Webshots Adds Video
Marshall Kirkpatrick
32 comments »
CNet’s photosharing service Webshots is adding video sharing capabilities today, something that has been expected since at least August when the service underwent a drastic redesign. There’s not a lot of information on the site yet about the new feature, but there is one company blog post with links to tutorial videos. You can see examples of Webshots video here and here.
The company claims its video service will have a 50-percent larger viewing area and nearly 3-times the bitrate of other video sites. As we wrote last month, CNet in general is bleeding traffic and Webshots in particular has seen a 69% drop in third quarter traffic. Adding video to Webshots could be a smart move if Webshots can bring something unique to the market. I’m not sure large play and higher quality is going to speak to users as much as the large community of YouTube or the privacy controls and file integrity of Multiply. Webshots may be suffering, but it’s far from dead yet. In June Hitwise identified Webshots as the 3rd leading photo sharing site online, behind only Photobucket and Yahoo! Photos.
Webshots is also announcing today a new program called Project Spotlight, which it calls an artist grant for scripted, documentary and citizen journalism video on the web. Webshots will begin compiling a best-of show combining the best video and photography on its site. This could prove compelling; see for example all the traction online contest site Bix gained by giving out awards up to $50,000 to users before being acquired by Yahoo! last week. Many independent video bloggers are looking for ways to be compensated for their work.
Hosting for free accounts will be free for the first 100 videos up to 5 minutes in length plus 10 extra videos per month of membership. Webshots Premium members will get up to 250 videos up to 10 minutes in length for free, with 25 additional videos per month of membership.
Photobucket has been particularly successful combining photos and video and I think the potential is there for Webshots to succeed with the combination as well. There’s something about the Webshots approach though that has a “destination site” feel to it though and I think it’s widely acknowledged that embedded, viral media is where the market’s enthusiasm is right now. Webshots needs to offer smaller versions of its players if it expects people to embed videos it’s hosting. Combine this with the mass exodus from Webshots and today’s announcement may prove interesting only when we compare features across major media sharing sites.
Hi Marshall,
While we made sure we offered higher quality transcoding and larger playback size, what we feel makes our service compelling is the ability for our users to combine videos and photos to tell their stories.
In the few days since we’ve launched the service, we’ve seen a difference between the types of videos uploaded by our users and the types of videos you’ll see on Youtube. Most of the videos are not one-offs or copyrighted content, but are videos that were taken in the context of a longer story or an experience, such as a trip or an event.
In terms of allowing users to embed smaller versions of their videos on other sites, we definitely offer that capability and encourage our users to do it: just look to the right of the video and you’ll see an embed code for a 425 pixel width version.
thanks!
James Park
Director of Product, Webshots
There’s other image hosting services that are 100% free but don’t offer video. I think there is need to seperate the two. We’re not out of Beta (and not allowing new members to sign up) but we’re offering a service that will give users the features of Photobucket & Slide but the flexability of imageshack and all without bandwidth restrictions. We’re also going to put a cap on how many users we’ll allow to join. I know that’s a “crazy” concept but we’re not looking to be the image host for every myspace user. Photobucket and imageshack have stuggled to keep up with their growth. When you combine an already very slow myspace with a slow image host it makes for pages that bring you back to 56k circa 95′.
Very soon we’ll be out of Beta and accept new registrations.
Shameless Promotion
What’s going on with Flickr? When are THEY going to add video capabilities? People are eating their lunch.
Two things still distinguish from YouTube:
- the ability for videos bigger than 10 mins (not that it’s always needed)
- music licensing
I think the music licensing is pretty big. Look at how many are getting sued by Universal, while YouTube users can use music from many publishers w/o perhaps worrying about music “sync” rights. That’s one, maybe the major, reason why I’ll continue using YouTube.
Ed,
If you are concerned about the Music tracks in your videos I would recommend using creative commons music. There is a vast selection of artist creating high quality music that want you to use heir works. Why not support them? (Jamendo.com is a good example of this).
Also to clarify your second point. Universal’s agreement gives YouTube safe harbor, not you. You’re just as likely to have your content removed, and/or investigated on YouTube as on WebShots. Also, if you read about Universal suing MySpace/Fox, it further supports speculation of behind the scenes collusion, and getting the labels to sue competitors….hardly in line with Google’s “Do no Evil” policy. Why would you want to support that if it matters to you?
hmm, this space is sooo crowded…my advice to webshots is to focus exclusively on the internet pornography market, no joke…the revenue potential as a hosting provider for producers (professional and amateur) is astounding (as is that whole market)…not a big fan of that tainted industry, but nobody has cleaned it up yet (or so they say…)
As digital cameras increasingly have high resultion (640×480) video capture modes (if not high quality), the average user is making more use of this to enhance capturing their experiences. To share this combined stream of photos and video clips (for they are generally short and unedited) the user is not going to want to go to seperate out the two media types and share them seperately. Offerings such as Webshots and Photobucket (Buzznet is also worth a mention, although they seperate the stream) work best in this scenario, whilst media-specific services such as Flickr and Vimeo will become/are niche providers whom service those without this combined need (and Flickr/Yahoo might do well to adapt).
The edited video sharing segment is a different market, but that’s not to say that edited video doesn’t have a place in the shared capture stream, but those who edit their videos are generally going to be more willing to share them seperately, at a service such as YouTube or on a blog, in place of a usual service.
Webshots video service has been on the board for over a year, so I’m very pleased to see it released, if only to see how it it gets adopted amongst my users (video is not yet supported in their partner API so that’ll have to wait a bit).
I used to be a fan of webshots - it was the place I uploaded all my photos too - until I found flickr… you the idea of tagging photos really appealed to me. I kept my webshots account open for a while hoping they would also allow tagging on their photos - when they had their big redesign I thought my luck was in - but I was wrong - still no tagging! - if they realy want to survive in the photo storage world I would take a look at offering more than just annoying videos of teenagers lip-syncing to the latest fall out ball song.
Webshots still seems a heavily photo oriented site, and I wonder if the photographers who use it will embrace the video site. While popular sites are adding video later in the game, it may be worth a look at sites that were designed to support both from the beginning, such as Pickle (www.pickle.com). Having both supported from the start tends to create a more consistent user experience for those looking to keep everything on one website.
But forget Flickr, when is facebook going to add video?
So many photo and video sharing sites - a lot will have to die soon till it gets narrowed down a bit.
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