Waow, it's been a very intense past fortnight in videoblogging:
- video-sharing platform YouTube raised 5m$ from Sequoia earlier this month (everyone interested in this space was talking about it at ETRE in Athens)
- Videoegg announced a couple of days ago that they are signing a deal with Typepad to bring video casting to bloggers, although they still have to iron out a few things. Audio interview here on VentureVoice. Their original cool stuff (USP) was webcam capture, drag & drop support, and support for many video devices.
- well, Dailymotion announced the next day that they were integrating with Typepad and Blogger and they announced webcam support a few weeks ago.
- everyone forgot to mention that castpost has been doing blog interfacing for many months now, including to Typepad.
- or that vobbo has been offering the webcam service for many months as well.
So... Where's the news ? That someone read the API of Typepad ? That support for all video formats and live capture from webcams or drag & drop support is one of the key value propositions of Macromedia's latest flash software (out of the box)... ?
It can of course also be made to work with other stuff, and I'm not trying to diminish the efforts that each team has put in their service.
I was wondering about the business model of all these players a while ago, and now I am wondering as well about the investor's approach to these companies. There are business models of course for vloggers and vlogging platforms: advertising, subscription, per use, per click, per account, per storage, etc. But hey... Unclear to me how each is going to become a global player with significant revenues from what I'm seeing in the marketplace.
Not to mention of course the gazillion other copycats of online video-sharing available out there. Let's just note that Podemus, a French startup, was put in the spotlight recently by our friend Loic Le Meur; and Revver that showed up on my feed aggregator yesterday: similar to videoegg, but they help you earn money by submitting your videos to them. Oh... Scoopt.com does that as well! Complicated marketplace indeed.
In the meantime, professional bloggers should have a look at Eric Rice's audioblog. He's quietly been building a tool that professionals are picking up (commandN.tv for example), and translating his infrastructure in Chinese, Japanese, Korean... Well done Eric! And at least for his service you have to pay to use it (after the 7day trial period) every month.
I had a nice meeting with my friends Jean-Michel Billaut and Malo Girod de l'Ain (FilmFestivals.com) this week, and used part of the time we had together to show them some of the stuff I've been working on with my partner Ivan and our team in Paris and Madrid. Indeed, Jean-Michel asked for my permission to blog PART of what he saw and what we discussed about.
By now, I guess you've understood that I consider video-sharing almost as a commodity in terms of business model, and although many guys out there have been pioneers and are offering great tools (I encourage you to use them), I decided to rebuild my own tool that enables *me* to upload of course any format, that allows me to capture any webcam feed, that posts directly to Typepad, that doesn't have issues with MPEG2 formats (one of my cameras actually produces exactly that format :(, that enables downloadable backup files, that doesn't have the 30sec, 2 minute or 100Mb limitation, etc. (all of it working great on one of our development servers at http://vpod.tv <= no it's not my brand, just one of our many deposed domain names). Hey... If I can do it, then the next guy can do it, no barrier to entry here, hence I wouldn't bet my business on it.
Now, the real stuff we're working on hasn't been disclosed yet, and we don't expect to until it works great, offers real value to customers, and sustains a very significant competitive advantage in the global marketplace. As many things in life, the future for our stuff is yet unclear. We believe strongly in it, we feel we have the right execution capabilities for it, and that we will succeed.
In the meantime, back to work.
Update: Eric Rice has a comment about the new videoegg/typepad deal. Interesting.
Update2: Russ has 2 great posts about the ambtion and business models.
Update3; and Andrew has the perfect tool to create a web 2.0 business.
UPdate4: Russ had actually a series of posts on how videopostcasting is hoing to be huge, is posting vpod scripts, and talks about hooking up his ipod video to a friend's TV.
