First we had Ning, which lets you build your own niche social network. Now we have Fliggo, which lets you build your own YouTube. Fliggo is the latest startup to come out of Y Combinator. It has been in private beta for a while, but is now open to the public.
Fliggo lets you create your own video-sharing site. It hosts and streams the videos, and provides “grandma-friendly” management tools to customize the site and monitor usage. Fliggo sItes can be private or public, and are geared towards groups, companies, or video bloggers who want more control over who can see and comment on their videos, and the ads placed against them. Fliggo takes the expense and custom-work out of building a video-hosting site.
Right now, if you want to create your own video site, the easiest thing to do is to simply use Wordpress and embed YouTube’s videos. In fact, that is exactly the approach we used with our own video site, Elevator Pitches. The downside to that is that all of the videos also reside on YouTube, and if we wanted to enable advertising, we’d have to split that with YouTube. Fliggo lets you control all the videos, as well as who gets to comment on them, and the related videos that are suggested alongside them. In fact, Fliggo created a quick-and-dirty version of Elevator Pitches just to show us how easy it could be done. (We’re not switching over, though, so please continue to upload videos to the official Elevator Pitches site).
The downside is that your videos don’t show up in YouTube searches. And Fliggo doesn’t yet offer HD uploads (athough that is coming). Another danger for Fliggo is that it becomes a magnet for videos taken down for copyright violations elsewhere or porn (both of which are prohibited by Fliggo’s terms of service).
The basic service is free, but Fliggo charges for premium features such as teh ability to serve ads or host Fliggo on your own domain. The company has a not-yet-public API it shares with partner sites which want to embed Fliggo functionality on their own existing sites. JamLegend (a LaunchBox startup) recently did just that, adding a video section based on the Fliggo API where players can film themselves rocking out on their keyboards (literally).
Above is the screenshot of the JamLegend implementation. Below are screenshots of the Fliggo version of Elevator Pitches and a view of the management dashboard.
“The downside to that is that all of the videos also reside on YouTube…”
I think you can consider that as an advantage.
@Melvin do they syndicate to youtube or host at youtube?
You can import any video from youtube but they host the videos for you.
While this is a great service, I am afraid this will get deadpooled soon.
Transcoding, hosting and serving video is one of the most cost intensive activities for a website. The revenue to cost ratio in a business venture like is is terrible.
I wish them well, and I hope I am proven wrong, but to me, this seems like another great examples of excellent engineers working on a project with limited business potential.
From India,
Anjali Sen
WRONG in respect to their future. This is great.
I agree, Youtube is the de facto video platform, I don’t think anyone is going to change that with Google on board.
Interesting idea though Youtube themselves could easily offer something similar which might be a worry.
Youtube is the de facto video platform
I wouldn’t bet the baby’s dinner on this one staying true. As the compression brouhaha and letterboxing changes have settled, it’s become apparent that YT remains subject to enormous quality and performance issues that certain of their competitors are successfully addressing. Heck, even a big-money appendage like Hulu humiliates YouTube in every way except volume of content, and even that isn’t a very big concern since history tells us that people are not all that afraid of picking up their UGC and moving somewhere better.
Anybody who thinks YT is the apotheosis of user-video is analogous to a SEO merchant hinging their skills on an ability to get a site listed in Yahoo. If it’s findable on Google (or other), the size of the content index is irrelevant.
No
sorry, but yes. when anyone thinks of video sharing, its YouTube. Regardless of its ups and downs, its got the popular vote.
looks like it is also white labeled.
Are there annoying links to recommended videos at the end?
Do they support HD?
How reliable are they?
We could be a client, soon. How do we sign up for the api?
You should look at http://www.boostcast.com
How do we sign up for the api?
They may have a website. Try Googling.
Hi DJ Chang,
Send us an e-mail at info@fliggo.com and we can talk about the API.
Fliggo uses the JW media player, which is whitelabel. Combined with a server-side ffmpeg you can easily achieve an all-in-house setup for close to zero cost and hassle.
This seems like a great tool. I know a lot of people who avoid uploading to Youtube because they want something more personalized.
At college we had a lot of trouble finding lecture videos because they were often unorganized and scattered all over the place. Fliggo could be put to great use by instructors for these kind of videos. Sweet.
Try phpmotion.com or clip-bucket.com
And Elevator Pitches is not switching to Fliggo because…? Through no fault of Fliggo’s or what? 411 please.
I think this is a pretty neat idea. The problem is that advertising budgets are drying up, and if thats one of their main income streams, I don’t see the company lasting in the short term without substantial VC/Angel money to keep innovating and converting companies like TechCrunch to buy their enterprise version. And by the way, why isn’t TechCrunch migrating over to this service?
Hi Chris,
We have an exciting and feasible business model that does not rely on advertising income. It relies on the traditional method of people paying for something they value.
Thanks for the feedback!
Hi Chrys
I really wish you guys well because it looks like you have some great engineers, but you need to understand that it is very hard to get anyone to pay for anything on the Internet.
People have been trying to figure this problem out for the past 15 years … and for the most part, they failed, which is why almost all of them have reverted to advertising.
From India
Anjali Sen
Anjali,
That’s not entirely true, we’ll put on a good show for you guys
I like the concept as well and it really was as easy as the overview video made it seem to set up. I’ve been looking for a place to start a community on video marketing for business and this may be it.
I set it up and before I even knew it or had a chance to upload any videos (which I will in the next few days) I had someone join my community at videomarketing.fliggo.
DRAWBACK… I looked at some of the videos and the quality leaves a lot to be desired. Hope it improves.
Worry not, we are working to offer higher quality videos. It’s on our short-term road map!
Hmm interesting, is this different than magnify.net?
http://www.tech...he-video-crowd/
The backend interface is nice, but it’s heavily borrowed from Vimeo. Imitation+flattery right?
Sadly YouTube’s quality is still quite poor and the range of video filetypes accepted is retardedly small. It’s a constant crap shoot as to the final result of your video after transcoding.
I’d suggest they open up their friendly interface layer and management tool (that’s basically what this is) to more video services and allow the user to choose what they want. Otherwise it’s just reselling YouTube video hosting with a streamlined interface and the options of domain hosted//advertising which isn’t as compelling.
We are constantly working on improving our video quality and transcoding process, as well as filetypes we accept.
I you find a filetype we don’t support, please let us know and we’ll get right on it!
Y Combinator does it again!
> Y Combinator does it again!
Does what?… funds another “cool” concept without a business model?
Awesome guys – looking sweet. Beer time, all round.
I heard the idiot kid owner–once he saw the Hooters Gift Card–offered 51% of the company to Ycombinator on the spot.
Pizza. Booze. Boobs.
In every YCombinator partnership agreement.
Too competitive. You can do the same with YouTube Channels or MetaCafe or DailyMotion – or DIY social networks, Ning, Grou.ps, Wetpaint… good luck boys!
Vincent,
Go ahead and make http://jamlegend.fliggo.com on any of those services and post it here. If you do that, I’ll quit my job today
Good argument.
Fliggo definitely carved out a niche and they actually have a business model. White labeling is a great way to offer freemium services. Customers will pay to take away branding & advertising. Beautiful!!!!
How Y Combinator gets away with scoring equity in these companies? Their ROI has to be ENORMOUS!!!
*How does…
i can see some pro’s and con’s to this site, nonetheless i wish you guys luck
They can offer publishers the ability to charge users for access to premium videos(eg: educational videos, think lynda.com, and peepcode.com) and do revenue sharing.
The key is to partner with publishers that produce videos that users are willing to pay for.
You can buy a YouTube script for $99. What’s the point?
Youtube is all about having MILLIONS of people see your stuff… with this, you’re still stuck with your blog’s (probably shitty) traffic.
Sync the service to YouTube (better yet Vimeo) and the problem’s solved. This is about white labeling your content and building your own ad-free community.
I have to say, it looks pretty cool. Will have to sign up!
Daves got a good point. Unless your in the media business i dont see why i should use this instead of just posting videos on youtube with more traffic.
Loving the clean design of the site!
This has huge potential a la Ning. Many thought Ning was crazy in the early days for many of the same reasons listed here. I am optimistic these folks are on to something big.
Magnify.net has been doing this for a while.
Create and curate your own channel… upload or embed video from anywhere.
great stuff. though youtube script they say is for 99 bucks. How many know that. Thus Fliggo will fill a huge void and make money too. I can see this going like Ning for sure.
Who has time to buy a script, and set it up. Fliggo is a one stop shop ready and waiting and also very clean.
YCombinator has smarts. Fliggo great job once again.
PHPMotion and Clip-Bucket are free and open source! They are youtube clones..
why not just use kyte
Although the idea seems interesting. I do not think it has a huge user potential on the consumer side (B2C) – it should rather be geared toward businesses (B2B)
We’re building something B2B
Youtube clones need to be supported by advertising, which youtube themselves aren’t able to monetise yet. But it could be an acquisition..
I agree Fliggo can be personalized. Thats great. But, although you personalize and make private. You members still can download it by using other software such as REAL PLAYER. So, this is still can copyright the VIDEO you upload. Imagine You put all your hard effort to create a good video…and people copyright it.. That is not good man. I hope Fliggo have a technique where PEOPLE CAN VIEW, BUT NO DOWNLOAD…
Unfortuantly, fliggo appears to be down for the count. I haven’t been able to access it for the past couple of days.
Fliggo is back up now, and it works brilliantly.