Earlier today, I was talking to a classmate who works in the PE/VC world. We were discussing the implications of the massive deal that went down on Monday. She was saying that the Google acquisition of YouTube is going to kill one of the deals she is working on because the company they were looking to acquire was now going to ask for a higher valuation. She and I started talking about how the acquisition serves to legitimize online video as a new force to be reckoned with and that this sale is a milestone.
IMHO, YouTube's main value has been to get consumers used to the idea of speding lots of time self-entertaining themselves through online videos. YouTube provided an easy, user-friendly technology that allowed the worldwide internet audience to prove the notion that user-generated video has a place on the web. From here, I think we are going to see companies competing to release the next step in streaming technology, TV channels popping up on the internet and of course, advertisers and broadcasters racing to define and refine the internet equivalent of traditional TV's 30-second spot.
This topic is near and dear to my heart as I am one of those people aiming to launch an online TV channel, focusing on automotive content. As such, I am interested in seeing what the standard of quality for online viewing is going to be. Is it going to be the tiny YouTube format that downloads without freezing? Is it going to be high-quality but slow streams such as what one finds on Apple's website? Will it be something in the middle? Well, I found a link to a company while reading Mark Cuban's blog (an interesting read) that deserves attention in this context. According to the website of Waltham, MA-based PermissionTV, companies can use its service to "configure and manage their own branded Internet TV channels and monetize their audience through ad-supported, pay-per-view and subscription-based services." The proof is in the pudding: the introductory video itself is remarkable in its seamless quality, and that's just the overview. PermissionTV offers an upgrade that installs a program on your PC, which in turn allows for DVD-quality steaming video.
What I also find highly interesting about PermissionTV's service is that it bundles several methods of advertising together with the video delivery technology. It looks like PermissionTV is experimenting with video monetization, and more power to them. Whoever figures this out is the next billionaire. Trust me, you want to check out PermissionTV.com.
One more site I want to draw your attention to is veotag.com. This company is based in our own beloved New York City, and I discovered it yesterday through a link a classmate sent. Veotag is "an exciting new service that lets you display clickable text, called "veotags," within an audio or video file", according to the site. The link that led to my discovery was a 30-minute video of Guy Kawasaki of Apple fame. What was really cool about this video was that it was chopped up into ten or so segments of Guy's speech that you could skip to, akin to "chapters" on a DVD.
I think you get the idea. Pandora's box is now open as entrepreneurs race to be the next online video headline, inspired in no small part by Chad and Steven's $1.65 billion payday. I for one am really excited to see who comes up with what and which one gets noticed. Stay tuned, so to speak.
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