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YouTube Has New Competitor To Watch in Veoh
Over the Web's 15 years, there have been many who proclaimed the Internet is the new television. And there have many attempts. Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com probably was the first in a dial-up world, streaming live audio. The second phase came mostly through live events, such as the Victoria Secret's fashion shows and Live 8, as well as the introduction of underground peer-to-peer file sharing of video.
We now seem to be in the third phase of Internet TV since the launch of viral audio and video sites. The spoof site JibJab played a major role in political comedy for the 2004 presidental elections. The birth of podcasting has allow anyone to "broadcast". Current TV let the people be newscasters. Bloggers influence journalists (Instapundit vs. Dan Rather). Air America Radio is listened more from its internet streaming and timeshifted show podcasts than its over-the-air "terrestrial radio" broadcasts.
This third phase for Internet TV was cemented last Fall with the new video iPod and iTunes selling downloads of music videos and both new and classic TV show episodes.
The video iPod has spurred a flood of new video download site interest, including the quickly popular YouTube (launched in December), MTVN's purchase of iFilm, and the launch of VH1's "Web Junk 20" delivering the best viral videos of the week.
There's another Internet TV site to check out and watch develop. It's called Veoh Networks and yes, they want to reinvent television, too. They've been in beta since last Fall and don't have YouTube's instanteous usage...but they may have something.
Like many other sites (including YouTube and iTunes), Veoh distributes video. However, Veoh offers some things not available elsewhere. For one, their videos are DVD-quality, and even high-definition. That's great for the consumer and better than most of sites, where streams are low-fi and shaky, even on broadband. More importantly, the economics of Veoh is different, allowing the people who create the videos in the first place to either charge for downloads or share in advertising revenue. So, if you create some viral video and upload it to Veoh, you actually get to share in the revenue.
It still has a long way to go to build buzz and attract fresh content...but the idea is good. Let's see if it sticks or if it is just more static.
Sidenote question: Yahoo! says they are moving away from creating custom video content and offer more user-created content makes me wonder: why is Yahoo! still mirroring broadcast.com forwarded to the the main yahoo.com portal? Why doesn't Yahoo! free up broadcast.com again and let it be a prime viral video location on the web?
related blog posting here.
posted by Unknown @ Sunday, March 12, 2006,
1 Comments:
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At 1:17 AM,
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Veoh is spectacular. Much better than youtube or the others.
