The Boston Area Online Video Round-Up

David — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:55:38 +0000

If you are one the people who believe that the Boston area is not exactly the hot bed of Web 2.0 activity, there is one area that the hub has developed well – online video. Last year, everything was about YouTube and other consumer generated plays. At the same time, some New England area companies have been launching their own video offerings and rebuilding some old ones.

Here is a round up of some of the top local online video companies. Most of these are business focused but I have included a few consumer plays. If your favorite company is not listed here, please leave a comment and I will add them.

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Brightcove: Cambridge, MA: Online video publishing platform and video syndication network. Also operates a video portal of Brightcove publishers located at Brigthcove.com. The PR darling of 2006 award goes to Brightcove and CEO Jeremy Allaire where every publication was required to write about them at least 2 times per month.

PermissionTV: Waltham, MA: Online video publishing platform that is looking to use video as almost as direct marketing channel by enabling “one-to-one” interaction with users. They have customers including FHM and Bob Villa.

Maven Networks: Cambridge, MA: Online video publishing platform and early entrant that list customers including Hearst Magazines and Univision.

Gotuit: Woburn, MA: Online video publishing platform that uses a patented metadata technology to drive better search, navigation and advertising capabilities. Customers include SI.com, Major League Soccer and the National Hockey League

The company also operates 2 consumer sites as well. GotuitMusic.com, a free streaming music video service, and SceneMaker.net, a social network for sharing viral videos – both covered on 93south and, to give the proper disclaimer, 2 of my recent projects. You should also check out the video mixer I produced for Gotuit featuring Fergie.

Choicestream: Cambridge, MA: Provides a personalization and recommendation service for online and mobile content publishers ala the Amazon book recommendation service model. Think ” if you like this drama prairie dog video, you will like the Kill Bill Remix. Choicestream picked up a good round of funding in 2006.

ExtendMedia: Newton, MA: Provides a multi-platform video distribution service for media companies covering direct content sales, content syndication, DRM and billing in one hosted or enterprise service. ExtendMedia announced a 12 Million round of financing in April, 2007.

Akamai: Cambridge, MA: Wins the web 1.0 survivalist award of the group with a rebirth of sorts in the broadband video era. The CDN (Content Deliver Network) has benefited heavily from handling much of the streamed video on the web today and, outside of just video, Akamai estimates that 10 -25% of all Internet traffic comes through their 25,000+ global servers.

Mediasilo: Boston, MA: Launched in beta in 2006, Mediasilo is digital asset management software that allows teams to work together on large video files through the web. It also has a video publishing platform. Very slick design on the site including the over-used talking head video on the homepage.

Participatory Culture Foundation: Worcester, MA: Produces the open source desktop video aggregator, player and podcasting application Miro ( coverd by 93south recently ) and also the social video bookmarking site VideoBomb.

ScanScout: Boston, MA: Online video advertising play using metadata to facilitate the placement of in-video contextually based advertising. Check out the OMMA article with CEO Doug McFarland formerly of Eyeblaster and Advertising.com.

Visible Measures: Boston, MA: Out of MIT and funded by General Catalyst, Visible Measures is a video analytics solution that is promoted as the industry’s first comprehensive Video Experience Measurement solution. They have partnered with PermissionTV and Brightcove to roll out the service.

EveryZing.com: Boston, MA: The recently renamed PodZinger is another metadata play that was originally focused on deep audio search within podcasts but has branched out into the broadband video space with the launch of their consumer portal, EveryZing.

Pulver Media: Beverly, MA & Melville, NY: Anyone from the VOIP space should already know Pulver Media who produces the VON events. They have branched out to add a “Video on the Net” section to the existing shows (the “V” is for voice and video now). They also launched Network2 a long tail video aggregator combining content from around the web.

imoondo.com: Boston, MA: Think Craigslist meets YouTube, imoondo.com is an online video classified site. Launched this May, the site is not the biggest but is gaining traction within the Boston area. It also announced today that it is looking for partner community sites to beta test a co-branded classified platform

Banddigs.com: Windham, NH: I discovered BandDigs at the last Webinno group and was impressed by their video group chat feature. The main product offering is building a community around live video streaming for band and musicians. Could be a good partnership for the Middle East or TT’s?

OurStage.com: Chelmsford, MA: Think Hot-or-Not meets the MySpace music section. An online space for emerging bands and budding film talent to post their videos and have the users decide who is the best. At the end of each month the site hands out a $5,000 cash prize to the winners in each category.

Of course no video round up for the area would be complete without at least mentioning Tewksbury-based video production software Avid and Acton-based VOD / Streaming Video provider SeaChange International.

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Update, 7.23.07 :: I added both Choicestream and ExtendMedia.

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Technorati tags: Akamai, brightcove, banddigs, imoondo, ourstage, gotuit, video, online video, maven, permissiontv, mediasilo, navic, scanscout, visible measures, broadband video, web 2.0, boston web 2.0, miro, video player, blog, everyzing, choicestream

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David — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:41:05 +0000

The Massachusetts online video bubble continued to grow today with the relaunch of Miro (formerly The Democracy Player). The Miro service is an open-source desktop software that combines video search, channel guide and media player into one slick desktop application. It also has a BitTorrent and podcast client as well. The free video aggregation service is a product of The Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA) who also operates the video social bookmarking site, VideoBomb.

In a user interface heavily borrowed from iTunes, the Miro software allows you to create video channels from the MRSS feeds primarily provided by over 1,500 very, very long tail content publishers (think of the 1,000 vloggers out there trying to rip-off the Rocketboom, lonleygirl15, “latest video hit” concept). To watch video, you first select to download the video from it’s source to watch locally. Miro comes with only a few pre-loaded channels but users can easily grab additional video channels from the Miroguide. It also has the ability to search and download video from a list of viral video sites like YouTube, Dailymotion and Revver.

I am a huge fan of the wave of new desktop video services including VeohTV and Joost for their potential to deliver video content in a way that my current soviet-era Comcast cable box is just not capable. However, my one real issue with Miro is that is suffers from a shortage of top quality professional content. There is a massive amount of video content and I did download and watch today but I am not sure that I would be an avid user just yet.

This also happened when I first played around with the earlier version of service last year, I spent a few days downloading everything I could but quickly lost interest after the novelty wore off. I like the concept and but not the content. Let’s face it, (not unlike my blog here) there’s a lot of crap being produced out there and my problem is not having access to any more of it…it’s having a way to filter it for the video I would actually like to watch.

That being said – It is 100% worth a spin for online video fans and I will install Miro on the laptop that I am connecting to my TVs…is someone going to create a good TV Guide for the video aggregators?

Check out the Miro BUZZ! Here is the other part of the story – just how much blog buzz is going on today for the launch. Check out this sample of the blogs posts covering the announcement.

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video, online miro, democracy player, joost, veoh, babblegum, youtube, dailymotion, open source, blog, worcester, MA, boston, web, web 2.0, boston 2.0

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