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Imeem Partners with Sony BMG to Legally Stream Music
from Mashable! by Adam Ostrow

Imeem, the service that offers a widget for sharing your music playlist, has reached a deal with Sony BMG to legally offer their music to users. In exchange for allowing Imeem users stream Sony BMG music in their widgets, the record label will get a cut of the advertising revenue. Imeem previously signed a similar deal with Warner Music, after the record company first tried to sue them.

Additionally, the company is reportedly in talks with Universal Music Group and EMI Group about similar content deals.

from Mashable! by Adam Ostrow

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.

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

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.