AdBrite Makes Brilliant Video Product

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

1. permanent hater
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

   Not bad… and this is coming from a permanent hater!

2. Ryan
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

   I’ve been a fan of Pud’s since his fuckedcompany heyday but it wasn’t until this up close tutorial that I realized he has a lisp. I still love him however.

3. Zaid Farooqui
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:25 pm

   Depending on how AdBrite pulls the video from the source, it could break tomorrow if YouTube decides to tweak a thing or two and not allow FLVs to be downloaded - or say, make it harder to get FLV url.

   Something new nonetheless, in a market laden YouTube rips.

   -Zaid

4. JonB
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:35 pm

   Amazingly enough you reviewed vSocial on October 27th of this year(http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/27/vsocial-pitches-white-label-video-solution/) and at that time vSocial already had the same player.

   In fact the quote from the review is: “The company offers three different products. The first is called VConnect MyBrand. This level of service allows publishers to add their logo to the player, watermark over the video and “call to action” link back to their own site. ” You can even change the color scheme to match your site.

   vSocial has hundreds of users using this player already… oh, and vSocial can put ads in your stream as well: preroll, postroll, CPC or CPM, you decide.

   Disclosure: I work for vSocial.com

5. Mike L
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:40 pm

   “Adbrite is not hosting video, so you’ll have to upload it to YouTube, Photobucket, or wherever, in .flv format and then point Adbrite to the URL for the video.”

   So, leeching bandwidth from other sites and making money off of it is ok now?

6. Frank Cefalu
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:44 pm

   http://digg.com/tech_news/Is_3.....inks_it_is
   —
   "Is $30,000 for a badly designed website fair? This company thinks it is. "
   Users, check http://www.brutworld.com , this site and its child sites were performed for a astounding 30,000 dollars! Now, I wont say who told me this information. But, the person is mad at the company. He got booted a while ago. Really freaking nuts for 6 flash pages. Design is horrible. The firm is Bauer Web Development.

   Wow Guys, Michael we need your opinion on this one! =/

7. Zaid Farooqui
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:44 pm

   If this model truly holds, what holds google back dropping one checkbox while submitting vids to YouTube to show ads? Sounds like millions of more adwords
   $$$ for google.

   -Zaid

8. Sally
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

   wow so does this mean i can pirate a load of youtube videos, embed my watermark, and profit? nice!

9. Frank Cefalu
   

   January 4th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

   Do they have an api?

10. Pud
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    Just to clarify, we do not endorse leeching or bandwidth stealing.

    Michael was just making the point that we do not host video (for now), so you gotta find somewhere else to host yer vids. For example, the test video in this Techcrunch post is being hosted on my server at Pud.com.

    Philip
    AdBrite

11. Harshal Vaidya
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

    That video is not working.

12. David Krug
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

    Very cool time to launch a videoshow.

13. NJG from NYC
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

    Just to clarify, we do not endorse leeching or bandwidth stealing.

    That may or may not be the intent, but the way this is currently set up, it’s clearly extremely easy to profit off of somebody else’s intellectual property, bandwidth and hosting.

14. All-IP Media
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

    This is great. Looking forward to when they can host videos. Just signed up for a publisher invitation.

15. DJ
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    I don’t understand what is so revolutionary about this. like the above poster said, vSocial has had this forever. ThrowAwayYourTV.com has been using vSocial with customized players to match their site for months now.

16. JOK
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:11 pm

    It about the ADVERTISING medium, not some REVOLUTIONARY MEDIA PLAYER. Cripes!

17. Josh
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

    Correct me if im wrong, but when you upload a video to youtube, youtube’s watermark gets placed in the bottom right? Does Adbrite lift this watermark, or is it even a watermark, is it just a part of the player?

    Evidently, when Vsocial was reviewed, this very same thing was overlooked. Hate to be the conspiracy theorist, but this is either odd or an honest mistake or Vsocial’s fault for not promoting the hell out of it.

18. Allen Stern
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:18 pm

    Pud - just to help me understand… I “could”…

    1. go to youtube
    2. find a great popular video (let’s say the coke and mentos)
    3. make a page on my site
    4. take that video and your player and mash them
    5. add in an adbrite ad and my logo
    6. promote the f*** out of it across the web
    7. make money

    is that correct? if so, what are you doing to make sure that people don’t do exactly what I just stated when they are not the content owners.

    thanks in advance

19. Mike L
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:18 pm

    Here is a list of video sites you can host your flvs, hopefully they won’t mind you’re making money off of it:

http://www.eyespot.com/
http://video.google.com/
http://grouper.com/
http://jumpcut.com/
http://ourmedia.org/
http://revver.com/
http://vimeo.com/
http://vsocial.com/
http://youtube.com/
http://video.yahoo.com/ 
http://www.dailymotion.com/

20. t0ny
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:19 pm

    While not endorsing theft, its definitely enabling many to.

    I feel that from a socio-technological standpoint, we have to understand that this is not a revolutionary medium, but one that has already seemingly established, but is just another flavor that doesnt allow the luxury of hosting videos.

    What this does, is now makes the user have to find their own place to hosts videos or steal bandwidth from a youtube, etc. This might not be something that the everyday user can figure out how to get “hosting” space for their videos on myspace, blog, or website.

    While being aware of the use of these technologies is someting that is growing everyday, we have to make sure that we are providing correct mediums that not only enforce fair play but dont “enable” unfair play.

21. Stephen Sclafani
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

    Josh,

    The YouTube logo is shown by the player, it’s not a watermark on the actual FLV file.

22. Ty Graham
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

    What’s amazing is that there is finally a discussion on content ownership with regards to “clicks” and “advertisements” in online video. I’m so excited! This is the closest yet to my idea and further proves there is a market!! What’s lame is that I emailed that pud fucker last year telling him of a video ad network which could revolutionize adbrite. Yet he ignores me and tries badly to copy. Too bad he doesn’t get it… It will fail and possibly be sued eventually 2007 is going to be an awesome year for video!

23. Fashion Industry Ceo
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

    I like I like…adbrite I ‘ve been thinking of trying their ad system for awhile now.

24. Josh
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    Thx for the clarification Stephen…

25. general tso
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:34 pm

    this has go to be the craziest endorsement from michael and an even crazier business model…

    1) YouTube allows people to upload pirated video
    2) AdBrite allows you to steal the pirated video from YouTube use thier bandwidth and then make money of it….

    thats fantastic… if this thing holds, it makes a lot of sense for bloggers but i really doubt youtube will allow you to mess around with packaging thier content…

    or maybe i dont understand how its done technically

26. Anif™
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    Oh boy, I can so see a band of people already downloading YouTube videos this very moment, preparing on what’s to come by plastering their logo all over it…First some German Facebook clone gets bought out for millions, now this….is this the concept of web 3.0, cloning and leaching?….If so, I’m on it!

27. Mustache
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:48 pm

    Sure, you CAN host your videos on youtube and somehow use the AdBrite player to show ads. But as a web publisher, I sure won’t do that cause what happens if the youtube shuts it off tomorrow? I will host the videos on my own server thank you very much.

    Now, if someone decides they don’t care about their videos breaking tomorrow, that’s certainly their perogative. But that’s hardly AdBrite’s responsibility?

    I think this is mainly designed as a tool for website owners who has video content.

28. Darren
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 2:56 pm

    isn’t the content uploaded suposed to be under creative commons?

29. matthew
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:01 pm

    that’s one big, sharp video…very nice quality. will the site support that level of quality for all its videos, or just this pr video?

30. Agent_Torpor
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    Um, yeah, and why will anyone pay attention to little fuggin’ ad links on their video viewer as opposed to the old links right there on the webpage that were mostly ignored anyway?

    Thanks for playing, again, Phil. Why not explain why NHL.com dropped AdBrite?

31. Stan
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    I can see YouTube blocking this pretty much right away.

32. Darren
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    actually used with http://twistage.com/ it might be a powerful combo.

33. Liberal_Elite
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:24 pm

    Um Pud. YouTube is owned by Google.
    How long do you think they’ll let you do this?

34. mc
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    umm… NHL.com is still with AdBrite

    check text link on the right of this link

    http://www.nhl.com/draft/2006/round1.html

35. will
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:50 pm

    question, do I make money from the ad? or is the branding service the value proposition and adbrite keeps the advertising $?

36. dumbfounder
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

    “Adbrite is not hosting video, so you’ll have to upload it to YouTube, Photobucket, or wherever, in .flv format and then point Adbrite to the URL for the video.”

    they have a player but they aren’t hosting video? I don’t get it, how do they play Youtube videos through their player? I think you have that wrong. They need to host the video so they can stream them through their player. They can’t just have their player play videos from Youtube and overwrite the Youtube watermark. Doesn’t make sense.

37. Flack
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    > “that’s one big, sharp video…very nice quality. will the site support that level of quality for all its videos, or just this pr video?”

    Well, if I get to host my own video, i would think that I get to set the video quality however I want. We’ll see…

    > “I can see YouTube blocking this pretty much right away.”
    >”Um Pud. YouTube is owned by Google. How long do you think they’ll let you do this?”

    I’m not sure they can stop it. The Mojiti.com guys have been pirating YouTube and Google’s bandwidth for a while now, and they are still up.

38. Stephen Sclafani
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    dumbfounder,

    YouTube is a two part system. The flash video player and the actual FLV video files are separate. Once you have the URL of a YouTube FLV file you can play it in any flash video player.

39. CNet
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 4:55 pm

    All those YouTube clone sites are going to make a fortune with someone else’s video clips.

    Good luck to “scan thru” the video clips AdBrite and congrats to Mike for another great endorsement.

40. Agent_Torpor
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    umm… NHL.com is still with AdBrite

    check text link on the right of this link

    http://www.nhl….006/round1.html

    Um, retard, that’s an old page that probably hasn’t had their code updated. Even the side navigation bar is different from their current style.

    I defy you to find another easily-clickable page on NHL.com with AdBrite links/

41. Feedpass
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    Mike,

    Come on. Back in May you came down hard on Feedpass for helping people to make money off other people’s content. Our service allows users to create an easy subscription landing page using any RSS feed, without turning over the feed like you do with FeedBurner. Back in December we made the decision to remove all advertising, which you ignored. We felt it was the right thing to do. Since then, we’ve seen a renewed spike in our growth, which is always nice. Apparently word is getting out.

    Now you step up and pat old Pud on the back for providing a tool for anyone to do the exact same thing with videos. Even worse, video carries significant bandwidth demands, all of which will be paid by YouTube, Google, or whoever else gets stuck hosting it. Also, there are no controls in place to stop me or anyone else from snatching any video from YouTube and popping my logo and ads all over it.

    Do I think it’s a cool tool, yes? Does it cross the line? Probably. And probably well past anything that Feedpass ever did.

    Just my two cents. You are a powerful man, but we’d all respect you more if you could let steady principles guide you in your writing. Is it okay to use other people’s content to make money on the web or not?

42. kilosepp
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

    I CONCUR.

    I BELIEVE PHILLUP KAPLAN’S LATEST IDEA WILL DEFINITELY TOP HIS OTHER HITS SUCH AS PRIVATE LABEL PORN AND BIZIENT. THIS INTERACTIVE E-MARKETING VIDEO ADVERTISING SYSTEM WILL BE THE CATALYST OF WEB3.0.

    TIA

    YAYO IS FOR CLOSERS
    http://www.whofailedtoday.com/bbs

43. Klim
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 5:45 pm

    But what is the revenue split? vSocial doesn’t mention theirs either.

    But unlike vSocial who’s service costs $49.95/mo, Adbrite is free if I understand correctly? I have nothing against vSocial making money, but I think that adbrite would suit a lot more people, especially those still building traffic to their websites. Brightcove also has a good solution… free service with ads, and they split revenue with user.

    And I agree with many above, how will they monitor stolen video? Or prevent video hosts from blocking them? Split revenue with the hosts?

    @Feedpass - I agree. But in this case, Mike doesn’t do video so it does not appear to concern him, unlike having his feed hijacked.

44. Ed
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 5:47 pm

    It’s not AdBrite’s problem if people go and steal bandwidth from YouTube or wherever.

    The IMG tag lets you do the same thing.

    What someone really needs to do, is invent DRM for Flash video.

45. Soso
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 5:50 pm

    Very interesting idea. I don’t know if they have prevention measures for this, but it seems like it would be hard to find advertisers willing to put ads on a video if they are unsure who the video belongs to. Who takes the laibility for copyright infringement? Publisher, advertiser, website owner, or AdBrite, all of them. Still an interesting idea though.

46. Michael Arrington
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 5:54 pm

    Feedpass - you are seeing this through the eyes of someone looking for an evil. Just like BitTorrent has lots of wonderful and legitimate users, this tool is going to help those of us occasionally creating our own content keep more control of it. We do lot of original video at crunchgear. This is exactly the tool we needed. I think if you think of it from the actual content producer’s standpoint, you may see the value.

47. David Berkowitz
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    I just don’t get the value proposition as a blogger. If I’m uploading something to YouTube, why deal with yet another video player? I’m trying to use as few tools as possible for my blog. If a video hosting service offered this, then I’d bite, but adding my logo to a video just isn’t valuable enough.

48. tom
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    So if I copy someones article off somones blog post it on my blog and paste adsense around it and I make money (which happens all day), this is teh same concept but for video (there is to your copyright argument)….and if it is transparent it will be easy to weed out the junk for advertisers. Cheers to AdBrite!

49. Brad Webb
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 6:42 pm

    Mike - My issue with this, though, is that an extraordinarily similar product was shown to AdBrite 9 months ago when we were doing in-video contextual testing with them. As well, we’ve had our take on this product (which, btw, uses *our* bandwidth, and *our* users, versus passing thru “someone’s” video/bandwidth) for several months now — and was overlooked when you folks reviewed our offering(s)

    This, along with other, similar parasitical products, are going to cause big distribution networks to force in advertising, watermarks, or be dodgy in where/how they serve up videos. Bandwidth is cheap, but it’s far from free, and expecting YouTube, Veoh, Google or anyone to serve up and take on a cost, for others to make a profit, and them to get little/no credit, nevermind $$$, is rediculous. The cost(s) on this, versus Flickr, is exponential, as you know. This solution truly isn’t good for the hosting companies, and I’d be surprised if it lasted very long.

    As well, I’m guessing it won’t take long for content creators to get the shaft in this, -or- the offering will be limited to the “special few” that get by hand-picked content moderators.

    David - Grab a vSocial account, and check out http://www.vsocial.com/mybrand/ — We do a ton of stuff beyond “just adding a logo” — as well, we can allow you to either hook into some ad inventory, or go after your own advertisers. [/schill]

50. bdc
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

    Uggh,

    This is going to be a mess. Basically this is Splogging. What is the difference with what the AdBrite Player can do and what MyHeavy and Veoh having been doing?

    http://newteevee.com/2007/01/0...../#more-274

    We have been through this before, with deep links to audio and video streams.

51. JonB
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 7:19 pm

    Take a look at some of the sites that vSocial has for turn-key solutions for content creators. These sites have unlimited uploads, user defined skins, color schemes, players, categories, sorting, and complete social networking tools (enabled only on the last one but available to all).

    The players are completly customized, including logo, watermark, and link backs. Even the color schemes are user controled and configured… and we’ve been doing this for months now.

    None of these sites have ads enabled, but they are completely capable of doing so:

    http://webba.vsocial.com
    http://video.amateurgolf.com
    http://cheernetwork.com
    http://jonhammond.vsocial.com/
    http://djayc.vsocial.com/

    The players are completly customized, including logo, watermark, and link backs. Even the color schemes are user controled and configured… and we’ve been doing this for months now.

52. Feedpass
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    Mike,

    Agreed, but looking at this tool with the evil in mind is just the same as how some people looked at Feedpass. But even when we had Google AdSense wrapped around excerpts of feeds (with direct links to the actual feeds), almost all of our Feedpass pages have been created by publishers just looking for a way to make subscribing to their blogs easy for their readers.

    Just look at the world of bloggers. Most of them don’t have a good subscription mechanism on their pages. A very high percentage go right to jumbled XML code still when clicking their “feed” link. So there is a need. In fact, any blogger that doesn’t use either Feedpass or FeedBurner (or even tools like SoloSub) to simplify subscriptions should be ashamed.

    There is also a need, or at least demand, for advertising in the exciting video medium. However, the complete lack of controls that is already rampant on YouTube and other sites along with the ridiculous “safe harbor” approach to copyright management used by these sites, opens up a tool like AdBrite InVideo to high levels of abuse.

    If I had a video that I thought would go viral, I’d love ads and my logo on it, but I wouldn’t want to post it to YouTube or any other major service where everyone else could also take it and make money from it. But even YouTube has become a SPAM service, where a large percentage of the top videos are fake videos promising Brittney Spears videos, etc. and then selling something else.

    Interesting debates lie ahead, to be sure.

    Jim Woolley
    Feedpass

53. Brian Caldwell
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 7:29 pm

    why so much focus on YouTube? the point seems to be that Pud has created a great new system that leverages his previous experience. it’s not about stealing, since we can host the content anywhere. seems to me that if stealing becomes a problem, it will be the users of the new service not the service itself that will be at fault. yeah Pud! another cool idea to play with.

54. Pud
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 7:39 pm

    We never thought that *not* offering free hosting would be so controversial.

    InVideo is just a video player you can embed into your site, like Windows Media Player or Quicktime. Those players don’t offer free hosting either. And, like those companies (I assume), we don’t want people using our player illegally.

    We plan to support DRM standards as they emerge. I’d imagine someone’s gotta be working on DRM for Flash video.

    Regardless, the controversy is fun, though unexpected and I think unwarranted.

    Rock on,
    Philip
    AdBrite

55. shadilac
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    I didn’t intend to jump in here, because I think people really should be directing their complaints at Youtube…. they are the source of the piracy, not the ad network. People will always be able to steal stuff and re-sell it… you can’t blame the government for theft because they invented money (the “medium”), but you have a flawed analogy. Quicktime and Windows Media Player don’t embed ads and pretend to know who owns the rights to the video so they can be paid.

56. Hen_Blubbering_Lunch
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    Pud, please bring the board back up. TIA.

57. Drama 2.0
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 8:37 pm

    There are some very interesting potential legal issues that this raises. Let’s say that I upload an episode of the Daily Show to YouTube (or some other video site). I now want to embed this in my blog and make some easy money, so I use AdBrite’s player to serve my video from YouTube with AdBrite ads.

    The video’s copyright holder now has three potential legal targets: YouTube (for hosting the infringing content), AdBrite (for directly profiting from the infringing video) and me (for posting content I knew I didn’t have the rights to and making an intentional effort to profit from my infringing behavior). YouTube at least can make the argument that they comply with the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. AdBrite clearly is not a host, but is profiting from the infringement and creating a system that almost encourages this (it’d be hard for them to claim plausible deniability as to how their system will be abused), making them a very vulnerable target for a contributory and vicarious infringement lawsuit. And of course, my effort to procure content I know I don’t own, upload it and then set up AdBrite’s system to profit from it makes a direct and vicarious infringement lawsuit seem like a sure bet.

    Want to cash in on the Web 2.0 gravy train? Become an attorney.

58. bishop
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 9:00 pm

    pud,

    this is a great tool for producers. will it only be text ads?

59. Ronald Lewis
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

    Michael,

    Perhaps you need to turn up the spam deflector a notch, eh?

60. Michael Hoffman
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 9:23 pm

    I think you all are missing something. Using any of the commercial video services to host content that you then strip their player out goes against their terms of service:

    From the fellas at YouTube:
    “You agree to not engage in the use, copying, or distribution of any of the Content other than expressly permitted herein, including any use, copying, or distribution of User Submissions of third parties obtained through the Website for any commercial purposes… You agree not to circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with security related features of the YouTube Website or features that prevent or restrict use or copying of any Content or enforce limitations on use of the YouTube Website or the Content therein.”

    How hard will it be for YouTube/Google and the others to track their streams? I am no expert on the tech side here, but my guess is that they can or will be able to tell when the streams goes without the player. Then they simply cut off your account. Maybe we can get someone from one of these companies to explain this?

    I think the case Michael makes is nice, theoretically, but as long as YouTube doesn’t have ads in-stream then people are going to see it as the obvious hosting solution. And what I would like to see from Michael is a calculation of his economics. You host the video yourself, how much does that cost with real traffic? And how much can you make on the ads from AdBrite?

61. Michael Arrington
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 9:32 pm

    Michael H - I won’t host it myself. I’ll put it on photobucket where we pay a small fee for the premium service. They won’t mind a bit. In fact, there’s a natural partnership between photobucket and adbrite.

    And I won’t be putting ads on it. I like that the format is higher res than youtube, that i can put my logo on it, and that any links back come to our original post, not youtube.

62. Klim
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 9:36 pm

    Hold on, are we quite sure that adbrite will skin youtube (and such) videos? Mike says that you must point it to an flv file, but unless I’m missing something, it’s not simple for anyone to simply go to a youtube video and grab it’s flv link. Keepvid, Vixy and the rest know how to (by script), but unless adbrite will also do it for you, how are you going to uncover the flv link?

    So is this an ad tool for your videos hosted on _your own server_, or can we actually slap ads onto youtube videos? Site is slim on details. Pud? If it’s just the former then all’s well.

    @Pud (#56)- According to their site, inVideo does give you some hosting, but that’s besides the point as ads/profit don’t even come into that picture, nor the issue of skinning some other website’s videos.

    @ Mike (#48) - I don’t see what bittorrent has anything to do with this. Its purpose is not to generate revenue. Whereas here it clearly is.

    And for those accusing youtube of being the root of all evil, that’s just silly. Youtube is good free advertising too many.

63. Mike Abundo
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 10:28 pm

    If YouTube won’t allow this, someone else will. Photobucket’s already profitable; now their fees will be even more justified.

64. zijian
    

    January 4th, 2007 at 11:36 pm

    oh,yeah

65. Harry
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 12:51 am

    Flash has in place a security system that allows web owners to restrict their content (like flv’s) so that it is played only in flash players originating from their own site. YT is definitely trying to prevent their flv’s playing in other players, that is why they are using the above restriction (as well as trying to hide the flv url). My guess is that services like AdBrite (but quite a few others) are channeling the video stream through their servers (using proxy) to bypass the flash security. Of course that doesn’t mean that YT will not move legally against them once they become widely used.
    Video hosts like blip.tv or dailymotion.com are providing urls to their flv’s and have no restrictions in place, implying a more relaxed approach (hey it ’s user generated content they get for free right?).
    In TagLoops people can do all sort of things with video once they have the flv url. See for example the one below where closed captions have been added in an Xmas video hosted in dailymotion:

    http://www.tagloops.com/index......;StoryID=7

66. Adam
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 1:15 am

    First, congrats to AdBrite for doing this! About a year and half ago when we were one of their publishers, I spent hours on the phone with them trying to get them to offer something publishers can put into a video clip, so I’m happy to see them finally go that direction. I just hope it leads to an API video hosting sites can use.

    Next on vSocial. Just as an FYI, and I feel we are often overlooked since we’re a bootstrapped company, we’ve been offering free white label sites for two years come this February, and currently have over 1,000 domains using our service. For example.

    http://videos.streetfire.net/
    http://myvideos.africast.tv/
    http://videos.percussionmedia.com/

    We started marketing more aggressively and are now signing up more than a hundred new sites a week. We too allow you to skin your site, use your own URL, and use your own watermark on embeded players that link back to your site.

    I believe Veoh is offering a service like this as well, an we would all be remiss not to mention Brightcove and Video Egg, two more strong companies in that space.

    We started our video sharing service in 2004 and offered white labeling in February 2005. I don’t know if that makes us the first or last, but it really doesn’t matter because now it’s who has the best service and I think vSocial is one of the best out there in terms of features and usability.

    Regardless all of this talk about Whitelabel service misses the point I think. The bigger play here is what Mike pointed out, and that is offering Bloggers a chance to take content out on the web and brand it as their own and make advertising on it. AdBrite has excellent background in advertising and organic ad-server-network products, so I think they will be very successful at this. Good luck guys, great product!

    Adam Bruce
    http://www.Vidiac.com

67. Adam
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 1:21 am

    RE:#67 - Harry,
    Yes, you can very easily put a line of code into a Flash player (SWF) to make sure it’s being served from the proper domain. HOWEVER you cannot put scripting inside of an FLV. (beyond some basic marker tags). The only way to protect against someone that has a direct HTTP link to your FLV from doing this is streaming the content using something like Red5 or Flash Media services (which is priced to high to be affordable for just use as a protection).

68. Harry
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 6:15 am

    Well, I was thinking about the crossdomain.xml restrictions, but you’re right, that would only stop the consumption of data - not the playback of the flv

69. Jeff
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 6:28 am

    First, Dial Media gives us the Ginsu Knife,
    Next, Ron Popeil gaves us Ronco
    Now Phil Kaplan gives us AdBright in-video!

    Pure genius…

    As an advertiser (mimeo) with my own content i see how this is useful… for the copyright discussion above, is seems reminiscent of the music, news, theater and book IP discussions of 1550 through 1780. Seems to me this issue is not new.

70. derrich
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 8:21 am

    I’ve really considered using this since I read it here last. Yesterday, JohnChow.com blogged about it, which reminded me. I think its great since I post alot of videos:

    http://www.derrich.com/2007/01.....n-spiders/

    Today is the best TechCrunch day yet…AdBrite, Akismet, and a forum announcement? Who could ask for more. (Forgive my misguided excitement. I’m hopped up on 2 large cups of “chocolate coffe” right now.)

71. Brandon
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 8:58 am

    This is definitely cool. I like their solution for Video Advertising. Rather than show video clips they found a solution to advertise that co-exists with video. I’d like to see the click rate from some of these videos tho. Might be promising

72. Jaafer
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    You Tube is now using Flash Media Server (FMS) and I suspect will easily be able to restrict video from playing anywhere other than in thier own player.

    I agree with Mike that InVideo is great for content owners that want to brand and link back the video to their site. If I put a Techcrunch video on my blog then it should send the user to Techcrunch not YouTube. Its great for blog promotion.

    The advertising play is a good angle to make money but remains to be seen in this form of delivery if users will like the ’split screen’. Not sure this is what excites me about InVideo.

    Pud - maybe a little refocus on the the value proposition here. At this point it is allowing content owners to promote their existing internet properties (blogs, sites) and increase traffic. Great job!

    Mike - I read Techcrunch daily but am always too lazy to sign in to MyBlogLog. Keep up the great work. I look forward to having you profile my budding venture soon!

    Thanks,
    Jaafer
    http://digitalu.wordpress.com

73. Rick
    

    January 5th, 2007 at 11:28 pm

    I dont understand what is considered leeching from Youtube? So many sites make money from videos being hosted on Youtube. Youtube has become a video storage / hosting site.

74. Brian Nathan
    

    January 7th, 2007 at 12:56 am

    This is a great idea , I am going to adopt this on my site

75. Snubs
    

    January 7th, 2007 at 9:34 am

    I’m not sure if everyone else is having as hard of a time using this player as I am but isn’t that the first step towards delivering ads in video?
    On the moral side - we’re so far beyond that stage as a collective society which only needs to be entertained when we want however that comes to be. The I.P. laws still exist however inconsiquential they may seem to be at the moment.
    The thing that is scary is the site that goes too bold and is obviously pirating intellectual property with no checks/balances to even try to prevent it from happening using their tools will set the legal precedence that dismantles the cornerstones of web 2.0

76. Blaze
    

    January 7th, 2007 at 6:40 pm

    Pud’s done it again. I wonder if the AdBrite logo in the topright always stays there or if that’s customisable also.

77. Blaze
    

    January 7th, 2007 at 7:03 pm

    Note: the video doesnt work in my rss reader (netvibes). They might need to sort that out.

78. Ty Graham
    

    January 8th, 2007 at 1:11 pm

    I remarkably foresaw with great detail the complete solution and was first to come up with a solution similar to this years ago. I have well documented my attempts yet I have been waiting for market maturation to pursue it. I have been sitting on the complete solution quite a while now. If anyone is seriously interested in funding the brilliant patent-pending advertising solution, contact me at gigaboy20 at yahoo.

79. Peter
    

    January 11th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    i think Mike Arrington’s original ‘Youtube’ analysis was wrong in that it suggested YouTube was a place to host your videos even if you did not plan on using the YouTube player. That is not what YouTube is for - as someone above said, the ‘terms of service’ probably prohibits this kind of stuff, and tracking streams can’t be all that difficult.

    Remove this incorrect analysis of ‘YouTube as video hosting company’, and the controversy goes away.

    An interesting aside, though - maybe GooTube _would_ be interested in video hosting outside of their player? The reason to _not_ do this would be because GooTube would then essentially be admitting that an external ad network could do a better job of monetizing the content. But maybe there are some details I’m missing?

    Also, if AdBrite needs to host video, I wonder if they build out their own gargantuan server farm (who in the world wants to do that?) or if they use Photobucket or Amazon or TextDrive or….GooTube. What they decide to do here could foretell their future plans - go it alone or look for future acquisition by Google or Yahoo?

    I see AdBrite getting bought by GooTube, personally. It’ll be a tough decision for Pud, but at the end of the day, making investors and employees (and himself) fabulously wealthy will feel pretty good, and he’ll probably be convinced that GooTube will be able to do a very good job for AdBrite customers - and GooTube probably will.

80. xazuru
    

    January 17th, 2007 at 8:00 am

    I never have thought about such opportunity…

81. Peter
    

    February 15th, 2007 at 10:05 pm

    this whole controversy is over nothing

    Ive just tested in video

    its a great product

    though you cannot host videos from youtube or video.google at all

    You need to host them yourself, and point to the URL of your flv file in the video setup.

    There is no way to currently point to the URL of the flv files on youtube

    you can use other sites like keepvid etc to download these flv files from existing content in youtube, though you still need to host it yourself.

    so the bandwidth issue is mute.

    though im sure some people will use sites such as keepvid to rip content from video producers..

    but at the end of the day, if you are a video producer and want to protect your video content you host it and protect it yourself easily. if you want to promote it via gootubes sites for free.. you put video snippets in there to promote the full videos etc. these free services allow you to put links directly to your full content pages.

    gootubes laughing all the way to the bank with people providing them free content , then they scream theft when , people use the embed code they have allowed people to use on a free service

    If gootube provided the only place on the net for people to host video, then all arguments about copyright/IP theft would be valid.

    If you dont want your videos stolen.. dont put them up for people to steal in the first place and make other companies rich in the process..

    ok.. end of rant

    pete

82. Scott
    

    February 18th, 2007 at 4:04 am

    What is interesting is that people are posting their videos to YouTube and Google Videos… while Google makes all the money on ads…. Why? They are posting it there to share or to get exposure or build a brand.

    If you asked the author if you could post their video on your own site, they most likely would say yes. After all, if they checked the box that said their video could be embedded in other websites, they obviously don’t mind it appearing on other websites. Just ask, and they will probably say yes. Then just convert/copy the flv file to your own web server (or PhotoBucket, or whatever) and you are good to go. No stealing bandwidth and no copyright infringement necessary.

    What this will really be useful for is people who have their own videos and have hosting space to put the videos. I already tried out InVideo on one of my sites. I simply uploaded the FLV file to my own web server, and setup InVideo to point to my file on my server. Works perfect.

83. ngilow
    

    March 8th, 2007 at 5:40 am

    I’m test video… ads not works.

84. adam joan
    

    March 9th, 2007 at 9:27 pm

    Hi guys,
    is there a way to view flv link of youtube?

    thanks