New York based human-powered online video guide WeShow launched today.
WeShow is not the first site of its type, but it does launch with strong backing. Investors include The Pilot Group (owned and managed by Bob Pittman, father of MTV and ex-COO of AOL Time Warner) and Bill Sahlman (Harvard Business School vice-dean and professor of entrepreneurship). The amount of funding has not been previously disclosed but is believed to be around $5-7million.
WeShow brings an editorial approach to selecting and organizing the best online videos available from sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Google Video and others. The site also offers the monthly “WeShow Awards,” billed as the “world’s biggest online video contest” where users get to vote on content from each country WeShow has a local version for (US, UK and Brazil). WeShow TV rounds out the offering by providing a review style show featuring some “of the world’s best videos.”
The appeal of the service really comes down to whether online video consumers prefer their video delivered raw or refined. I’ve always thought that finding interesting videos was half the fun, but others may prefer to be spoon fed. Creatively, WeShow started their release for the site with survey results stating that 60% of Americans feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of online videos and 46% of these people do not watch more online videos because they dread the task of weeding through too many search results. I’m always a little skeptical about these sorts of numbers, but credit where it’s due: the company is demonstrating a problem before delivering the solution, a lesson well learned by some startups.
Overall it’s good at what it does. Navigation is easy and the variety of video choices is rich. Whether it’s an idea that’s strong enough to stand by itself will simply be a question that only time can answer.
Weee!
first to comment 
Whatever– I’ve been aggregating the best videos on the net for months, with the strong backing of devoted pervs everywhere. Woohoo!
The strength of a website like that fully depends on their editors. Given the relative success of startpages filled with editorial links, sure this might work. These guys or some of the other 100 startups in this area will find a nice niche audience which fits with their linkings. Putting millions behind something which will eventually have to choose a niche however doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Do not agree with Riley though, if you have to explain that there is a problem, often the reality will be that the problem was only minor.
Welll I am really not seeing any thing new and the look is also very mundane.
The link below is a review of Realnetworks new RealPlayer by WSJ. I know it was twice recently here at TechCrunch. There’s no discussion on whether there are any differences with the wierd stuff btwn the old Realplayer and this new version (other than not asking for personal info during setup). I still will not use it even when the Mac version becomes available. I prefer to use the Techcrunch download tool for Youtube and iSquint to convert.
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Interesting… Organizing all the videos into categories is a very hard work.
yeah nothing new;
– tons of video collection sites..
– Also – COntest site? WEak sauce – Yahoo baught all they need and no one else wants any.
This is already being done over at http://www.videosfit.com People submit videos, the community votes and the good ones (at least as deemed by the community) make it to front page. They also have categories and channels for specific tastes.
url correction thats http://www.videosift.com
Videosift does this, but they are a non-profit.
Digg, Stumbleupon and Dabble do this, via community.
I don’t see any difference in terms of causing people to feel more comfortable, with less more editorially selected content, either by the community or from editors, than any of those four sites.
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Okay the “Two-headed baby turtle” video is amazing, but then, no comments, no viewing stats. Clicking back to the site, and the site didn’t remember that I viewed it, much less present related videos. I had to search for that same video, and only in the search results did I get a list of “relevant” videos.
Unless you’re creating a subject-oriented niche directory, people will tend to post comments/participate at the site where the original video was posted.
Mike Arrington can post the Silversun Pickups (?) video as part of his write-up and get people to comment, but otherwise, people are only going to comment at Youtube or wherever that video was originally posted.
Bob Pittman is investing in a company that competes with NextNewNetworks (the spawn of his MTV buddies)? Interesting. . .
They show, I watch — pretty nifty, especially during those spoon-fed moods I get from time to time.
..is this the like the Yahoo of old, except for videos..how is it scalable?
i can sense the schaudenfreude emerging among skeptics..
I’ve always wondered when something like this would come out. To be honest, I’m surprised YouTube hasn’t made their site more like this.
-Chris
http://www.nerdcouncil.com
We’s watchin’ ya’ll…..come on over and watch us….and could we perhaps have some of yer start-up capital leftovers for some shiny new servers????
The thing that’s interesting is that they re-purpose video from other content owners and them combine/mash them all together for their daily round-ups.
Did they get permission to re-purpose the content from each of the providers? NO
They have mini-thumbs linking to all of the content they ’stole’, but what they’ve done here is clearly copyright violation. The funniest thing is they add their watermark to all of their videos, so it looks like all of the content is from them, eventhough they don’t own any of the footage (see for example the celebrity pages)…
Priceless — Can’t wait before they piss off one of those content providers and get the inevitable call from their legal department. I agree nice layout, nothing new though….
I’m usually pretty skeptical of most of the new start-ups I read about, but I actually think this one is a pretty good idea. Sure one or two other sites are doing it, but certainly no one is a destination site in the video directory space, so there’s still a big opportunity.
I think their biggest challenge will be getting mind share and becoming a destination site themselves. Unlike a YouTube, there’s nothing particularly viral about a directory site, at least as far as I can see. Of course, good backing does help with establishing a name in the market, so we’ll just have to see.
I agree with the general concept of a moderated video site. Some may have fun finding videos, but many of us don’t have time and want to see the better stuff out there, as defined by adults, when we have a little time to kick back.
YouTube and VideoSift both fail to serve that niche, because it’s the dumb stuff that always gets voted up by the teens that mostly take the time to comment and vote. Maybe that’s what you want to watch, but not me.
I prefer something like http://withabrain.com, where the time-consuming work is done for me. I pick a category and just sit and watch, instead of sitting and clicking and bailing 10 seconds in to everything I see. Then again…I built it, so I suppose it stands to reason that I would like it.
We quietly launched a refined version of this idea in November 2006 and have spent the last 6 months perfecting it at http://www.auditoriumA.com
all about articles n more
Before say something, you have to click on the link and see what is different on WeShow. It’s a great site with a good organization.
I have to agree with the majority of the commentors, this service is nothing new but I belive this is the first major actor in this niche of video aggregation. I think the investors will have a hard time seeing some ROI on this project because of how easy the concept is to mimic and by experience I know that washing out the nuggets from the online video services is a time consuming work if you want to maintain quality and write anything usefull that can later be used to rank in SERP’s.
I currently run a similar service at http://www.vidly.net which have been live for a year know so I have some clue about what the kind of work involved in this business means.
The one I like the best is The Daily Tube (thedailytube.com) because 1) it’s the easiest to navigate, 2) it concentrates on what is new so I don’t waste time wading through things I’ve already seen and 3) it delivers right to my in-box.
But it’s a hot space and I think a few of these kind of sites could be successful. With the explosion of the number of sites and videos online, there is a real need for smart filters that aren’t gamed or the product of lowest-common-denominator voting (i.e. Videosift, Google Video).
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