What’s next for online video sharing sites?
May 10th, 2007 by Benjamin KuoThere’s a lot of pure, online video sharing sites trying to figure out what the future holds for them, and where they should go next.
I was chatting yesterday with the folks over at Oversee.net’s LiveDigital online video sharing web site, about where the future of the online video market is going, and Sumant Sridharan, General Manager of LiveDigital, told me outright–that video sharing is becoming commoditized.
LiveDigital thinks that pure video sharing sites are losing ground, and video sharing is really just becoming a component of social networking web sites. LiveDigital, which originally started in March of last year as what Sumant calls a “MySpace 2.0″, has recently shifted gears and repositioned the site as a user-generated channel platform.
Sumant shared with me an analysis they did of the top Southern California online video sharing web sites using the web ranking firm Quantcast.
Their chart, ranking the local companies by monthly unique visitors:
Online video sharing providers are rapidly looking for new business models and markets; San Diego’s Streamload has been positioning itself as a underlying, white-label provider of storage services for videos and other data for OEMs; VMIX has been licensing its technology to newspapers and other firms to power their own video sharing sites.
LiveDigital, for one, now sees itself as more than a video sharing site; Sumant told me that their platform is now geared towards allowing users to develop a meaningful channel around whatever topic they want, and filter, aggregate, and present it to other users. Sumant told me, “The phenomenon of video sharing is not very special anymore–the interest is in programming that content into something that is meaningful, and to do that on a mass scale.”
I suspect there’s a lot more user generated video sites who are trying to figure out what the future holds, as well.
May 10th, 2007 at 11:51 am
[...] in programming that content into something that is meaningful, and to do that on a mass scale.” (zegt iemand van videosite LiveDigital) 10-05-2007, Anton van Elburg Doorsturen homepage, [...]
May 14th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Great post.
Easy tools to upload and share video is important, but as online video and audio continues to explode, there will be way too much content. At the end of the day, audiences/viewers need ways to discover what they may be interested in.
Our focus has - and continues to be - on community media discovery. The old “channels” way of thinking works to a point - Mefeedia has “Guides”, for example - but there are also exciting, new ways to discover great content through the power of community.
-Frank
CEO of Mefeedia.com