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April 22, 2007

Middio: Music Video Search Engine For YouTube

Michael Arrington

47 comments »

Middio is a new site, still in private beta, that’s indexing music videos from YouTube and tagging them properly with the artist and song name. The search interface is good; finding a music video for a given artist takes just a moment and there’s none of the non-relevant content you see with YouTube searches. Videos are also embedded in the Middio site.

What Middio doesn’t have is playlists or any way to bookmark favorite videos, two very useful YouTube features. Until they add them, I’d use Middio as a good way to quickly search for music videos on YouTube, and then click through to add them to your YouTube playlists.

Another compelling feature would be the ability to convert videos to iPod format and download them to a computer. YouTube will try to stop it, but it’s not clear if they legally can.

Middio launches on May 5. Sign up on the home page for email notification.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 2:11 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. meneame.net

    April 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 am

  2. pligg.com

    April 22nd, 2007 at 6:19 am

  3. 我挖网 - 5dig.net

    April 23rd, 2007 at 5:47 am

  4. Somewhat Frank

    May 8th, 2007 at 9:57 am

  5. Music Video Search Launch at Rareface

    May 15th, 2007 at 7:10 am

  6. keku.com/w2 WordPress » Blog Archive » MyStrands Launches Music Video Discovery Service, MyStrands.tv

    September 14th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

  7. keku.com/w2 WordPress » Blog Archive » MyStrands Launches Music Video Discovery Service, MyStrands.tv

    September 14th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

  8. Brilliant: FIQL Avoids Copyright Trap Through Music Videos

    September 20th, 2007 at 2:08 am

  9. Finally, Music Videos To Appear on YouTube

    May 16th, 2008 at 4:17 pm

Comments

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  1. weblockr

    April 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 am

    Michael… i wonder why the number of feed subscribers keep jumping up and dropping down by thousands across the week… sometime they are 367k, some other times they are 356k… how is this big jumps and drops… is it something from feedburner or just a normal thing when you reach high number of subscribers…. also i wonder how feedburner makes money!

  2. Yohay

    April 22nd, 2007 at 3:16 am

    Viacom could use this site’s powerful search to show how Youtube infringes copyrighted material.

  3. Paul Jensen

    April 22nd, 2007 at 3:26 am

    It seems to me that Middio is similar in concept to a demo of Dapper’s web service, but just for music videos.

    Being able to properly tag videos will go some way to making them easier to find, but I wonder how Middio will prevent malicious users from spam-tagging videos to make them crop up in popular results? Is there some sort of voting system to punish bad results?

    It’s interesting to see that these new web 2.0 services are really specialising in niche markets now….is the market really that saturated?

  4. flash

    April 22nd, 2007 at 3:38 am

    Another great site for review related to this subject
    http://www.groovid.com

  5. Anthony

    April 22nd, 2007 at 3:41 am

    There’s so much potential out there for building on top of YouTube. This video search is good but I think soon we’ll be seeing a lot more. Video Pandora anyone?

  6. A Miller

    April 22nd, 2007 at 3:47 am

    I’m banned? =(

  7. Lasse

    April 22nd, 2007 at 3:53 am

    This is kinda similar to one of my personal projects. It’s an experimental mashup between youtube, last.fm, google news and other services:

    http://musictonic.com

  8. Alper

    April 22nd, 2007 at 4:04 am

    We[1] have been scraping YouTube for music videos for a while now. Let’s see if we can build upon Middio’s metadata to improve our service.

    [1] We are http://lasttv.net, your personal music video channel.

  9. Adrian

    April 22nd, 2007 at 4:19 am

    I use http://jukeboxtube.com/ to seach and play music from YouTube - it allows me to run a search without having to break the current vid. good for a party.

  10. matthew

    April 22nd, 2007 at 5:14 am

    @weblockr
    feedburner can’t measure the number of subscribers directly, so it tries to extrapolate it from the number of feed hits. on the weekend, feed hits drop which causes feedburner’s calculated “number of subscribers” to drop.

  11. Sandro

    April 22nd, 2007 at 5:53 am

    Thanks for the link Adrian, didn’t know about jukeboxtube, and will deff. use it from now on. Simple and cool!

  12. Jon

    April 22nd, 2007 at 6:04 am

    I guess I’d have to wonder how sustainable this business could possibly be. First, there is the obvious problem that they are indexing largely illegal content, and if YouTube is ever forced to take the content down, the business is gone.

    Of course, YouTube could certainly do a content deal with the music labels to serve this content, but I would imagine that any deal would include the actual content… that is, YouTube would index the content themselves (with the help of course, of that little search engine of their parent).

    Furthermore, if the company found any real success, it would seem that YouTube could fairly quickly take them out of business by also providing the service. As you mention, there doesn’t seem to be any value-add on top of the search, so where does this go.

    I’d be interested in learning if there is something more defensible about this.

  13. Ryan

    April 22nd, 2007 at 6:11 am

    does anyone know who created this site?

  14. beng

    April 22nd, 2007 at 6:54 am

    Another way to search you tube without all the “non-relevant” features and content.

    Just show me 100 dang thumbnails already!

    http://www.youtubesearcher.com/?criteria=eminem

  15. david hyman

    April 22nd, 2007 at 7:08 am

    MOG launched a similar service a month back called MOGtv (http://www.mog.com/tv)

    MOG analyzes your digital music collection to understand what songs are in your collection. in then creates a personalized musicvideo station leveraging the google api. MOG also offers a music video search engine here.

  16. Alex

    April 22nd, 2007 at 7:47 am

    I think that videos are a very important aspect of music, but along with videos there’s much more to be discovered.

    That’s why we created FoxyTunes Planet - the Personalized Music Aggregator. It finds videos from YouTube, along with images, news, last.fm and pandora radio stations etc. from more than a dozen different sources and the list is growing.

    http://www.foxytunes.com/artist/eminem

    And the best part is that it’s integrated with our browser extension - so instead of manually searching, you can directly jump to FoxyTunes Planet pages relevant to what’s currently playing in your media player.

    -Alex
    FoxyTunes

  17. RaJ

    April 22nd, 2007 at 8:59 am

    Its a good thought from #2. And no wonder Google will acquire this too. Already Google video has provision of downloading the videos for IPOD. Its a good news for IPOD users.

    http://www.suggestusability.com

  18. Cesar

    April 22nd, 2007 at 10:17 am

    This is and will be a great feature for youtube. I think i will enhance the video searching process since i think google is having some deficiency on this. Also Ipod users, i bet, will be fascinating with this new formatting option.

  19. GizmoActive

    April 22nd, 2007 at 11:01 am

    The Middio business model does not appear very sound.

    It’s business in dependant upon content that it does not own, but more importantly the content that Middio is indexing is still shrouded in Copywrite infringement issues.

    Additionally, YouTube is owned by Google, the multi-billion $$ company that can easily create and implement any improvements that are needed to make YouTube more user friendly.

    On the other hand stranger things have happened on the Internet so we shouldn’t say R.I.P. to Middio just yet.

  20. Saket Kumar

    April 22nd, 2007 at 11:51 am

    Michael,

    Try uLinkx (http://www.ulinkx.com/), You’ll like the local & LIVE search (Directly on youtube, Myspace…).

    If you really like Middio, then find the video and create a playlist/bookmark on uLinkx using our bookmarklet.

    You can create Video Homepage (Video Wall) using uLinkx (http://www.ulinkx.com/help/video_wall).

    Any feedback/review/flame would be appreciated.

  21. Kewtr

    April 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 am

    Another compelling feature is the Digg logo.

  22. LiveBM

    April 22nd, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    Maybe not so good as Middio, but this site does the same

  23. Jake Jarvis

    April 22nd, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    Hi all,

    Just wanted to answer a few questions.

    All sites embedded in Middio are legally uploaded to YouTube. The major recording companies have uploaded thousands and thousands of music videos that they legally own, but unfortunately are hard to find next to all of the teen lipsyncing and assorted fan-made videos.

    As for a business model, Middio is a tiny side-project of mine that I have invested relatively little time in over the course of the past few months. Amazon/iTunes affiliate links will be integrated before launch and non-obtrusive ads may be shown on pages where copyrighted material is not embedded. However, I was never really expecting on making Middio into a full-blown business.

    Over the next few months, we’ll be working on integrating more and more services to make Middio the ultimate music mashup. We’re already working on last.fm integration, which will make the Top 100 page much, much more accurate.

    Feel free to contact us with any more questions. Email is admin@middio.com. We’ll be sending out quite a few more beta invites before launch so drop your email address on the homepage if you haven’t already.

    Thanks for the interest in Middio!

    - Jake

  24. Stevenic

    April 22nd, 2007 at 11:21 pm

    What timing… I just created a wiki last weekend to catalog music videos posted not only to YouTube but anywhere on the web.

    http://vidwik.wikidot.com/dave-matthews-band

    This seemed like the perfect community driven project to me. Music is something that people want to browse as much as search. If you check out the DMB page I linked to above you’ll see that I’ve organized everything into album views that at least to me seems superior to any of the “search” oriented music sites I’ve seen.

    VidWik has the same playlist & favoriting problems as Middio does but I’ve already worked out how to add a per/page RSS feeeds so users can subscribe to the latest videos added to a page so the other problems should be tractable as well.

    Of course the biggest challenge is going to be getting people to contribute but all it takes is one dedicated fan per band to create a nice catalog.

    With regards to copyright I totally believe artists need to be compensated for their works and I’ve primarily linked to Ad Supported content on sites like AOL Music and then backfilled with live recordings & fan videos from YouTube. In fact a site like VidWik could make it easy for a band to keep track of their infringed material.

    -Steve

  25. Tom

    April 23rd, 2007 at 12:01 am

    This looks very cool I would love to use it. As for the point of copyright, is this not a bit redundant issue now? Surely its Youtubes liability and record labels do not seem to be in a rush to remove them as its completely free promotion.

    We use video’s every day on our site http://www.trackfeeder.com. We’ve not had a single label request for them to be moved, in fact its been the opposite – had a lot of requests to include tracks.

  26. 5dig

    April 23rd, 2007 at 5:45 am

    Looks good, I’ll give a try.

  27. pallet jack

    April 23rd, 2007 at 6:15 am

    Building atop a company that may no longer exist the way it does today - is a little sketchy

  28. ppires

    April 23rd, 2007 at 6:40 am

    I working for a site “abruxa”, it means the witch, we do almost de same thing for youtube, metacafe, livevideo…
    is in portugueses for now, and is atach to a blog :) is main functionality

    http://www.abruxa.com/cristalbola.php

    you to see your TV section
    http://www.abruxa.com/tv.php

    please see and coment :)

  29. Andrew

    April 23rd, 2007 at 11:42 am

    Yuxt.com has been launched few months ago. and it looks more superior when it comes to similar tasking. Their bookmarking features is fun to use, just drag and drop to create a collection.

  30. Andrew

    April 23rd, 2007 at 11:42 am

    http://yuxt.com

  31. the poop monster

    April 23rd, 2007 at 11:45 am

    pooppppooooooooooooooooooooop

  32. Shachar

    May 2nd, 2007 at 2:02 am

    This is a great site with lots of tutorial videos. The interface is very nice and the player is very modern

    http://www.5min.com

  33. Sascha

    May 6th, 2007 at 12:05 pm

    This is stupid. One could easily use the YouTube search engine.

    Simply a filter. Not interesting enough to be on TechCrunch!

    Everyone think this is more than it actually is!

  34. Rita Cole

    May 7th, 2007 at 6:53 am

    Hey Sascha,
    I realy like TechCrunch why don`t you? Not satisfied enought or just first impresion?

  35. Roman Drake

    May 16th, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxZzrA0u5rA

  36. Roman Drake

    May 16th, 2007 at 6:40 pm

    Check it out tell me what you think
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxZzrA0u5rA

  37. sanjay

    May 17th, 2007 at 10:56 am

    Enter an artist name, get recommendations, enjoy an hour of music videos…one click is all it takes….

    http://www.myMusik.us

  38. Marty

    May 21st, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    Videocodezone.com is already doing this with YouTube. Interesting to note that this is where I would go to get my Music Video Codes for MySpace but now I see that most of the songs they have also have a YouTube version available.

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