YouTube alternative and video sharing site Motionbox has acquired competitor and fellow video site Viddyou for an undisclosed amount. Motionbox, which raised $6 million in funding earlier this year, is similar to YouTube in that it allows users to upload and share their videos on the web, but it includes a more in-depth suite of privacy settings that make it better suited for sharing clips with a select group of friends rather than the whole world.

Motionbox also got a boost from AOL, which recommended Motionbox to as an replacement for its Video Uploads service, which was shut down last November. Viddyou has a similar model to Motionbox by featuring extensive privacy controls. The site also focused more on quality of video over quantity by adding support for high definition video.

According a press release, Viddyou users be able to move their account information and videos to
Motionbox and premium users will be granted Motionbox Premium subscriptions. ViddYou launched in 2007 as a “vlogging” site and expanded its offering to become more of a video sharing site like YouTube.

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Video sharing site Motionbox has just closed a $6 million Series C funding round led by Constellation Ventures, with Canaan Partners and SAS Investors also participating. Alongside the funding, Motionbox is also announcing that its founder and CEO Chris O’Brien will be assuming the role of Chairman of the Board and EVP of Strategy and Corporate Development, with former COO Josh Grotstein taking the reins as CEO.

Motionbox is similar to YouTube in that it allows users to upload and share their videos on the web, but it includes a more robust suite of privacy settings that make it better suited for sharing clips with a select group of friends rather than the whole world. The site offers a free version with standard video sharing options, as well as premium memberships that allow users to upload an unlimited number of videos, with no time limit restrictions. Motionbox’s site also lets users order their videos on DVD and in paper flipbooks, which can recreate brief scenes.

The site recently got a boost from AOL, which recommended Motionbox to as an replacement for its recently-shuttered Video Uploads service.

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Users must move their videos prior to December 18, when the service closes for good and the videos will no longer be available. AOL is recommending that users transfer videos to Motionbox, a New York based video sharing and editing startup that we first covered in 2006.

The FAQ that AOL will distribute to users this week is below. This change doesn’t appear to affect AOL Video itself, which focuses on professional content from Hulu, CBS and other sources.

AOL Video Uploads

Q. When will the AOL Video Uploads close?

Effective December 18th, 2008 , AOL Video Uploads (uncutvideo.aol.com ) will be closed and all videos stored will no longer be accessible through AOL Video Uploads. AOL has evaluated several personal video offerings, and believes Motionbox, a leader in online personal video, to be the best suited to handle the needs of AOL Video Upload users. Motionbox is FREE and includes some great features.

We are recommending users go through a simple transfer process to move their videos to Motionbox, and also giving them the option to download or delete videos stored on the site.

Q. When/how will users be notified?

A. Anyone who has stored videos on AOL Video Uploads will receive an official AOL e-mail the week of November 17, 2008.

Q. What are the options for retrieving video from AOL Video Uploads?

A. AOL recommends users transfer their videos to Motionbox, a free service that supports all of the features users enjoy with AOL Video Uploads.

Basic Motionbox service is FREE and includes:

- Easy transfer of your existing videos from AOL Video Uploads.
- High-quality video playback, with full-screen viewing options.
- Sharing, with privacy settings to help protect your content.
- Fast, reliable uploads of almost any video format.
– Simple editing and mixing tools so you can trim and combine video clips.
- Video embedding on your blog, profile page, or Web site.

Additionally, users may download or delete their videos from the AOL Video Uploads before December 18, 2008.

Q. What happens to videos if users do not take action before December 18, 2008?

A. After December 18, 2008, users will no longer be able to access videos through the AOL Video Uploads site. However, before December 18, AOL can help users move their existing videos to Motionbox® to continue accessing them online. Users may also download files from AOL Video Uploads or delete them.

If a user doesn’t delete the video or transfer to Motionbox, it will be removed from AOL Video Uploads as part of the closing of the service.

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Viddyou, a video sharing site that launched almost a year ago as a platform for video bloggers, today rolls out support for high definition video and adds a $35/yr premium membership option for power users.

On the surface, Viddyou looks like many of the other video sites out there. But it has so far managed to foster a community that seeks refuge from the masses over at YouTube. Co-founder Aaron Wadler says that Viddyou’s contributers enjoy the site’s extensive privacy controls and lack of both advertisements and trolls. It’s a place where they feel comfortable sharing videos of their children and grandparents, or posting more personal video blogs for and about their friends.

Today’s additions are meant to continue that focus on quality over quantity. The high definition video comes in both 720p and 1080p, a first for video sharing sites we’re told (Vimeo provides only 720p). Both look great to the untrained eye, and 1080p might be too processor intensive for most computers anyway. We’ve embedded a 720p video from Viddyou below since 1080p would probably chug and skip for many readers.

ViddYou users who want to upload in HD will need to pay for the premium membership, which will also let them download copies of their videos and upload videos of unlimited length (the free version only allows 5 minutes each).

Competitors include Motionbox, Vimeo, and Mydeo, three other services that focus on video sharing for friends and family.

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Video editing and sharing site Motionbox, which markets primarily to families, has announced the closing of a $7M round of Series B financing led by Constellation Ventures with participation by Canaan Partners and SAS Investors.

Motionbox recently released a premium version of its service that allows you to upload files of any size and enjoy unlimited storage for $30 per year. Videos can also now be downloaded for playback on an iPod or similar devices. If you really want to take your videos “offline”, you can order small flipbooks (naturally dubbed “motionbooks”) that will capture 15 seconds of a video on paper.

We recently covered Motionbox in our round up of online video sharing services.

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Time for another roundup, and this one coincides with a notable first-year anniversary: that of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, confirmed on October 9th, 2006.

Since then, the name “YouTube” has become virtually synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month. Second-place Yahoo Video trails with 48,026,000 visitors. But must YouTube remain the clear winner in the online video space? While they have certainly captured the largest audience – which may in the end be all they had needed to do to secure their position – we shouldn’t underestimate the many other companies vying for mindshare.

Even if YouTube remains the destination of choice for the vast majority of consumers, producers ought to take a serious look at the alternative services. They often support more file types, bigger uploads, and higher resolutions. They also place fewer restrictions and provide an array of features simply overlooked by YouTube. That said, a few of these services are mere YouTube clones and hope to follow in YouTube’s footsteps by providing very basic features.

These are the services we looked at: blip.tv, Brightcove.tv, ClipShack, Crackle, DailyMotion, Sony eyeVio, Google Video, Megavideo, Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, Spike (ifilm), Stage6, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, and YouTube.

Since they are all about 80% the same, I’m not going to go through each of them one-by-one at length. However, there are some overall trends that ought to be pointed out, as well as some key differentiators. To get into the details as to how all of these websites differ, check out the comparison chart we’ve provided above. You’ll notice that there are some gaps, so please email me if you can help us fill in the holes.

First of all, only YouTube, DailyMotion, and Metacafe appear to place any hard restrictions on video length. With the rest, video lengths are determined indirectly by file size restrictions. While YouTube and several of these sites place the file size cap at 100mb per upload, others place it higher at 250mb, 500mb, or 2000mb. Veoh places no limitations on file size, but they recommend you use their desktop player for files over 100mb. If you’re willing to fork over some cash for a premium membership, Brightcove.tv and Motionbox will also let you upload files of any size.

While YouTube allows users to upload files only formatted as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG, other services accept a much greater range of file types. If you want to make your life easier, however, get into the habit of encoding in .MOV (Quicktime) and you’ll be welcome at almost all of these sites.

When it comes to video quality/resolution, it’s not perfectly clear how these services compare, because most of them don’t state their video bit rates or explain their transcoding processes. However, several of them clearly blow YouTube out of the water. Stage6, a DivX-based service, and Sony’s eyeVio, a Japanese-only service, support the most stunning video quality. Videos hosted by Veoh and Crackle also look very sharp.

Out of all these alternative services, blip.tv stands out as the most professional video sharing solution. The website and player are cleanly designed, they accept perhaps the widest range of file formats, they will automatically syndicate your videos to many other websites, and you can choose to place midroll, postroll, adjacent, and overlay advertisements in your uploads. Additionally, you can track your shows’ statistics quite closely and allow users to download your videos. I could go on and on about blip.tv’s useful features. The only major bummer with blip.tv is that you can’t seek ahead to points in a video using their Flash player.

It’s no surprise that shows like Rocketboom have decided to migrate over to blip.tv. We even decided to use them for our TechCrunch40 conference. And PC World agrees with us that blip.tv tops them all.

While we have a strong preference for blip.tv, the others have their own peculiarities that may make them more attractive to you. ClipShack, while mostly a YouTube clone, has an area where you can use a webcam to add movie, book, video game, and TV show reviews directly to the site. Crackle serves as a talent discovery system through which amateur producers can win a chance to pitch ideas to Sony and other media executives.

Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Megavideo support a wide range of languages. Sony eyeVio, which unfortunately doesn’t plan to roll out an English version, enables users to download videos straight to their PSPs, Walkmans, iPods, and mobile phones. Metacafe and Megavideo both have programs with which they pay content creators according to how many people view their videos. Motionbox, the most private of the services, has a video player with a unique filmstrip that can be used to visually locate segments in a video (they also provide a simple online video editor).

Revver provides a WordPress plugin so that video bloggers can upload and manage their content more efficiently. Veoh lets you both upload videos to other sharing sites and watch videos from all over the Web in its download client. Vimeo sports the best-designed website and a strong community feel. And Viddler’s player packs in a bunch of features, including the ability to leave comments in videos at particular points.

Since embeddable video players are the faces of these services, we have placed screenshots of them below (click to enlarge). We are also in the process of uploading a sample video to each of these websites so you can compare their video qualities. Links to these videos can be found in the comparison chart.

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If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities.

Here’s a look at each of the services, followed by a more in depth chart comparing features.

Cuts
“Simple and easy, when you need edits now”
Cuts is the new kid on the block and is all about remixing viral video. They don’t host content, but instead take videos from other sites (YouTube, Google, Myspace). With Cuts you can trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows. See also our early look at Cuts a few weeks ago.

Gotuit
“For slicing and dicing scenes”
Gotuit Scenemaker is for slicing out scenes from videos on other networks. After importing a video into the program via URL, you can select a start and end for one or more scenes on the video, title, tag, and email the scenes to friends. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it to slice up Gotuit content.

Eyespot
“Mashups with effects, transitions, and titles”
Eyespot is a solid editor that lets you mix together your own Motionbox content or scenes from their promotional media packs. It has a simple drag and drop interface that lets you manage a wide variety of effects and transitions for both the audio and video layers. Eyespot lets you add your own audio and mix in photos as well. While you can’t grab video from other networks, Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available on more and more sites. The NBA is one of the most recent additions.

JumpCut
“When desktop software is too expensive”
Jumpcut is the most developed of the editors, allowing you to add a long list of effects, transitions, and captions to the videos. It also incorporates fine grained control of trimming and audio levels (uploaded background audio and voice). The complexity of the interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups, but borders on being too heavy an application for the internet.

Photobucket
“Cutting edge tools”
Photobucket just released a new video editing product that leverages the most recent Adobe Flash tools. Unlike any of the other services, users can “mash up” video clips with audio files and photos, and add effects and transitions.

Motionbox
“For trimming and joining”
Motionbox is best known for deep tagging videos, but they also have an editor that is ideal for trimming your Motionbox content and joining the videos together.

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A few startups are focusing on creating transcriptions of podcasts and video content (see Pluggd and Podzinger, for example), which search engines can then index.

And many people are tagging audio, video and photo content. YouTube, Flickr and others allow this (and see Google’s efforts to tag photos using humans). Tags help describe the content and are usable by search engines as well as humans. But highest level tags, when they are present, don’t capture all of the content, so a lot is missed.

Figuring out how to search the meta data around rich content (tags and lots of other descriptive data) is big business. Truveo, a video search startup that launched in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by AOL for at least $50 million, helped solve this problem (but still falls woefully short of perfect). A new unlaunched startup, CastTV, takes rich media searching another few steps forward (much more on them in a later post). But even these new search companies can’t find all of the content in a video or audio file, and certainly can’t take you right to where that content is presented.

That’s why I like the idea of deep tagging. It requires human labor but for many publishers it’s worth it. Instead of simply being associated with a file, a deep tag is associated with a clip from the file. Click on the tag and jump right to that part of the clip.

We’ve covered a few companies that are facilitating deep tagging, such as MotionBox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo last week), Viddler and Click.tv. Also, Google recently added a captioning feature to video, as well as the ability to permanently link to any time spot in a clip.

Veotag is doing this as well (we haven’t covered them yet but a few commenters have pointed them out in the past). Today I received an email from Howard Seibel, Veotag’s VP Marketing. He pointed me to this page which is a better version of a TalkCrunch podcast I recorded last week with Om Malik and Robert Scoble. He’s added deep tagging, so listeners can jump right to certain parts of the show.

I like the fact that I can embed the Veotag player right into the TalkCrunch website, and people who listen to the podcast on the site can utilize the deep tags (right now we have a simple Flash player). I’m having our trusty analyst Nick Gonzalez look into integrating Veotag into TalkCrunch sometime soon. If you know of other startups addressing deep tagging, please let us know.

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Some things haven’t changed: Flickr still hasn’t released a video product, and YouTube (TechCrunch posts here) is still the reigning champ of online video with just massive traffic growth and mindshare.

But new tools are coming out to make sharing videos online even easier. Both Video Egg and Grouper (TechCrunch posts here and here) have downloadable clients that allow encoding to flash on the desktop (saving users from uploading very large files to the service) and some very basic editing features. Grouper also allows users to string together multiple video files (VideoEgg does not yet allow this). Also, while working from the desktop is easier than online, you must install the software. Grouper is not available on the Mac. VideoEgg has a Mac client that works with Safari, but I cannot get it to install on my new Intel based Mac.

New service Motionbox, which will launch in the next few weeks, goes way beyond all of this. CEO Chris O’Brien and investor Derek Idemoto came by to demo the service to me last week and, well, I’m impressed.

Motionbox doesn’t have a client uploader like Grouper and VideoEgg. You must upload the full video files to the service. And while those uploads are a pain, Motionbox has very good reasons for doing this.

To get what Motionbox is doing, take a YouTube and add a ton of really great editing, mashup and deep tagging features. Like YouTube, Motionbox transcodes files to flash to reduce file size and standardize viewing. But they also store the original files and allow you or those you authorize to download those files and/or purchase DVDs with the files.

Editing and Mashups

I also had a chance to test MotionBox’s video editiing tools. When editing a video, Motionbox breaks it down visually into frames (see screenshot above). Users can edit the file extensively, including linking several video files and removing any portion(s) of files. Mashups with other users’ public or shared videos can also be created using this editing feature. Frankly, this goes way beyond what anyone else is doing, including VideoEgg and Grouper’s current offerings. All of these changes can be pushed back to the original quality files for downloading or DVD burning.

Deep Tagging

Like YouTube and other services, Motionbox allows tagging of video files. But they also allow deep tagging of parts of video files. Open a file (see screenshot above) select a portion of the video, and tag it. Viewers later will be able to skip right to that clip of the video by clicking on the tag. Longer videos can now easily be broken down into linkable pieces. This is a huge leap forward over competiting services.

Chris gave few details on pricing and limitations on files sizes, other than to say that any limits will be time based v. file size based like YouTube (which has a 100 mb file size limitation), and many or all of the restrictions will be lifted for premium users (expect a $25/year premium subscription fee).

Sign up to be notified of the Motionbox launch here.