I mentioned vpod.tv, a startup headquartered in Paris and Madrid, in my Innovate 2006 roundup. Today they are announcing a $5.1 million Series A round, led by Frédéric Humbert of Innovacom.
vpod is a “best of class” service, in the rapidly evolving and increasingly crowded video sharing space. vpod is doing things that no one else is with transcoding, editing/display and monetization.
Frankly, the online video space is getting so crazy that I put off a demo of the product from founders Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz and Ivan Communod until the end of the conference. The real winner seems to be Adobe - its new Flash development platform is so robust that everyone seems to be developing their own video product, and most are basically variations on the same thing.
vpod may be different. It’s based in Europe, which will give it an advantage as the U.S. players beat eachother up - they can grow European market share in the meantime. Also, like Revver, vpod is focusing on monetizing videos.
vpod will allow advertisers to easily create advertisements, and play them on their own websites and/or insert them into users’ videos. Ads will be inserted at the beginning, middle or end of videos and will range from 10-60 seconds long. Users can opt out of ads by paying a fee. By opting in, they’ll receive a revenue split from vpod - something in the 50% range. This is further than what competitor Revver has announced to date.
But vpod also shines in other areas. They take video from almost any source and, more importantly, transcode for almost any device. Want Mpeg-4 for the PSP? vpod will let you download that format. Mpeg for the iPod? You can have that too. Just tell vpod your device and it will give you the correct format.
And finally, the tools for creating your own “channel” on vPod are stunning. The only Flash is around the player. Everything else is javascript and dhtml. They allow, for example, resizing of boxes by dragging the mouse, something I’ve only seen in Flash previously.
vpod is in private beta. Sign up on the home page. They are allowing people in slowly, ramping up for a fall launch.
In the meantime, if you have some time to kill, check out my after-three-cocktails video interview with Rodrigo here.
Screen shots (more are here):
Great info. Thanks.
PRas
Looks like you’re having a good time, man!
Google Video, YouTube, Grouper, MySpace videos, Akimbo, Current.tv, Pixsy.com, Dailymotion.com, Metacafe.com, Vidilife.com, Guba.com, eBaumsworld.com, Ourmedia.org, Veoh.com, Podzinger.com, Break.com, Tagworld, Gorillamask.net, Fireant.tv, Dailysixer.com, iFilm.com, Sloopy.com, Atom Film/AddictingClips, Extremefunnyhumor.com, Dinkytv.com, Stupidvideos.com, GrindTV.com, Comegetyousome.com, Ripetv.com, Livedigital.com. moBuzzTv.com, 88Slide.com, Purevideo.com, vMix.com, booyahnetworks.com…. And Yahoo and AOL are jumping on the boat too.
Someone released a “build your online video service in 5 minutes” app somewhere?
not quite true:
vpod is doing things that no one else is with transcoding, editing/display and monetization.
http://www.farcast.nl
What is not true? I can only relate your comment to my post.
I am simply presenting a bunch of companies that are shaping the landscape of online video today (and more will come fo course). I am personally happy for vpod.tv (I enjoy seeing successful fellow countrymen entrepreneurs), I’ve been following Rodrigo’s blog for quite some time and I’m glad they can find a differentiating factor from many others. However, the landscape is getting very crowded rather quickly, which is what I was trying to reflect in my comment, and that I do believe it’s very true. And yes, sadly, I do believe some of those companies will not last long.
Having said that, if you actually take the time to review some of these online video service, you’ll see that some companies are also doing things different from others. For instance, just to name one, Booya (booyahbroadcasting.com) has an interesting proposition as well when it comes to monetize online video.
Disclaimer: I have no business in the online video market (at least not yet), and if I were to plug any of them, I’d go for mobuzztv and vpod.tv. So there.
..and how many of those companies listed above in #3 provide quality transcoding, higher bitrates, storage? Also, most of those sites clip the media at 3/5 minutes which ain’t good atleast for me.
Probably vpod would address some of these.
Regards,
NagB /at/
Startups.in
..and ofcourse vpod has some neat ideas to monetize unlike the current leader.
Startups.in
NagB, if I were to respond to your comment I’d have to retype exactly what I just said, so I’m just going to leave it at that. Didn’t I say at the end that I’d plug on vpod.tv before any of the others? Please don’t preach to the choir. What I find funny is to see people defending a company when nobody has actually attacked it or made derogative comments about it.
On the other hand the “probably…” thing you mention could apply to anyone, couldn’t it? Surely Google - to name one - has plenty of storage and bandwidth to burn so as to deliver high quality video. About the current leader, well, it ‘ll be interesting to see whether they do what they should or they run out of money before they figure it out.
And about neat ideas, as I said in a comment on another post, ideas don’t build success. Execution does. And I trust Rodrigo can do a great job at it. I think Mike explained it all pretty well, and I agree with him.
Great deal for vpod.tv
How many of these can there possibly be? Unless you saw that your service was significantly different and better than the other hundred competing services, wouldn’t you just close up shop or start development on something else?
And you folks forgot Microsoft the big spender on MSN and MSN TV with some great patents like the ones listed here http://swpat.ffii.de/gasnu/microsoft/index.en.html
@RBA, All I meant was that some of the companies you mentioned do not fall into the same bucket. Cheers
Startups.in
> Someone released a “build your online video service in 5 minutes”
> app somewhere?
Yup.
http://www.vidiac.com
Get Started > Sign Up> Fill out form> point a Domain > done
It sure does look like they have a great opportunity to expand their business. It sure is frustrating to deal with various video formats and if one solution could handle any format it would be a tremendous benefit. Personally, after reading all the technical hurdles it takes to put certain types of videos on a PSP I never even bothered.
“The real winner seems to be Adobe - its new Flash development platform is so robust that everyone seems to be developing their own video product, and most are basically variations on the same thing.”
>> Great comment. Hadn’t thought of it that way.
and do not forget the great enabler of the video sharing revolution from googlevideo to youtube, the open source FFMpeg.
You don’t NEED Adobe tools to work with Flash. Flash is a lot like PDF–there are great alternatives to Adobe tools out there. We did use some Adobe tools to build our webcam video blogging system, BlogCheese (www.blogcheese.com), but we keep moving away from them. We even built our alternative to Flash Media Server to record videos. Adobe does win with all this Flash, but it’s not necessary to go to them.