www.dpingram.com

Kewego, besides having traditional video sharing sites in 10 European countries, also provides white-label sites to companies such as Orange, Lycos, T-Online, and French Broadcaster, M6.

The video sharing site Kewego.com, has raised $6.9 million US in a second-round of funding.

Kewego is the joint venture that formed out of two French sites merging their services. The offspring raised $6.3 million in the first round of funding from Banxei Venture Partners, who also returned for the second round. Also joining in this time is CDC Enterprises.
via Mashable! by Sean P. Aune

White label video site provider vSocial has announced a second round of funding from Biltmore Ventures and Consor Capital. The company also announced that Howard Lindzon, the creator of Wallstrip, will be joining the company’s board of directors.

Unlike video destination sites like YouTube and Veoh, vSocial provides a platform that lets other companies launch their own video sites with their own branding. For example, Volleyball.com, a volleyball news and e-commerce site, has launched a vSocial powered community that includes both video and social networking features.

vSocial currently serves 1.5 million visitors per day to about 200,000 unique visitors, according to the company’s press release.

Via Mashable! by Adam Ostrow

Summarised from Mashable! by Kristen Nicole

Revver announced it’s pay out of $1 million over the past year, meeting a milestone for the amount of money drummed up and split with content owners that promote and leverage Revver’s video-sharing network.

As one of the first video-sharing networks to offer a rev-share model with content creators, many flocked to the site hoping to have more control over their content and, more importantly, earn extra cash.

As a standard in the rev-share video communities, Revver has also benefited from the popularity of videos like the infamous Pepsi and Mentos experiment, and several indie directors and film creators, including Hollywood notables, are promoting their series on Revver in order to take advantage of the ad-supported model that lets them reap the fruit of their labors.

While most content owners are not yet bringing in the big money from this model, there’s no doubt that content creators will only gain more control and financial rewards from their online content, and Revver will probably continue to position itself as an advantageous distribution platform for user-generated content. It’s already incorporated a new advertising option for pre-roll ads earlier this summer.

Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well.

Bebo has indicated that it won’t be making user profiles available for marketing purposes, which is a tactic Facebook has recently adopted, to the dismay of some.

There is certainly a recognition that doing things that exploit users is not advantageous. In the past it was possible for companies (in all markets, not just websites) to exploit their users because of the lack of consumer choice (competitors with laregly similar offerings), but today when competitors spring from nothing to come to the fore you can’t piss of your users or they will flee. What companies need to always do is focus on what value they can give or share with their users. When users are getting value they are happy for the host to make money.

Internet users may have to help distribute online video clips to combat the growing costs delivering such content. That’s the conclusion of researchers at Microsoft who have studied how peer-to-peer networks could reduce costs for sites like YouTube that spend millions every month to make videos available over the web.

Cheng Huang and Jin Li from Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, US, worked with Keith Ross of Polytechnic University in New York, US. They used nine months’ worth of records from the MSN video site servers to work out how to reduce the costs of meeting around 60 million requests for clips every month.

“The current model is not really sustainable,” Ross told New Scientist, “Microsoft is certainly interested in the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies, where users distribute video amongst themselves.”

Video sharing sites currently pay for bandwidth on a “per bit” basis. So the more popular they are, they more they pay for bandwidth. Canadian researchers estimate that Google-owned YouTube pays out around 2 million US dollars a month distributing clips, in addition to other costs such as servers and staffing costs.

via New Scientist

Next week Hotswap launches officially and opens up their site with full functionality.

Hotswap is targeting the $370 billion/year U.S. used car market with a free, video-focused classifieds site. Listings are optimized to allow users to quickly upload video of the car with a camera phone or other low end video equipment. (smart)

Both normal users and car dealers can upload listings. The company has inked a deal with Red McCombs Automotive, which will upload all of their used cars to the site. Other business development deals are being negotiated now.

They’ve raised around $1 million in capital from Kinsey Hills Group, the investors behine Scribd and others. Hotswap competes with Vast, eBay, Edgeio and many others.

Via Techcrunch

Universal Music Group has sued video sharing site Veoh for “massive copyright infringement”. UMG threatened Veoh with a lawsuit in August, and Veoh pre-emptively filed against the music label claiming that it hadn’t infringed any copyrights. UMG provides its reasoning in the documents filed in a Los Angeles court on Tuesday:

“Veoh follows in the ignominious footsteps of other recent mass infringers such as Napster…Veoh’s rampant infringement will not stop until Veoh, and those who own, control, and run it, are enjoined and held financially responsible.”

Could Veoh be the next Bolt.com, crippled by a lawsuit it can’t afford to fight or settle? Veoh has some powerful backers, including Time Warner and former Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner. Eisner is also on the board of directors. Veoh may stand a better chance of survival than Bolt, but the bad blood between the company and UMG means that a partnership is off the cards for now.

Update: Veoh mailed in their official response:
UMG’s action is not surprising and reflects their limited understanding of Veoh and of the online video space as a whole. Veoh is recognized by many media companies as a DMCA-compliant company and is committed to respecting the rights of content owners. In fact, we’re currently working cooperatively with major media companies and the MPAA to develop standards for copyright protection. It’s unfortunate that UMG prefers to continue their pattern of litigation rather than contribute to the important discussions going on within our industry.

via Mashable

After months of hearing about Universal Music Group’s displeasure, DivX yesterday filed a preemptive federal lawsuit of its own that asks a judge to exorcise the “specter of litigation” currently haunting DivX.

At issue is DivX’s Stage6 video hosting service, which is a bit like YouTube but requires the DivX codec instead of Flash. According to a copy of the complaint seen by Ars, Universal has told DivX that the site is “knowingly involved in the infringement of UMG’s copyrighted materials, and exploits that widespread infringement for its own commercial gain.” In response, DivX points out the obvious: it complies with the DMCA and Universal has an easy method to request the takedown of any music video that infringes its copyrights.

According to DivX, Universal has been not interested in supplying actual DMCA takedown notices and instead “has chosen to posture and threaten DivX in the hopes of extracting an unwarranted windfall.”

Both companies believe that the other one wants an “unwarranted windfall,” and it looks like a judge will now step in and settle the matter. According to DivX, it has complied with every legitimate DMCA takedown request that it has received, and it goes even further than the law requires by using file hashes to block repeated uploads of the infringing content. Assuming this is true, Universal would not seem to have a case, which may be why the company has not yet brought an infringement lawsuit against DivX.

via ars technica

The race is on as to who can provide the credible alternative or threat to YouTube. In June, online video sharing site, Veoh, got $26 million in funding. Weeks ago, another online video sharing site, Metacafe, received $30 million. And now, the French video sharing site, Dailymotion, has raised a $34 million financing on top of 9.5 million funds it earlier received.

Dailymotion, founded two years ago, claims to be the world’s largest ‘independent’ video site with 1.2bn page views and over 37 million unique visitors in July 2007. The site enjoys 15,000 new videos uploaded daily and currently ranked in Alexa as the 50th most visited website worldwide.

The latest financing was led by AGF Private Equity and Advent Venture Partners, included new investment from CIC Capital Privé and extra cash from existing investors Atlas Venture and Partech International.

Dailymotion’s executive chairman, Mark Zaleski said the new funds will “take us to profitability and enhance the users’ experience further.”

“The additional funds will allow Dailymotion to accelerate progress against strategic objectives: strengthening international expansion, improving users’ experience through investments in technology, enhancing the community and reinforcing its position as the leading video technical platform. In addition, the funds will enable Dailymotion to provide advertisers with an industry-leading, video-driven marketing platform.”

According to C21media, earlier this year, Dailymotion hired a number of TV executives in the US to steer its growth there, including former Time Warner senior VP of global marketing Joy Marcus as general manager. The company also signed a first-look deal for eight original programs from RDF USA.

Microsoft’s new Windows Live software suite includes an updated electronic mail program, a photo-sharing application, online file storage, and a writing tool designed for people who keep Web logs.

Although they will not be included in the initial test release, the company’s recently announced SkyDrive online data storage service and its FolderShare service are being folded into Windows Live. SkyDrive currently gives test users 500 megabytes of free Internet storage, while FolderShare makes it possible to synchronize between multiple computers — including Apple’s Macintosh computers.

The new service is an indication that Microsoft plans to compete head-on against archrival Google and others, and not only in the search-engine business where it is at a significant disadvantage. Instead, Microsoft will try to outmaneuver its challengers by becoming the dominant digital curator of all a user’s information, whether it is stored on a PC, a mobile device or on the Internet, industry executives and analysts said.