts, music videos, etc), where the community and the access to a huge library of media plays a much larger role. The idea isn’t just about sharing video, or making slideshows, the idea is to open up video as a new medium which is as easy to edit as the comments in this thread, or an article in Wikipedia.
Motionbox looks to be more interesting, however as someone else pointed out they haven’t launched yet, and by the time they launch we’ll have “deep tagging” too
-Ashot Petrosian
http://www.jumpcut.com
I think somebody just put the balls back into online video. This thing rocks. I made a video in less than a minute that would have taken 22 to render on imovie. And I lauhghed my ass off. Finally somebody cares about people sharing their movies. salud, amor, y pesetas.
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Motionbox looks to be more interesting, however as someone else pointed out they haven’t launched yet, and by the time they launch we’ll have “deep tagging” too
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That’s why you don’t let your company’s secret sauce get profiled before you’re launched. Not to say that jumpcut wasn’t already doing it, but m-box surely gave everyone a few weeks lead time to catch up.
The problem with all these sites is that I don’t think the time of the amateur video has really come yet. Whereas everyone has a digital camera these days (minimally on their cell phone) to power sites like Flickr, digital video cameras are relatively rare. So while there’s amateur stuff out there, it still pales in terms of quantity and quality to the professional (copyrighted) stuff.
So the ultimate winner here isn’t going to be the guy with the best video editing features, per se - it’ll be the guy who can get around these copyright issues, and even convince copyright holders to treat their service as a marketing platform, licensing their viral marketing videos and clips for the users to play with and remix. Till that happens I wouldn’t bank on any of these companies surviving for the long haul.
This is by far my favorite video uploading site to date. You Tube is cool, but it’s so web 0.0001 when it comes to design. There’s a limit to minimalism people! These guys have finally gotten it right. Video Egg is way too demanding and keep throwing conditions at you about how they’re gonna either charge you or bombard you with ads. Also, Video Egg doesn’t work properly with Flock. It made me use Firefox, which resulted it in loading and still not working! Until now YOU Tube has been good, but JumpCut is one of the first good competitors YT is getting. I really like how Leo Laporte is using Video Egg on his blog, it’s simple, looks nice and loads the vid. quickly, but when you actually try and use it yourself it’s pathetic. Their client is so badly coded, that it doesn’t even remove the desktop shortcut when you install the damned program. I love to see clips on sites from Video Egg, but HATE using it myself. Great Billy Idol take off video btw!
It is now American Idol for everyone - call it American Idolatry - everyone can be a star - if you are a teenager. ‘-)
I can only agree with some speakers before. It is a really cool product, but will it gain enough traffic over the longer term. As I see it the business oppurtunity is rather fragile (or maybe it is just me), and relies on the youths to be really, really hiped by it. It is a cool product but is it enough cool.
All these solutions are great, but it sure seems like we are seeing an explosion of new web 2.0 websites, without a clear plan for profitability.
The smart sales professional will jump on these evolving tools and use them in their everyday business. Great articles…you guys do a great job.
This is wonderful to see - anything that makes video easier is wonderful. Video is way too hard for the “my mom” test at the moment.
Thanks Michael for the heads up.
A very cool flash application to edit videos and share videos. If they offered an embed option like youtube, people could then put embed their videos in other sites like myspace.
What a slick and easy to use app!
Hoss: They do offer an embed option, its right under the every movie.
‘Breeding like reabbits’ is good. It’s It’s incredible how many new sites popped up.
I made a comparison between 40 online video sites in order to get a general idea of this market.
http://www.mustseeblog.com/?p=68#more-68
Linux not supported as it uses Flash 8
Cool! I`m glad to read it
it worked for me under wine on linux, so its kind of supported… =]
Sites like http://www.livelocker.com help you manage all these videos sites by letting you bookmark and rate your favorites.
Hey but you forgot silly slug? Ha ha.
Enjoyed the video you made. Jumpcut definitely has a great editting feature.
Yahoo Research Berkeley just launched a flash-based remix tool that I blogged about here.
there’s so many sites in my video favs, I just found 3 new video sites on egrab.com . I love youtube, but have been more active on other sites lately because theres so much out there.
Everytime a new video sharing site is launched, God kills a kitten.
This is great post. We have searching for other video sites other than YouTube.
I consider Jumpcut one of the best alternatives to YouTube at the moment. The lack of good online video editing and general undereducation is what’s keeping the video rage from going to the next level.
There’s a good write-up of YouTube alternatives at DVGuru: http://www.dvguru.com/2006/04/.....-compared/, and I wrote a current, more detailed review of Jumpcut, if anyone’s interested in more info: http://www.vibetechnology.com/.....h-jumpcut/.
There are dozens of more video sites listed on OVGuide.com
Found another YouTube type site, except this one is for swingers
3XUpload.com http://www.3xupload.com