NY Video Meetup

This week at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, a variety of companies either demo'ed their service or provided a variety of business updates. If you are in the NYC tech or media scene, this might be the best monthly meetup to attend.

Here are the presenters:

1. Hulu - Kevin McGurn, VP National Sales (our coverage)
2. Move Networks - Bob Bryson, SVP Sales & BD
3. Boxee - Avner Ronen, Co-founder & CEO
4. MediaMerx - Tejpaul Bhatia, Co-founder & CEO
5. Visible Measures - Matt Cutler, VP Marketing & Analytics (our coverage)

If you want to jump around in the video, click play, then pause and wait for the loading bar to finish, then you can jump, jump around.

On Monday at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, after the demos concluded, three popular NY venture capital partners took the stage to critique the demos they just watched from a venture capitalist perspective. While they were certainly a bit nice in front of the crowd, I thought you might be interested in their feedback.

The demos came from Adotube, Magnify.net, Vusion, ekkoTV and BestTV.

The VC stars were: Chris Fralic from First Round Capital, Daniel Schultz from DFJ Gotham and a third who didn't share his name.

view the video »

Last night at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, Adotube presented their brand new video advertising solution. While the volume isn't great on this video, it's worth watching, especially the second-half. Adotube actually does in-video lead gen and sales. Let's say you are watching a video of Sting and he has a concert coming up. An ad can show a promo for tickets, click it and order tickets directly in the video. Once the sale has completed, go back to watching your Sting video. Not sure if anyone else is doing this.

While this works well for corporate and promotional videos, I am not sure if it will take off in the YouTube market. If the key is massive plays, using a stand-alone, non-social player won't help you reach the goals set for the video. They do power a variety of popular video portal sites (mostly non-U.S.).

view the video demo »

Last night at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, Magnify.net presented their new Magnify Publisher tool. We wrote about the Magnify Publisher when it launched last week. I did notice that embedded videos are now using a customized Magnify.net player with Magnify branding. This wasn't in the initial launch version last week.

Magnify Publisher offers a variety of video hosts to search from and you can filter to specific providers. Image search currently works with Flickr and more image providers are coming soon. There's also the ability to upload a video (it's stored on Magnify's servers) or record a video directly using a webcam.

view the video demo »

Yesterday at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, Israeli-based BestTV presented their video portal application. The BestTV application is a middleware application -- meaning agencies and companies can use the tool to create video portals on top of their current sites. They are currently in the Europe and Asian markets and are looking to expand into the U.S. They mainly work with Web shops.

One interesting note -- the presenter explained that the SaaS (software as a service) model works well in Europe but not in Asia. Asian companies want enterprise "one-time" cost models and not monthly plan services.

BestTV appears to compete in the same space with NY-based Magnify.net.

come inside to view the demo »

Last night at the NY Video Meetup, MobLogic presented their new daily online video show. I noted that I was not going to post the demo as it was basically just showing the actual show which you could watch on MobLogic.tv. Presenter Scott Solary asked if I would post the video so please find it below. I cut out most of the actual video show - go watch it live - better than my Canon capture.

Lindsay is a talented video host and should have stuck to Wallstrip. She also seems to love Crest white strips! While CBS will probably throw a ton of money at this show, I find the "person on the street" interviews to be cute for the first 1-2 days. Rather than stick with one video host, they are placing the videos on every host. Blip is their featured partner, one of the presenters had a Blip wallet. On the technical side, there is a very good implementation of Wordpress that seems to be pushing the envelope.

Tonight was the March installment of the NY Video Meetup. The idea is to bring together people interested in online video. I found tonight boring at best. In any event, here are videos of each presentation with my Twitter recaps. Unfortunately due to the layout of Webster Hall, the videos will seem like you are sitting in the first row of a movie theater (popcorn optional). view the videos »

Tonight was the last NY Video Meetup of 2007. There were major technical issues throughout the evening which forced one presenter to next month and kept us focused on the Wiffiti board for half of the time and doing individual intros for another piece of the evening. Frankly I was bored so my recaps below are short and blunt. Below are the videos for each presentation. I will allow this as normally the Video Meetups are quite good. Please come inside for the videos! »

ModMyLife

I could swear I've seen this demo for ModMyLife before. The basic idea. They have actors who they don't pay act out stunts in NYC that the audience decides on. It's cute, not sure if it's the next killer idea but it's a good time waster. They won't do anything illegal or "dumb" so not sure how far they will go.

Redlasso

Redlasso lets you take clips from other sources and put them together and then save or upload the final clip. They also monitor stats on where the files are stored. Questions around copyright and monetization came up - he had no concrete answers on either.

OriginDigital

The sponsor of the event - they showed off their Odaptor product. You upload videos, it converts them, makes an xml, makes various formats and can send them to various providers. Didn't really see anything unique or new - though it seemed very smooth in interface.

Sportsbone.tv

The only content creator of the evening, Sportsbone.tv creates video shows about football with a "funny" twist using lots of props it seems. A couple bits were funny. A woman in the audience suggested they do the shows live as the football game is in progress, I thought that was a nifty idea. Ten friends from college create this - each one focuses on another aspect of the business.

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.

Quick note - tonight's NY Video Meetup is going to stream coverage of the demos live on Ustream. Check out the channel here. The presentations begin at 7pm Eastern and include: Joost, Blip.TV and 5min.com. Should be an exciting night and I bet the name Hulu will be sounded several times.