I just got a sneak peek at a video sharing site due to launch in September, called Viddler. The company has focused on making the video publishing experience compelling and enabling discussion, tagging and sharing tied to particular moments in time. It’s a good looking system with smart features and a viable business model.
Company lead Robert Sandie lives today in Bethlehem, PA but has a background managing Adobe flash servers for enterprise clients. The distributed team is made up of designers Andrew Smith and Chris Tingom in Arizona and developers Lukasz Hankus and Kasper Cecek in Poland. The vision for the product is deeply inspired by Flickr and it shows. The business model, for one thing, will be driven not by pageviews and advertising but by subscription for premium features. I think that’s smart. The premium features will be announced later, but they look good.
The keystone feature here is the ability to add tags and comments tied to particular points in a video. Those tags are then searchable, so if I want to find the particular point in one of my videos that I tagged “touchdown,” that’s easy to do. I can also have a conversation with other users regarding a particular moment in a video and choose to embed the video on another site in it’s entirety or only from a particular point I select. While users can link to particular points in a Google Video as of last month, that’s easier and is just the beginning in Viddler.
Multiple videos can be uploaded at once and upload doesn’t pause your work in the interface. Videos are served as streaming files, so they can’t be downloaded and will thus be preserved from copyright violation.
Different services are trying different things to really harness the dialogue that video sharing makes possible; I think that Viddler’s focus on time specific interaction could prove both easy and enjoyable for a wide variety of video publishers and viewers. The interface is appealing and if the forthcoming premium features are as well put together as the preview of the basic service I saw today – Viddler’s future could look good.
Online video sharing is obviously a very crowded space, but I think there is plenty of room and time for new players to establish themselves. While Viddler isn’t about downloading video, the fact that Pew estimated last year that only a quarter of US internet users were downloading music or video indicates to me that very few are uploading video yet and the market has lots of room to grow. See also our review of many players in the market last December (”Comparing the Flickrs of Video“). There really are a lot of video services launching, but surely there’s room for more than a handful to come up with a winning strategy.
Viddler will launch in September but you can visit their site and sign up for notification of the launch today.
This is the new cool technology.
There is another site that does this allready and is totaly usable and it is called PodZinger http://www.podzinger.com/
Looks like a nice site, but how many of these do we need?
This definitely looks like it has some incredible features. Any idea how many people are in the private beta and what their oppinions are?
Subscription-driven revenue models usually fit well into b2b sites. Consumer-oriented social or content sharing networks rarely can earn big bucks on subscription fees. To back this up I refer to the research by Eric Johnson of Columbia University, in which pinpoints that even a 10c fee makes a great difference between free-of-charge.
As obvious as it is, subscriptions have only a limited appeal and slow growth dynamics. Ads will still be the major source of revenue for most internet-startups (consider substantial forecasted growth, especially in context ads in flash videos!)
P.S. The technology is cool!
Where is innovation? why so many players for the same concept.
I am not sure who funds these ,entering into a crowded space. Tagging,commenting and search is just bells and whistles, anybody can add easily by hiring couple of developers for sometime.
Again, where is innovation?
I dont agree with Marhsall that there is plenty of room for new players. YouTube has become ebay of video.There is no second,no thrid. If there is an item I want to put it for auction, I will only goto eaby because that is where I get more targetd audience (buyers). If I want to share video, I will goto YouTube.When you talk about community&sharing you want to go to the best community.Second,third,forth all will vanish…
There is definitely a lot going on in the video space. The concept of searching / jumping to specific places in videos has been a challenge for a long time. When I worked for the Internet Archive, we thought long and hard about it, and it was a difficult task to accomplish.
We just launched a fun video service that might be of interest to people here:
http://www.dapp...plications/Magg
Just to throw another tool / mashup into the mix
I agree with Cruncher.. this is getting like the ajax homepages farce..
There used to loads of innovative sites profiled on TechCrunch (I’ve been subscribed since those early heady days).. now there’s lots more coverage of VC deals and me-too websites – is this a reflection of the state of web 2.0 startups (no-one innovating, companies just adding a couple of new features and launching very similar products) or is TechCrunch not covering every little startup due to the vast number of them or simply not interested in them any more?
When will my DVR adopt this strategy? I would love to have a football game stored on my dvr and then search for “scoring drives” or “touchdowns” or “turnovers”. That would be a really innovative product that I would love.
Too bad we can’t actually see it in action and draw our own conclusions. In the meantime, there is a very similar service available at veotag.com that is fully functional right now.
Like Viddler, Veotag allows users to tag any point in the video. It also allows searching of those tags and jumping directly to that point in the video – from the site itself as well as through search engines like Google.
Not sure abour viddler, but look forward to seeing how it works when it becomes available. In the interim, it looks like veotag will continue to garner lots of attention from industry pundits like http://www.guykawasaki.com and others.
I have used veotag and really like the offering and plan on expanding my use of it.
I think you guys need to be a little more realistic about the coverage on TechCrunch.
These guys are cranking through tons of content and reviews each day. There’s no possible way that EVERY company they cover is going to wildly innovative.
I give them credit for doing a nice job of capturing the startups that are coming through the woodwork that would normally never get covered in mainstream media.
Figure in a given year if there are 50 – 100 companies that are truly innovative (which would be really high) then at best you’re going to get one big story every few days.
We run the biggest site for startup companies (www.goBIGnetwork.com) and see thousands of new companies posted per month, and I can tell you VERY few of them have biz models that are as innovative as the ones on this site.
Sounds interesting, but I just think the online video market right now is just too saturated.
Isn’t this going to encourage the uploading of long videos that could have otherwise been edited down, resulting in alot of junk footage, wasted bandwidth and storage space, only to have a few moments tagged and searchable.
Any attempt to crack down on this by limiting the length or file sizes of videos uploaded will result in attrition. Sounds like a losing proposition to me.
>> “Sounds interesting, but I just think the online video market right now is just too saturated.”
Look around you, every market is saturated, stroll down the soda aisle at your supermarket sometime; or the cereal aisle. Rarley is there a single player in any industry.
Haven’t you guys ever heard the ‘build a better mousetrap’ saying?
Online video is definitely hot. I would add Str8Up to the list.
Bush Bloopers clip is pretty funny.
I believe that Marshall is on the money. Those who think video is just fine and that You tube is the answer to everything, do not work in a classroom environment. The ability to tag video and ultimately filter video appropriately is what will unleash the power of video in the classroom. If no one pursues the ability to tag, then, like many blogs and wikis, unknowing legislators will blog YouTube along with other social networking tools.
Video is a powerful tool in the hands of students and automatically makes a subject more engaging and exciting. It is vital to massage video, blogs, podcasts, etc. until they become manageable in a classroom environment. Perhaps for entertainment purposes everything is OK, but for purposes of education, this is a step in the right direction. Great job, Marshall!
Hi everyone, just thought I would report to everyone following this story that we launched and can check out our services at Viddler.
Enjoy!
This is also a very good very sharing site! But Metacafe.com is far more better because it is earning money for me! Cheers…
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