A few months ago Duncan gave instructional video aggregator SuTree an overall positive review, but did point out that “navigation is very much old school and doesn’t jump out and hit the casual visitor with a flurry of Ajax and DHTML goodness”.

SuTree recently launched a new version of its site that takes into consideration not only Duncan’s feedback but that of many other users as well. Particular attention has been placed on the site’s look & feel which was generally characterized as plain, and the addition of new community-building features, such as:

• Courses: A set of videos about a specific subject. The course creator sets the order of the videos, add comments and guidelines to each video, and can even manage a forum for the members of the course.
• Wrap & Send: Users can “package” a bunch of videos together and send to others. For example, if your friend is taking a bartending class, you can send him or her a package of cocktail instructional videos.

While these features are not by any means cutting edge, I believe they fit the type of “mainstream +1″ audience SuTree is catering and will be well accepted by their growing community.

However, the big question is whether an instructional video aggregator can be a viable business. SuTree believes the answer is ‘yes’. To this end, the site is planning on integrating the usual assortment of ads (banners, text, video, etc.), as well as selling relevant products and advice to knowledge seekers.

The crux of this business model is traffic of course and SuTree is claiming 100K unique users per month and 600K page views. They’ll need much more than that to truly monetize. Their plan to do so is twofold: First, dedicate funds to marketing (which they have yet to do), and second, rollout more community-building features.

The company has a full plate for the upcoming year as they are planning on closing a round financing, indexing at least 100,000 videos (they are now at 11K), creating more business partnerships and enhancing the community through knowledge sharing channels and features.

Will all this be enough, or will SuTree join the deadpool? We’ll likely get an answer in 2008.

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The semi-finals of the European focused Startup 2.0 contest were held in Madrid on the weekend, an event with 15 of the best/ most promising Web 2.0 startups out of an initial 300 nominees presenting.

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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Israel-based internet company, E-learning Knowledge Solutions, recently launched SuTree.com, a video aggregation service where users can add and categorize instructional videos from across the web, providing a directory of video that would often be buried under the weight of competing content on sites such as YouTube and MetaCafe.

The service is similar to Scouta, in that instead of being primarily machine aggregated content, users on both services are encouraged to add the content themselves, tag or categorize it, comment and add to a larger directory to be shared by others, although SuTree does lack at this time any ability to automatically suggest video.

The site has over 5000 videos indexed across a broad field on interests, ranging from Kids through to Pets, Electronics, Food and Business. I was particularly impressed with the variety of source material, its not just the usual collection of YouTube videos that a prevalent on many aggregation sites, but from a much broader field including video from specialist content providers within each area of interest.

It would be easy to bag the site in terms of it Web 2.0 credentials, navigation is very much old school and doesn’t jump out and hit the casual visitor with a flurry of Ajax and DHTML goodness, but for its target audience of beginners, mothers, those with hobbies or seeking to learn something new it provides a nice rounded package that utilizes user generated inputs for the delivery of some great knowledge to many.

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