5min

NY-based Magnify.net has announced three new search partners for their video search product. The partners include NY-based 5min, ViewDo and Expert Village. 5min provides how-to videos and they will now be included in the video search available to Magnify.net publishers. Magnify.net self reports 35,000 publishers in their network.

It will be interesting to see if Magnify follows a Blinkx strategy with regards to partnerships. In fact, maybe there's value in both companies working together as Blinkx appears to have a strong video search network.

Check out our look at the NYC online video market which includes 5min and Magnify.net.

Earlier this week was the NY Video Meetup. Somewhere around 250 NY'ers attended and viewed a variety of demos and a healthy video discussion. One thing rang true throughout -- online video is HOT here in the city. So many companies, so many ideas and a amazing level of excitement/passion around online video.

Here are just a few of the companies in the online video space in the NYC area. I certainly forgot a bunch, so please leave them in the comments.

• Magnify.net - providing video upload, encoding, storage, delivery, and rev share mainly for video clips (CN Coverage)
• Blip.tv - a leader in episodic content (CN Coverage)
• 5min - moving offices to NYC next month - knowledge sharing (CN Coverage)
• Rocketboom - daily video show about anything with host Joanne Colan (CN Coverage)
• For Your Imagination - creating a variety of online-only video shows
• WallStrip - filming in NYC about stocks with host Lindsay Cambell
• Vimeo - video hoster and community creator (CN Coverage)
• ExpoTV - video reviews (CN Coverage)
• Kaltura - video collaboration (CN Coverage)
• Joost - NYC office is North American HQ - television replacement (CN Coverage)
• SavoryNY - restaurants video reviews (CN Coverage)
• WineLibraryTV - ok, he's in Jersey but we will allow it since he lives in the city - daily wine video show

While other areas of the country and the world are creating online video, NY is where it's at. Innovation, technology, people, community, it's all here. And Madison Avenue and Google are here to monetize it all.

Tonight I attended what I believe is the 2nd largest NY (tech) Meetup group - the NY Video Meetup. The group continues to get larger month over month and I am guessing 200ish came out tonight. Tonight's presenters were: HeyCosmo, Joost, 5min and blip.tv. I am assuming that the Ustream recorded show will be available later this evening.

Before I provide some comments on the demos, tonight I had the chance to meet one of the hottest video show hosts today, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary runs a daily video show called WineLibrary.TV. I wrote about Gary on my Vimeo vs. Viddler post and Gary has been on mainstream tv (Tonight Show and Ellen) recently and his video shows continue to explode in visitors.

So many times when techies talk about video bloggers it's always the same crowd. There are plenty of great video bloggers outside the tech market. If you plan to get into the video blogging space, check out WLTV. Gary has 50k+ viewers daily and what's more important is that each day he has 300+ comments on his video. And what's great is that even though Gary owns a large wine store, he never "forces" viewers to buy from him (yet I am sure they do!). Anyway it was great to meet him this evening.

And now on with the recap.

HeyCosmo

First up was HeyCosmo. The demo was pretty hard to sit through yet it worked, which means the product sells itself. The guy who presented (I didn't catch his name) is the brother of the CEO who was unable to make it so I can't be too negative about the presentation :). He was hilarious. HeyCosmo offers a variety of applications on a community video platform. One of the demo'd apps was a live texas holdem app. I have to say, it's hot. Each player uses a webcam and so it's as close to sitting at the same table as possible. They are working on Sudoko which is in development currently. I am working on getting some invites for CN readers.

Joost

David Clark, North American VP presented Joost and if you haven't tried Joost recently, I would suggest you give them another try. The app has lots of improvements from say early summer versions. David noted that they are a small company with big ambitions and they want to create a product that people love to use. Currently they host 15,000 shows and just launched a Facebook widget. I asked about their thoughts on Hulu and David responded, "We like Hulu - and we are looking to move to live and Web down the road as well".

The Joost advertising platform combines all of the current Inernet technologies serving approximately 1.5 minutes of video ads per hour along with other interactive ads. From a peer-to-peer standpoint, currently 70% of the bandwidth comes from p2p and 30% from their server farm.

5min

By now I am guessing most of the CN readers have seen the Israeli actor who discusses how to get VC funding - if not, I have embedded it at the end of this post. 5min is currently located in Israel but is planning to open a NY office in a month. They currently have one million unique visitors for October with 700-1000 uploaded videos per month. Their motto is "helping each other to share knowledge". The idea is simple - you are an expert at something. You create a video about that knowledge that's less than 5 minutes in length and upload it to 5min.

Their business model is to get "sponsored knowledge" where say Absolut would sponsor videos on how to create a great martini or LA Fitness might sponsor videos on how to lose the freshman 15. It's an innovative revenue model.

Blip.TV

Co-founder Justin Day presented Blip.tv. Blip has really picked up steam since their partnership with Rocketboom earlier this summer. Basically Blip is for show creators who create episodic content. Not much else to say here - though Alec from For Your Imagination noted that with Blip you can "replace" a video which is something you can't do on most of the other services.

The below article has been contributed by Roi Carthy who is an Israeli-based startup consultant.

What do you do when your next biggest competitor has $30,000,000 (and you don't)? That's exactly what I asked the folks at 5min.

5min pegs itself as a destination site for tutorial videos. The idea is that any questions can be answered in a 5 minute video. This can range from how to kite surf, to how to pour a head of beer. So instead of searching for an exercise program and locating a written one, you would instead locate a video of a workout tutorial in which you can actually see the drills. Right now 5min has over 2000 user generated videos in its catalog. Check out the official 5min introduction video:

The company was founded in late 2006 by Ran Harnevo (CEO), Tal Simantov (CMO) (pictured right) and Hanan Lashover (CTO). The three secured a $350K seed investment from Grey Interactive (Israel) and a few local angels. This allowed them to go live in February and scale-up their operation to 8 full-time employees. They are currently in discussions for Round A financing (although I've understood suitors are welcome…).

5min believe the how-to video niche to be a viable one. First, from the user-experience angle the assertion is that even though such videos can be found on YouTube, they get swallowed-up by the beast and are difficult to locate. As such, both producers of such content and users seeking it would prefer to have a destination site.

Second, from the business-model perspective, 5min believes this niche offers interesting opportunities for advertisers. Think of Gibson advertising alongside/in a guitar tutorial vid.

Side Note on "Traffic = $$$": It's all too easy to say "advertising revenue". Delivering the phenomenal number of views necessary to support such a model is completely different.

I honestly feel too few entrepreneurs truly comprehend the economics and its implications. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners wrote a great post about this.

The 5min team spent the first months developing their platform. This includes the backend magic, which they architected to be laden with metadata potential. They also developed their "SmartPlayer" (embedded above), a very good looking embeddable Flash Player specifically designed for how-to videos. It includes features the 5min team dubs "must-haves", including: Zoom control, speed (frames, slow-motion), etc. The feature that caught my eye is the Storyboard which allows video producers to add text in relation to the video. Users can then print-off the storyboard for a complete step-by-step tutorial. This will be especially useful when dealing with musical notes and recipe ingredients.

Leading the competition pack is VideoJug which announced a $30M funding round in May. Unlike 5min, VideoJug produces their videos in-house. I don't see this as a disadvantage. UGC is great, but it's far from perfect. Take for example issues such as tempo, timing and cadence. Rarely would you find a UGC producer that takes these into consideration before shooting the video. With VideoJug these come first and foremost.

On an excitement meter of 1 to 10, I would rate VideoJug as a 4, but I would also rate About.com as a 4. Thing is, About.com is a big money maker. "Boring" is a solid business principle and VideoJug clearly knows this. In fact, what I imagine is driving them is knowing that Big advertisers (Procter & Gamble, General Motor, etc.) feel more comfortable with such in-house/professional content, as opposed to UGC.

Now, does knowing their main competitor has $30,000,000 keep the 5min team up at night? Seems not. They give VideoJug the appropriate respect, but feel that UGC how-to's is where they should focus their efforts on. In fact, they're gaining traction… There a few promising business development deals in the works with well established companies (sorry, can't comment on these).

As I see it, the problem is that VideoJug can't be completely incompetent if it raised $30M. Meaning, UGC vids can't possibly have escaped their mind. They can all too easily take $10K, produce a UGC platform in a month and just see what happens. I don't see what they have to loose.

Is this space big enough for more than one large player? My gut says no. Smaller players can certainly make some nice money but I doubt we'll see $xxM acquisitions.