Its most recent financing round was $5 million from Spark back in November 2007, following a painful $300,000 angel round (at least it was painful for the startup’s founders) which we talked about a bit in the post covering the announcement of their first VC round.

5min is in essence a syndication platform for instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos, both professionally produced and user-generated. The service’s video library boasts tens of thousands of videos across a variety of categories (e.g. Pets), submitted by media companies and independent producers from around the world. The site has clearly struck a chord with legions of people looking for free hands-on instructions captured on video, since 5min reportedly attracts a significant audience of between 160 and 200 million unique visitors on a monthly basis.

A big part of its vast reach comes from hundreds of publishers and advertisers who use the company’s VideoSeed product, which uses semantic technology to automatically match videos to their respective audiences. What I personally like about 5min is the rich, custom video player, dubbed SmartPlayer, and the generally high quality of the how-to videos. An example video is embedded below.

(Thanks to Ouriel Ohayon for the tip)

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How-to site 5min is expanding beyond its roots as a video portal and has launched a syndication network for its videos called VideoSeed, which uses semantic matching to deliver relevant clips to participating sites. The platform matches keywords found on syndication partner pages and pairs them up with videos in the 5min database according to title and tag information (along with relevant ads to go with the video). Clips are all played in 5min’s specialized video player, which it launched earlier this year.

The company says that it can successfully distribute videos to syndication partners because its videos are all screened for quality and decency purposes and appropriately tagged with metadata, as opposed to the vast quantities of untagged footage that litter some more popular user-generated video sites.

And unlike some other how-to sites, 5min’s videos aren’t exclusively user-generated. Instead, the site has formed content partnerships with a number of other sites and media publications, including Ford Models, Elle, Car & Driver, Encylopedia Britannica, and Woman’s Day. Sydication partners (which will be displaying both videos from these content providers as well as 5min’s users) include Answers.com, wikiHow, and Ultimate Guitar. Through these sites 5min says that it will be reaching a whopping 110 million unique users a month, though this assumes that users will be reaching pages that feature the 5min videos (many entries in the aforementioned sites don’t have matching clips).

This is a crowded space, with competition from Howcast, Instructables, and a host of others. Provided 5min’s matching technology can live up to its promises (in my testing I could only find a few matches that displayed videos, so it was hard to gauge how accurate they were), these new syndication deals could help elevate 5min above the rest of the pack.

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The original SmartPlayer gave users the ability to manipulate instructional videos on the fly, allowing for frame-by-frame progress, slow motion, and zooming. The new version improves on these features by introducing ‘add-ons’, which are essentially pages of text and images with no limits on length. By including all of this data, the 5min videos have become self-contained guides that can be embedded on any website.

I think that the updated player has a lot of potential. Chefs will be able to include their recipes alongside detailed videos demonstrating how to prepare a dish. And musicians will be able to include sheet music or tablature alongside their lessons – a godsend for instructors.

But despite the improvements made since the first Smartplayer, 5min still has a ways to go. For one, it seems that there is no way to resize the video and attachment windows, which is a pain when there is a lot of text. There is also no way to get the ‘add-on’ field to auto-scroll, which would be key for musicians attempting to play a score along to a video.

Other competitors in this crowded space include Howcast, Expert Village, and Instructables. You can check out a sample video below (you might want to make it full screen).

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The general public is invited to parts of the show. more information is available on this website, including speakers.

Participating startups include 5min, Plymedia, AllofMe, Nuconomy, ClickTale, blogTV, Sportingo, PicScout, Qoof, 8hands, Velingo, Innovid, Semingo, PageOnce and Journeys.

I moderated a panel at the event last year. Highlights from that panel and the event in general are in the video below.

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We covered the startup recently – think YouTube with special features like slow motion to make the videos more useful. Our original profile is here, and our coverage of competitors is here.

Ouch! How Not To Do An Angel Round

The company previously raised $300,000 in angel funding. For those entrepreneurs who are curious about the economics of angel rounds, the details around 5min are interesting. In their case, it was ugly. An Israeli (print) magazine called Globes recently got their hands on the capitalization table of 5min and published the details. The angels ended up with nearly half the company for that $300k, leaving the three founders (the first three on the list) and all other employees to split the rest.

It’s rare that this kind of information about a company is published publicly, but it shows how angels can squeeze a company if they have the negotiating leverage.

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And there are some indications that it may be taking off. The company says 2 million videos were watched in August, and traffic is doubling month to month.

The video embedded above is a good example of the kind of content that you can find on the site – short, amateur videos that might actually be very helpful to various niches of people. There are videos on scores of subjects – dog training, cooking, working out, fashion (tying a tie, coloring you hair, etc.), playing instruments, parenting, etc. More good content is added daily.

And some of the videos are racking up decent view numbers, although it’s still peanuts compared to YouTube.

Part of the attraction of the service is more than the sign they’ve hung on the door saying people should upload instructional videos. The player also has special controls that are made for instructional videos, including freeze frame, slow motion, accompanying storyboards, and various language subtitles.

We’re keeping an eye on them to see if the growth rates and user adoption continues. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing those breakdancing moves.

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5 startups were chosen as finalists with the final to be held in 2 weeks time.

Amongst the final five was 5min, billed as a “Life Videopedia”.

We’ve covered similar start ups previously, most recently SuTree, which like 5min hails from Israel. English company VideoJug also operates in the space and took $30 million in funding last week.

5min sits between the two in terms of function. SuTree is an index of external how-to content, VideoJug creates their own how-to content. 5min is more like YouTube, content is hosted on the site and is user submitted.

5min have created a video system specifically for instructional content. Video creators can add a storyboard to uploaded videos to help others better understand the content. The need to focus on particular skills in uploaded videos has not been forgotten. Video on 5min can be played in slow motion or frame by frame, and the inline player supports zooming in and out for a more up close experience.

Given the interest and money in this particular niche there’s definitely something in the water. 5min presents a familiar setup to any person who has used YouTube style video sites whilst applying a number of unique features that are sure to win the hearts and minds of the DIY minion army.

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