Video Start-Ups Category

Broadband Video Start-Up companies.

iTunes LogoApple has recently inked a deal with a San Franciso based video advertising start up called Podaddies to develop advertising compatibility for both Quicktime and iTunes. 

While no money has yet been exchanged in the deal, does this mean that future downloadable iTunes videos could have embedded advertisements included?

Currently, Apple does not provide any ad-supported content, but I wouldn’t put it past them given the revenue potential that the advertising industry now has.

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Posted in: News, Broadband Video Companies, Advertising and Video Start-Ups by Chris Tew on September 18, 2007
FLVorful

Online video advertising is only just beginning to see the light of day. Despite being early days there are still a growing number of companies beginning to fight it out to become the key players in online video advertising.

We’ve seen early pioneers with video sharing sites such as Revver and Metacafe offering to share advertising revenue with its video creators, and also seen YouTube beginning to get involved.

Putting the video sharing giants aside, focused video advertising start-ups are popping up faster than crappy reality TV shows.

We’ve already mentioned a handful here on WebTVWire.com including LiveRail, vComm, Adjustables, ScanScout and Yume Networks, never mind all the stuff Google has up its sleeve.

With all this competition heating up you expect any entrant into the video advertising market to be bringing something very hot and spicy to the table.

FLVorful.com Beta – WebTVWire Review

FLVorful describes itself as the “internet’s video ad marketplace” offering a place to buy and sell video advertising.

Video publishers can sell ad space within their video and advertisers can hunt down individual videos to advertise in, or alternatively advertise in all videos within a certain category. Although not particularly innovative it sounds simple and could be a good idea.

Unfortunately as I looked deeper into the site I was unable to find anything particularly good about this start up. Honestly I don’t see much future in FLVorful for the following reasons:

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Posted in: News, Broadband Video Companies, Internet TV Software & Tools and Video Start-Ups by Paul Glazowski on September 12, 2007

Instant Media MIAOn Sunday, Chris wrote a great piece about the demise of Instant Media. If you don’t recognize the name, you’re not alone, I know very little about it myself, in fact, almost nothing.

All you really need to know is that it was a competitor of Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) and it’s dead.

I thought it might be appropriate to put together a little post, mostly to address why the news of the software’s sudden exit ( a la Sunrocket, if you will), despite being less than tremendous, shouldn’t go away quite so fast.

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Posted in: News, Video Blogs & RSS and Video Start-Ups by Jay Parkhill on September 10, 2007

Wallstrip LogoWallstrip is a site which produces short online video pieces covering stocks. Born of the blogosphere, it’s a fascinating and unusual business, so we thought we’d take an in depth look at it.

Wallstrip is a company founded by a venture capitalist who says he never intended to run it as a long-term business. It was funded with seed capital and sold less than a year later, so the company fairly screams “test project”. 

The fact that it was sold to CBS for $5M (as reported by Techcrunch) a mere nine months after launch proves that the test was successful.

Investor/advisor Fred Wilson reports that he met founder Howard Lindzon on blogs, and Howard told me that he met the show’s producers Adam Elend and Jeff Marks the same way. 

Fred, Brad Feld and others invested $600,000 and the production team was sent off with a mandate to produce a short video every business day for less than $1000, and to cover high-flying stocks with humor.

Interviews conducted: Howard Lindzon, founder and Adam Elend, founder/producer.

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Livestation LogoLiveStation is a new IPTV service that lets you watch television online using Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology.

The service, which just debuted at IBC 2007 in Amsterdam is another addition to the growing list of IPTV services that allow broadband users to watch television programming through the Internet.

LiveStation has some key differences that make it unlike any of the other internet television services available, which actually make it more like traditional television. 

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Posted in: News, Broadband Video Companies, Internet TV Software & Tools and Video Start-Ups by Chris Tew on September 9, 2007
Instant Media

With the past couple of years seeing such high investments and publicity around the broadband video industry, the bubble was bound to burst for some.

Instant Media (I’M) was a creation from Scott Blum, the man behind buy.com. The idea was to mix ecommerce with free digital media and give content owners an outlet to deliver their videos to a large audience.

Essentially Instant Media was an aggregator of vodcasts, online TV shows and podcasts – it was very similar to the more popular open source Miro.

You simply download the desktop application to subscribe to and download various shows within the Instant Media channel directory. It was much like iTunes but where anyone could get involved.

Think of us like iTunes, except you can download and watch shows in HD or transfer them to your flat-panel TV," says Joe Raffetto

But Instant Media looks dead…

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Posted in: News, Video on Demand, Broadband Video Companies and Video Start-Ups by Paul Glazowski on September 7, 2007

MyStrandsTV LogoSay you’re a devotee of the music-centric social Web creation MyStrands. Surely some of you in the WebTVWire readership can be categorized as such. 

Are you a devoted fan of the music centric social web creation site MyStrands? I’m sure some of the WebTVWire readership can categorize themselves as such.

Well, if so, you no doubt already like what you’re getting from the service, but as is generally the case, you might…kind of…maybe…want a bit more. More, at least, in visual terms. (Music vids, concert footage, etc.)

Well, fortunately for you, earlier this week MyStrands unveiled a website with the intention of addressing that very need.

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