Andrew Baron – Rocketboom – Magma Video Aggregator

Tonight at the NY Video 2.0 meetup in NYC, Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron presented his new startup called Magma. Andrew described Magma as a place for people who want to explore and find online video. The beta will be opened later this week – you can signup on the Magma website. From what I have seen on the demo graphics (embedded below), Magma is basically an aggregator of online video across the Web. But not all video, just the most viewed videos.

The videos are aggregated from Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.

Andrew shared three use cases for the Magma online video aggregator:

1. For online video viewers it’s the entry point for online video
2. Publishers might prefer to use Magma links as they share videos around the web versus say using a YouTube link.
3. Use as a social network – this appears to be based on profile information for users

One of the questions from the audience was around why Andrew would go after only the top videos and not trying to help smaller videos and publishers get discovered. I agree with the question because in the grand scheme of things, Rocketboom is still tiny compared to the mainstream video sources like NBC, Fox and Disney.

There is a suite of analytics and metrics tools and an API which developers can use to build apps on top of the data and videos available on Magma. One question for Andrew would be around how he will aggregate stats from all of the other places that the videos are available. Howard Morgan from First Round Capital said “I am aggrevated after seeing all these aggregators” and went on to say he wasn’t interested in seeing the top videos on this aggregator – he is only interested in which videos are the top videos on the aggregators he cares about at that time.

(click the first image to view a larger version)