MoveDigital launched a pay-as-you-go digital media distribution service this morning that includes a very easy way to turn media into torrents and mobile streams. Senator John Edwards has announced that he will use both the company’s torrent and mobile technologies in his “OneAmerica” tour. The videoblog RocketBoom will also use MoveDigital’s service to distribute its show to mobile devices. Oliver over at MobileCrunch covered the mobile tool in depth this morning.
I took a look at MoveDigital yesterday and it is remarkably easy to use. Users can upload video, for example, by file or URL and turn it into a torrent or mobile stream with a single click. A very nice web widget is offered with all the links to download in multiple formats and a display of the number of times a file has been downloaded. Only completed downloads are counted against your bandwidth. Viewers can chose to make a donation to anyone’s bandwidth, something that political campaigns using MoveDigital to distribute content may find useful.
After seeing a number of politicians begin using YouTube to distribute campaign video, I found the Edwards angle especially interesting. Will Edwards do for MoveDigital something like Howard Dean did for Meetup.com? I asked Michael Silberman, who was the National Meetup Director for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and is now the senior strategist at consultancy EchoDitto, what he thought and he told me that with so many new technologies becoming available it’s easy for a political campaign to get distracted. “On the Dean campaign not all of the tech we developed or adopted worked, but it was always in service to a campaign need identified by the organization or by grassroots leaders,” he said. He believes that using Bittorent is a very logical way to achieve the goal of using grass roots online volunteers to distribute information. That’s largely the point of online volunteering.
I think he’s right and MoveDigital makes it easy enough to do that the combination of direct downloads, mobile streaming and torrents is likely to serve Edwards and his efforts well. Torrents themselves may still be a bit too geeky for mass adoption, but if leveraged strategically with the other technologies they could make a lot of sense.
Torrents and P2P are becoming more viable for mass adoption as an increasing number of vendors release products aimed at nontechnical audiences. In addition to MoveDigital, previously profiled companies working in this direction include Red Swoosh and Opera 9, both of which enable easy and free torrent downloads.
One word: Cool
This must be the longest Post-title on TechCrunch, so far.
Are bandwidth donations considered campaign donations? This is not the same as Howard Dean’s use of Meetup.com.
A waste of time, alot of free software and storage space out there that lets you do the same thing.
http://www.movedigital.com/services.html
$10,100 year / 12 mts = $841/mo, you can get a dedicated, unmetered server for cheaper than that.
This could be a way to finally get the masses to accept the technology until now held in esteem by us geeks. When the masses accept it, the traditional entertainment distribution models will have to adapt, and hopefully will get cheaper.
At least that’s my telecom-future view. http://www.telecommer.com
So which tube do John’s videos use?
I’m not a huge fan. Serious web develops would rather stream their own videos instead of offering a MoveDigital download widget, which goes to promote MoveDigital’s website. If I was a customer, I’d be paying MoveDigital to take up space on my site with their brand. Kinda foolish.
Steven, couldn’t that be said about most web services? Co-branding or white lable services always seem best, but short of that…
Marshall Kirkpatrick,
Yes, co-branding is used by most web services. Yet, in video streaming most co-brands are free. For example, Youtube and Google Video, etc. I don’t understand why a web developer would pay for a co-brand when co-brands are already free with unlimited video streaming. Plus, MoveDitital doesn’t allow users to stream the video directly from their site. They must use a widget, kinda prehistoric.
Steven
Very Nice..
Just wanted to answer some questions on the widget. It’s completely at the user’s choice whether they want to use it. It’s just provided for the user’s convenience, as a means of aggregating many links into one bit of html, as well as enabling them to allow others to easily add bandwidth to their account.
We also provide the direct download URL, the torrent URL and the mobile stream URL if user’s choose to reblog with those. These URLs can be found in your account in a number of places, one of which is by clicking on the share button, and simply copying them from the “spread this” box. We absolutely encourage our users to point to their content in whatever form they see fit and wherever they see fit.
For example, in Marshall’s testing yesterday he uploaded this video:
http://download.movedigital.co.....ale374.mov
with the torrent found here:
http://download.movedigital.co.....74.torrent
and the mobile stream here:
rtsp://mobile.movedigital.com/marshallk/7844/Ekai-JasonLewisCircumnavigatesTheBigWhale374.mov.3gp
Too bad for Edwards. The less you see of him, the better his campaign results:)
Gary, If you could clarify a few things. If I understand correctly you are hosting the torrent and charging your customers for any upload bandwidth on completed files. You mention the ability for other members to donate bandwidth. Is that something separate from someone downloading a torrent and continuing to share once its complete?
Second, it would seem that even with other people distributing the file, the bulk of the file transfers will come through your ultra fast servers. This may be fine for users that will have limited bandwidth demands. For someone like a John Edwards that will have heavy traffic, what would you say that you offer him that is superior to buying server space and creating his own torrent.
Adding bandwidth is something separate from continuing to share a torrent once it has completed (which is of course good BitTorrent ettiquette). The feature that I describe allows other users to physically purchase bandwidth and have it added directly into your account. For example, if you look at a public user page like http://download.movedigital.com/rocketboom, you’ll see you can just add bandwidth directly to them. You can also find this feature from the “Share” button on a MoveDigital widget.
As for our value proposition, we are offering a simplified interface to managing your files. Rather than mess with the details of having to figure out how to create mobile video, stream mobile video, create a torrent, seed a torrent or just how to generally handle reliable file transfer, you instead come to MoveDigital, get those ultra fast servers, and not have to worry about any of that.