Grouper, the video sharing site Sony bought in August for $65 million, is announcing a partnership this morning with mass market video camera company Pure Digital. Starting in November, Pure Digital camcorders will ship with software to enable automatic video upload to Grouper or two-step upload to Google Video.
This is one of a number of new distribution partnerships that constitute an important part of Grouper’s value, along with the company’s P2P distribution system and video editing software.
Pure Digital sells cameras for under $200 at pharmacies and big box retailers; users can take their cameras back to the stores to get video or photographs transferred to DVDs. The Grouper distribution deal has been in the works since before the Sony acquisition and is similar to one Grouper has had for some time with webcam makers Logitech. A week after the Sony acquisition, Grouper also announced a partnership with Buy.com to power user generated product reviews on the shopping site.
In a crowded sector like online video, having good technology isn’t enough – you need clear ways to get your services in front of large numbers of users. If YouTube leveraged copyrighted video for early audience building and video capturing plug-in VideoEgg is aimed to offer ads on its now substantial network of social network partners – in these kinds of partnerships Grouper clearly has a powerful distribution channel of its own.
When Sony bought Grouper in August we compared the site’s traffic numbers with its acquisition price and then with numbers for YouTube. While acknowledging that Grouper was bought more for its P2P and video editing technology than its user numbers – the dollars per user worked out to suggest a YouTube valuation of around $2 billion. At the time, some people were very resistant to that idea. In the end, Google paid in total 25 times as much for YouTube as Sony paid for Grouper.
Grouper today looks like a property that can not only support P2P distribution of Sony video to desktops and PSP devices, it can also partner with companies like Logitech, Buy.com and now Pure Digital to drive mass market video publishers to the Sony/Grouper channel. That’s a relatively new phrase – mass market video publishers. Grouper itself says it only has 10,000 webcam-recorded videos uploaded on its site so far. While YouTube has clearly built a much larger user number than anyone else, Grouper’s deals to create direct links between themselves and the hardware market are smart.
I would pay extra for a camera that auto-uploaded to Flickr when I plugged it into my computer.
I want a digital camera that supports SD for storage but that can also talk to my 802.11 SD wifi card I use for my O2 and automatically POST to a URL in a well-specified form (e.g., POST name of photo, date taken, possibly geo info if available, a user-defined “extra” field, and the image itself, compressed down to reasonably-sized JPG). Then I can point it to a URL of my own choosing which either proxies the request to Flickr, or another photo sharing site, or both, and also posts a link on my tumblelog.
I am willing to pay extra for this obviously (100$ premium would not be unreasonable).
I agree. It is this inovative thinking that will fuel the Web 2.0 era. It has always been about thinking outside the box. Good write-up. Cheers.
Do you mean under $200 or under $20?
google seems stupid to have bought YourTube; with myspace, grouper, and the lawsuits (oh you haven’t heard?)
I want a camera that has bluetooth /wifi so i can click the pic and upload to my snapfish acct.
I want a camera that I can imbed into my eyesocket so I don’t have to use my brain to remember things. . . . If it uploaded stuff too that would be handy.
The price is a little lower than $200 – it’s $130 at Target:
http://www.targ...asin=B000FD8MJS
I have one and it’s pretty easy to use and upload clips. The batteries don’t last as long as I’d like, but the camera takes AA’s, so they’re relatively inexpensive to replace.
I would agree with Mr. Arrington that there is value-added for a camera to have built into it an auto-uploading capability to Flickr when plugged into a computer. But that being said, I would be interested in seeing auto-uploading capabilities expand beyond photos being directed to the mature sites geared to the professional photographer such as FLickr. This would enable the “average joe” non-professional photographer to upload their photos to interesting, fast growing and creative websites such as http://www.MYSUMMER.com and other exciting and fun photo uploading and photo sharing niche websites.
Thomas
My only small winge is that their is no capacity for zooming in or out which makes the camera excellent for close up stuff but try to shoot your kid’s hockey game and boy howdy, all you get are a bunch of frozen ants. heh