D-on-Net

YouTube raises more $$

Today, YouTube announced they have closed on an $8mn Series B round from Sequoia Capital bringing the total amount raised to $11.5mn (Series A $3.5mn - Nov. 05).  The release provides some interesting stats, such as 35mn videos watched daily on YouTube and over 100mn page views per day with over 6mn unique daily users.  YouTube says "the additional capital will be used to advance the company's rapid growth, expand sales and marketing efforts, and to accelerate the build-out of its world-class data centers."  Steve Chen, YouTube's CTO and Co-founder also said "by accelerating the build-out of our data centers around the world, we are poised to continue to serve up billions of videos in the most scalable and cost-effective way."

Brightcove is the next one-stop-shop for online video syndication

  Brightcove has been on my radar for a while, but has been a company leaving me with a lot of unanswered questions...and promised, but undelivered briefings.  However, today I decided to revisit the company and it appears they have revamped their site and started to reveal a lot more information regarding what exactly the company has up its sleeves - especially in terms of its value proposition.  For example, their homepage is now advertising a couple of their affiliate partnerships with the latin website Barrio305 and National Lampoon's TogaTV.  Clicking on either of these enables you to see what the Brightcove platform actually looks like, and it is not too shabby!  They are using Macromedia Flash 8, which creates a very crisp viewing experience.  Clicking through their revamped site it became quickly apparent these guys are going to live up to the hype and deliver on becoming the next one-stop-shop for video syndication.  Their recent acquisition of Meta Stories helps build out their publishing capabilities and as their site illustrates, they also have the tools to distribute, monetize and deliver content to consumers. 

Most intriguing to the new site is the visibility into Brightcove's advertising solutions.  It appears Brightcove is giving content owners the choice of either handling their own ad sales or applying to take part in Brightcove's own Advertising Network, all of which is sold by Brightcove.  The company is offering marketers Site Specific Placement, which gives the marketers complete control over the placement and integration of the advertisement.  The company is supporting 7, 15, and 30 second video pre-roll as well as synched banners.  Viewing TogaTV gives you an example of both as an AT&T add is shown through the video player with a banner add off to the right.  The company also says it has ad targeting capabilities, tracking capabilities and for large media companies that may already have an ad server for their site, Brightcove can integrate its capabilities directly with the ad server.  So what does all this mean?  Well, it appears that Brightcove is the process of covering all of the necessary bases.  I am especially interested in finding out more about their targeted ad and tracking capabilities, so if anyone has some insight please drop me a line.  I also still believe it is possible Brightcove could be providing the technology behind the delivery and placements of advertising into AOL's In2TV (AOL is an investor in Brightcove) and coincidentally the revamped website wasn't launched far behind the launch of In2TV.

Brightcove is also dipping its toes into providing Pay Media services by enabling content owners a suite of offerings to create a digital video stores allowing content to be downloaded to own or rented for a period of time specified by the content owner.  Brightcove also says it plans to support subscription models and again, the content owner is able to set the pricing.  Simplifying the process, Brigthcove is offering a "turnkey" solution for credit card processing, account management and customer service and is using Microsoft's DRM technology to protect against content piracy.  This offering is especially intriguing because Brightcove is essentially becoming the go-to outsourcer for the players who have hoards of content but not the cash or the technical expertise to develop their own i-tunes or Google video platform.  This solution also aids in bridging the time-to-market gap. 

Clipshack and Oodle collaborate to form shakeyouroodle.com

Today Clipshack and Oodle announced they have joined forces to launch shakeyouroodle.com.  This is a site dedicated to moments I am sure many people wish were not caught on video, but at least it is all for a solid cause! 

VideoEgg is evolving into more than an online video publishing service

Yesterday I was fortunate to get a briefing with VideoEgg co-founder Kevin Sladek and to say I was impressed would be a serious understatement.  VideoEgg's mission in a nutshell is to make the process of publishing video online as simple and painless as possible regardless of the end-user's device or video format.  While their product is arguably second to none, what is more intriguing are their plans to begin monetizing the service.

VideoEgg Publisher is a free (more on this later) web-based service, equipped with a pleothera of editing features, enabling users to upload video content via their pc, web cam, or various mobile devices and post the video to their blog, web page, or even eBay allowing users to create video auctions.  The process is painless and only requires a few clicks of the mouse before your content is encoded into Flash-format creating what truly is a high-quality end-user experience.  For the tech gurus out there, VideoEgg partners, on an exlusive basis in many respects, with On2 Technologies [ONT] using their VP 6.2 web compression codec.  Also unique to VideoEgg is the fact the encoding takes place on the client-side server, which means their servers do not grow with their user base, which is the opposite from Google Video, where encoding takes place on the server-side.  Also worth noting is the fact they partner with everyone's favorite CDN, Akamai Technologies. 

On the partner front, VideoEgg's largest publicly announced partnership is with Six Apart, the creators of Moveable Type and Typepad (which I use).  Typepad users can upload videos to their blogs (vlogs) for free, but the video must be less than two minutes in length.  VideoEgg has also partnered with Blogger and eBay.  While I did not embark on the topic of eBay with Kevin during our discussion, it is worth noting he and his co-founders actually tested video auctions on eBay and found they generated a larger selling price than the same items shown in eBay's traditional auction format.  We mention this because this kind of success falls in-line with eBay's decision to acquire Skype in that they are betting PC-to-PC communications will enhance its sales volume.  Too bad they could have done this much cheaper through a highly publicized partnership with MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger or AIM. 

Back to the topic at hand.  VideoEgg recently announced they now have a VideoEgg Integration Kit enabling other websites to embed the VideoEgg Publisher for FREE to their sites and learned over 200 sites have already registered for the plug-in, which is a staggering number considering this was announced less than a week ago.  This is the precursor to VideoEgg's grand plan.  While the service is currently free, the service will soon be supported by, you guessed it, advertising.  If users or affiliate partners choose not to have ads displayed then they will be required to pay for the service on a pay-per use basis.  I asked Kevin several questions regarding the ad-supported service, but he was clear that he wasn't ready to let the public know their plans.  I asked if the advertisments were going to be embedded in the video and all he would tell me was they will be displaying advertisements within the player environment.  This could mean ads on a side-bar or within the video, so it looks like we will have to wait and see for sure. 

A topic of particular interest to me is the anlaytics side of advertising, which was my next topic of discussion with Kevin and he definitely left me standing on a cliff.  I asked Kevin if they have or are in the process of developing any analytic tools that will enable them to provide a solid reporting package to the advertisers, in other words, so advertisers can track ROI.  While Kevin was not willing to divluge what they are up to, it sounds like they have this area covered, which in my opinion is what makes VideoEgg even more exciting.  If this is a service that will eventually be embedded on thousands of high-traffic sites across the web and they have developed a tool-set enabling them to send advertisements to various videos and sites based on the content of the video, content of the site, or demographics of the site...that is a compelling value proposition to any advertiser.  Yeah, it is early and maybe I am getting a head of myself, but it is possible VideEgg could become, and we are hoping they do, much more than a web-based video publishing service.

VideoEgg is based in San Francisco, CA. and has only raised two rounds of financing, just closing on a Series B round in January 2006.  Amount raised to date has not been disclosed.