The next big winner?

This is a great chart of video hosting services that offer monetary rewards to producers. Only a couple companies listed are more than two years old. Watching this tabulation evolve will make 2007 an interesting year, indeed!

The book containing the chart is available now, even as a work in progress. Click the cover to learn more and buy it.

Post-YouTube fall-out

Video sharing might not be as lucrative as the Google/YouTube deal might indicate. That big acquisition has not been followed by others. Was the YouTube phenomena a singular event? CNET reports that Guba and others are shaking up management as they deal with sobering new realities.


On the other hand, ZDnet reports that MetaCafe thinks its prospects are better than ever.

New: Megite video, and Tailrank

So here's the buzz- Why not aggregate every new story posted on sites that link to us, and deliver better news, since they relate to us? Hmm... so now Megite is delivering videos.

Something to watch... watch what the crowd that watches us does. The crowdsourcing of their "News River" provides a seductively automated mirror and lens. Look, ma, no editors!

A similar approach, though not yet with video, is Tailrank. Here is how they say they do it:

"We find the hottest stories by tracking conversations between blogs.

"Tailrank takes into consideration linking behavior, the text of the post, links in common with other users, text relevance, weblog ranking, past performance, and various other factors for recommendations."

Viewer Created Content gets crowdsourced

We've been watching Current TV evolve into a viable alternative to mainstream television. Editorial processes enable interesting materials to surface, and here's a case in point. The Portland-based band "The Shins" recently told their audience to bring their video cameras to a recent concert in Austin. The video tells the story of "crowdsourcing" the pod.

Over 200 user videos were uploaded and are a part of it.

Variety reports on "YouTubeToo"

With reports that major Hollywood studios would band together and build their own video-sharing site, a bit from Variety might be in order. The authoritative trade magazine has been following talks between CBS, News Corp, Viacom, Disney, and NBC Universal as they explore how to control their distribution, or at least to be compensated for distributing their content online.

So far, no deal, but Google wants them to use YouTube, of course. Variety says something might happen by the end of January.

Everyone is striking up deals as they can. They all have their own sites, of course, and various shows are available through iTunes (but that has generated less than $70 million for content owners in over a year). So what has them in this predicament? Well, like with everyone else, YouTube and user generated content caught the "big boys" off guard. Here are a couple of quotes:

"They're probably a year too late," said Jeff Pulver, founder and chairman of Pulver.com, a New York company that organizes a conference called Video on the Net. "The networks know they have to do something. They have good intentions, and big brand names, but at the end of the day, these joint ventures never deliver on their promise."

Jeff Jarvis, an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York who also runs the blog BuzzMachine.com, points out that the promotional platforms the networks have may not help much in launching a vid site. "You can't advertise it on TV, because the person who's watching TV is 59½ years old," he argued. "That's not the demographic you want to attract."

Video on the Net keynote: BrightCove

Another thoughtful analysis by Jeremy Allaire of the various ways video is changing the landscape of sharing information, education and entertainment.

The YouTube story... on YouTube

It pretty much stands on its own merits: the history of YouTube as told in October, 2006. Quite a lot to learn from this! The video really shows how horrible it used to be and how much YouTube made it easy.

Deep tagging goes social... SceneMaker from Gotuit

Now we are getting some powerful new video services emerging that use "video sharing" sites for their source materials. SceneMaker lets users cut and tag clips on YouTube (and MetaCafe, for starters), and then email their friends about it. The hope is that viewers can jump to interesting segments inside videos.

They have a "video toolbar" which lets you snag videos as you watch them, and to bring them into SceneMaker. The Boston Glove reviewed the site, and reports:

"SceneMaker will be free to users, but Pascarella said Gotuit hopes to attract a lot of advertising revenue. He plans to link ads to the tags generated by users. For instance, someone who runs a search for "shuttle" could see an ad for science fiction books or vacation tours of the Kennedy Space Center.

"'It gives the marketers the ability to target the words,' said Pascarella."

Here's a snippet from their site:

What Can You Do With SceneMaker?

• 

  Bookmark or "Deep Tag" Scenes Found Inside Online Videos From YouTube and Metacafe

  Much like you can bookmark a single page on a website, SceneMaker lets you bookmark and "deep-tag" specific scenes inside online video. Use the Gotuit Toolbar to apply descriptive tags or keywords to any scene you want to save.

• 

  Share Only The Scenes In A Video You Want

  Has this ever happened to you? Someone sends you a link to watch something cool in an on-line video...but you have to sit through the entire video to see the good part? SceneMaker lets you bookmark scenes inside of a video and send just the good part. For example, you can tag and send just the 10 second crash for a 5 minute highway chase video. SceneMaker makes discovering and sharing the best online video even easier.

• 

  Embed The Individual Scenes on Your MySpace Page, Blog or Web Site

  If you are a blogger or writer, SceneMaker now makes adding video to your website much more relevant. You can now reference specific moments in a video and embed them to play within your web pages.

A new kind of video distribution... BrightCove

The vision expressed by BrightCove CEO Jeremy Allaire has captured the imagination of producers from TV and film. The videos bring a wide variety of views to what "Internet TV" is becoming.

Nice to have an alternative to "video sharing"!