I guess it’s Yossi Vardi Startup Day here at TechCrunch. The prolific Israeli investor behind ICQ is now backing a video chat service called SeeToo that was founded in January, 2007. SeeToo closed an angel round of about $1 million a month ago, and Vardi is the biggest investor, as well as an active board member. The NYC-Israeli startup quietly launched a private beta last week, and we have 500 invites for the first TechCrunch readers to sign up.
The basic concept behind SeeToo is a shared chat room where you can watch a video simultaneously with the person you are chatting with. This is intended for personal videos of your child or travels, rather than for Hollywood movies to watch together with a friend, although that would be technically possible as well. Yoav Ilan, head of marketing and biz dev, took me through a live demo earlier today. 
He showed me a video of his 7-month-old baby and one of a big yacht he videotaped from his apartment in New York. As the video was playing, we were typing away underneath in a chat box. I didn’t have to download anything. I just clicked on a Website link he e-mailed me, and it worked.
SeeToo is not alone in combining video and chat in this way. PalTalk allows simultaneous shared viewing of a video in a chat room with a lot more people than SeeToo currently supports (which is only two parties, for now, but that may change). And you can do something similar with Meebo Rooms, which lets you watch YouTube and other embeddable videos with a bunch of friends.
SeeToo could easily add more people to a chat, and is looking into it. But the main difference is SeeToo’s clever use of peer-to-peer technology. You never upload a video. Instead, if you want to share a video, you download a small 600 kilobyte app that takes any video on your desktop, compresses it, and streams it right from your computer to the SeeToo Web page that is hosting the chat. The application is currently only available for Windows, but a Mac version is due out next year.
When the chat is over, the video disappears from the Web (it remains on your computer). The yacht video, for instance, was a 120 MB file. SeeToo does not need to host or store any videos, and consumers don’t need to wait for the videos to upload before they can share them. The simplicity of the service is the best thing going for it.
Paltalk is awesome. Why isn’t it linked in the post?
Let me be the first to point out the non-sexy, but rather palpable word of “firewall”. SeeToo will need to maintain at least a minimal presence in the clouds to kick-start the service. After that, they would need to rely on other people constantly running the SeeToo app in the background, to act as a proxy for folks behind even a $50 consumer firewall. (God forbid I sit behind a L7 corporate one.)
In my humble, but typically not modest opinion, I think there are better ways to optimize the delivery time of the video than cooking up yet-another-p2p-scheme.
Then again, this is just $0.02 from a random pundit
We’re doing the same thing. Investors are welcome
http://www.pladeo.com/pladeo/widget.php
what about the techcrunch funded seesmic - no disclosure? how does this compete?
boy yossi getting nice dividends for being all up in tc40
the idea is you upload a video, chat with a friend while watching the video, then the video deletes itself - might be a new way to cyberdate - load up when harry met sally and then chat along
can i load this with the yule log?
And the value proposition of this start-up?
interactive video advertising!
First of all, how many people are likely to chat while watching the same video, not much. Rule of thumb is for every thousand views maybe 1 comment? Say a video gets 100,000 views 100 people would be chatting- thats assuming this is happening in real time.
I just don’t see it.
Simon, I just tested pladeo, Meebo rooms, PalTalk and SeeToo. I’m sorry to break it to you that Paldeo is simply not in the same category.
Mezeri:
We did a number of tests on video audience / chat / user-concurrency. You’re partially correct. Although we’ve moved away from this exact model, I can say that on some sites we discovered very interesting results. You can see an example of our ‘alpha’ widget being used in the context of a shared video experience here
http://www.gillesdesmit.com/goudenkooi/
Now bare in mind we have left this thing to die a bitter death, but the video viewers still keep on chatting away on the bloody thing, we can’t stop them
But the fact remains that watching video can still be a very social experience on the web, it just depends on where you place these widgets. We’re now turning this technology into an ad product and have hit the sweet spot of interactive page chat.
I tried the beta along with an associate on two different machines and we weren’t able to get the client software to recognize an AVI/xvid file or a quicktime mov file. So, it didn’t work for us.
Response to Weekend Posts Pundit:
First thanks for the feedback. I just wanted to point out a potential misconception regarding SeeToo: by no means SeeToo utilizes users’ machines as super-nodes to assist in hosting and streaming video between the points like other p2p networks do. Our mission is simply to let users watch their private home made videos together with their friends immediately, simultaneously and with complete privacy.
Our solution BTW, is pretty firewall and NAT friendly, you are welcome to try
Automatt, can you please contact us directly at support@seetoo.com so we look at the issue? Thanks!
Yoav Ilan
Mark, I agree with you. Trust me, you’re not breaking my heart. But with money behind it, it could be a lot more - especially if you white label the thing, but that’s another story. Those companies you mentioned are all funded to the best of my knowledge and they’re doing quite well as getting a bunch of users. However we figured out how to monetize this stuff and I don’t really think those other guys have much of a clue at running businesses that generate cash. I guess they’re hoping for platform domination - that will probably never happen. Eventually they will need to make money for investors and turn into a cash business or die. This race is like the hare and the tortoise - we’re not the hare :-s
Simon, I don’t think money “fully funded” start-up realize that, one day, they need to show positive cash-flow. Hence the coming bubble 2.0.
Yet another sign of the bubble…
Why is there so many Israeli startups constantly being featured on TC, all of a sudden?
I used the app between IE and Firefox on my machine and it ran like a charm. the quality and speed were really good.
One annoying thing was there was no option to change screen size and no fullscreen option. Thats very important for watching a video!
I give it a thumps up!
But since the world is coming to end next year… its pointless!
So many ways to already do this! The best way is with MSVideoChat Vista Edition!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Biggest problem with this is bandwidth …… if the person broadcasting has crap bandwidth - then no matter how good the P2P is … the video will still suck…. i think these guys are onto something …. but maybe 5 years too early …..
IE does not seem to work for me.
I See, I See Too said the blind man…
I wish i was israeli, there is obvious favoritism towards israeli start ups, not sure why, especially when over 90% of them are pure garbage.
Seems to be a lot of startup features on here.
Wondering why you are not using InviteShare to give away the invites ?
@jakem & @zizi - My thoughts exactly. I’ve seen it for a while. There’s a bunch of startups coming out of other countries (India, Phillipines, etc.) with garbage ideas and they don’t seem to get much coverage.
#1: why link to paltalk? it’s all junk and spyware
http://wii4xmas.com
Erick,
It’s great to see that almost the whole front page on techcrunch is dedicated to Israel: Yossi Vardi investments (SeeToo and AllofMe), Google Israel privacy issues and finally e-toro. Not bad.
I invite everyone to visit the Venture Capital Cafe (http://goisrael.blogspot.com now moving to http://www.vccafe.com, so please bare with me on the design) where I cover early stage companies, innovative technologies, and venture capital news with a spotlight on Israel.
If you are a developer/designer in Israel looking for an interesting project, leave me a comment on the blog. If you follow the Israeli market, take a moment to subscribe - a lot of interesting developments are going up in December.
Congrats Alon!
Nice work
I luckily got invited to the test this, and everything is working out perfectly.