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Customize, share, upload, download videos from anywhere at this and that website has become quite common. And Kazivu offers you the same with a bit of a tune up, which is it; gives you a bookmarklet that lets you start posting videos with a single click.

Now there is no point in explaining what the service offers when it has already been mentioned that has been designed to let you put all your favorite videos in one place and create your own personalized channel. Therefore I will jump over to the bookmarklet, you can simply click and drag it over into your toolbar and when ever you find a video at any website (YouTube etc) you can simply click the ‘Post to Kazivu’ button and the screen on which the video is being displayed. If you click on the screen then, you are asked to login to your Kazivu account.

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Fox Interactive Media is taking the battle with Youtube to the edge. After announcing a joint venture with NBC to share and distribute NBC programming they are now launching a new section within MySpace Video that will feature premium content from a host of media and news outlets.

The new section that will be launched in the coming months will include “branded channels” from news outlets including National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, and lifestyle outlets including Animation Show, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, FOX’s IGN Entertainment, LX.TV, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, Studio411, VBS.tv (from the makers of Vice Magazine), and Young Hollywood.

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Joost, an IPTV based video service, is making news on a regular basis now. The company has now announced that it has raised $45 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital (based in Silicon Valley), Index Ventures (based in London and also investors in Skype), Li Ka-shing (a Hong Kong based business tycoon), Viacom and CBS. All the investers have taken a small minority stake in the company.

The interesting fact about the investment round is that Media corps i.e Viacom and CBS have increased their interests in Joost and have become investors instead of just being content partners. Sequoia and Index on the other hand are industry reknowned and war hardened VCs. Another key fact to note is that with Sequoia in Silicon Valley, Index Ventures in London and Li Ka-shing in Hong Kong, Joost has expanded its reach to 3 continents including the strategic and difficult to enter Chinese market. So all in all the investment round has brought a lot more than just a huge pile of cash into this startup.

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VideoJug, a British how-to video site has raised $30 million in an equity round from a private investment consortium according to paidContent. The round involves $20 million from a consortium that included Coller Capital, which is founded by Jeremy Coller and Sloane Robinson hedge fund in exchange for a “significant minority stake”.

VideoJug is a 24/7 how-to video sites hosting videos explaining how to conduct testicular examinations, how to date, or set up shelves and the likes. The finances would be used to beef up the already wide array of self published content and to offer more features for content publishers. Current features include a text transcript of videos, linking and embedding options and the ability to easily download videos.

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Valleywag is reporting that MySpace has acquired Photobucket. Although no one has the financial details of the deal but the price tag is rumored to be between $250 - $300 million. The two companies had a thorny past with MySpace twice banning Photobucket videos and photos on MySpace. The latest ban led to a lot of PR for Photobucket and was later lifted. Apparently the acquisition talks were a reason behind the removal of the ban.

Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and rode the MySpace bandwagon as a backend photo-storage service for MySpace users. Photobucket generated $6.3 million in revenues last year and estimate to hit the $25 million revenue mark this year. The site has 40 million registered users.

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ImageShack, a photo sharing site used by people to host their images to be displayed on their social networking profile pages has added video uploading and sharing capability

ImageShack is claiming that their video hosting feature is more advanced than the ones offered by Youtube, Revver and others, since ImageShack will pre-process your video on your system instead of first uploading it to their servers and then processing it their. The pre-processing involved file compression which could reduce a file by nearly five times its original size making the file uploads a much quicker and less bandwidth consuming task.

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BBC has published a very interesting survey conducted by Motorola, which interviewed 2,500 people across Europe. Some important findings of the survey are:

• 45% of European broadband users were watching some television shows online, with the French being the most enthusiastic in consuming their favorite programmes via the web.
• 45% of respondents expect to be able to make video calls via their television by 2012.
• 35% wanted to be able to pause, rewind or fast forward live broadcasts.

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Brightcove has bagged yet another deal with CBS to syndicate CBS video news clips across its network of partner sites. In addition to this the news clips would also be viewable on Brightcove.com a video sharing site similar to Youtube.com. Brightcove network sites could embed the Brightcove media player on their sites and tune it to CBS News channel, enabling Brightcove to deliver a continuous stream of news clips from CBS Evening News, The Early Show and other CBS News shows.

Brightcove is already a partner in CBS Interactive Distribution Network and has created channels for CBS content on its site. Users could also remix and share the content on their own channels. Brightcove also has content deals with AOL, MTV and Discovery and has $81.2 million in three rounds of funding to back its deal making spree. See the explanation by Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire below.

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Om Malik is reporting that Joost will be officially launching today, although the service is not opened to the general public as yet, but they have allowed their Beta testers to invite as many friends as they want. Previously Beta Testers typically had 5 invitations. For the rest of us, we would have to wait till the end of May to get our hands dirty with Joost.

Joost is the latest adventure of serial entrepreneurs Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström who have now successfully started and sold Kazaa and Skype, both of which were also desktop based applications like Joost. Joost is actually built on the same P2P core which Janus and Friis initially developed for Kazaa. Lets see how many successful ventures could they run on the same technology core.

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Sony Corp has announced that they will be launching a video sharing service called eyeVio in Japan on Friday. This would be the first step by the Asian Electronics and Entertainment giant towards challenging Youtube.

The service will be initially introduced in Japan, but Sony plans to offer it globally after gauging its uptake at home. According to CEO Howard Stringer: Read the rest of this entry »

The guys over at Common Craft have created an excellent video explaining what RSS really is all about. So if you have friends who have heard the funky word RSS but don’t really know what it means, perhaps this could be a good starting point. The video is also a really great viral marketing move by Common Craft. If you want to share the video, grab the code here.

MySpace which recently blocked Photobucket from their site has now lifted the ban and MySpace users could see their Photobucket videos, photos and slideshows on their profile pages once again. The revelation has been made by Alex, CEO of Photobucket on the Photobucket blog.

Some funny points in the announcement are: Read the rest of this entry »

Kyte.tv, a new service that launched today, allows users to create their own channel to broadcast across the net. Sharing your activities with others is becoming a hot playground for startups these days. Twitter arguably was the first to ignite this craze by allowing users to share their activities with others via sms (micro-blogging). Then came Atten.tv, a service that allows you to record your click stream and upload it to their servers where viewers could opt in to view it and see what you are doing on your PC. Kyte.tv, the latest entrant in this space, brings even more interactivity by allowing users to share all forms of media from photos-to videos with people around the world.

The primary differentiator between Kyte and other services in the space is its multimedia capabilities. Kyte allows users to display photos, videos, music and polls in your shows. Everyone can create a channel and start broadcasting his personal life right away. Channel owners can also enable live chat, and all the previous shows of your channel are displayed in a horizontal menu bar below the screen. There are several permissions and privacy options for each channel to choose from, allowing you to display your content to the general public or just to your friends. Channels could also be embedded anywhere on the web.

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Techcrunch and GigaOm are reporting that eBay is about to close the acquisition of StumbleUpon, a very addictive social service that lets users discover websites based upon recommendations by people having similar interests. StumbleUpon has been in acquisition discussions since last November with Google, AOL and eBay and the price tag is rumored to be between $40 - $45 million range.

StumbleUpon lets users discover new sites and content around the world via a browser toolbar. All you have to do is to click on Stumble! and it will take you to a random page according to the preferences specified in your profile. After viewing the site you could rate it by by giving it a thumbs up or down. The more you will use stumble upon the better it will get to know about your likings. With this information about you StumbleUpon will begin to serve you highly relevant content that is rated positively by people with similar preferences. People who have once used this service have not seen back, even more so because of the surprise factor in what they might see next, and also because of delivering highly relevant and interesting content.

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Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google-the world’s most popular and widely used advertising system, has announced that a new system called Claim Your Content is “very close to be turned on“. Schmidt made these comments in a one on one interview with John Seigenthaler, a former reporter with NBC’s Nightly News, at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference last night.

Google previously promised such a technology by the start of 2007, but later reports surfaced that it has decided to discard in-house development and will instead by using the content filtering technology provided by Audible Magic, which currently has MySpace as its major client.

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VideoEgg, one of the leading video solution provider that has also built an enviable video ad network, announced a strategic investment round from WPP, one of the world´s leading communications services groups. The details of the investment were not disclosed.

VideoEgg initially started as a video editing and publishing service. The VideoEgg Publisher allowed users to easily capture, edit and publish videos anywhere on the web, across any social network. Thus removing the complexity of video formats, editing softwares and players. VideoEgg is powering the video hosting/streaming for dozens of other websites, including Bebo, AOL, Dogster and many others. Rather than create yet another video destination site, VideoEgg lets any website owner integrate video into their site for free – providing the hosting, transcoding, editing seamlessly. In a way VideoEgg adopted the same approach to video that Photobucket adopted for photos, i.e to become a back end storage space for other social networks and online communities. Since this space is usually hidden away from geeks and rarely comes to light, we ought to see very little competition in companies trying to do backend jobs. However the success of Photobucket proves the point that the online photo and video game will be won by a company that works with existing destination sites rather than building competitive new destinations.

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Adobe has announced the launch of Adobe Media Player, a desktop app that will enable users to vide high quality video, irrespective of being online or offline. The media player achieves this functionality due to the fact that it is built on top of Apollo, a cross platform and open standards framework that leverages Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, Adobe Flash Media Server 2, and Adobe Media Encoder. The media player also allows content owners to distribute, track and monetize their videos. Users will also be able to create media channels via RSS, and stream and download videos.

The most important strategic ploy here is to use the media player to foster and nourish the Apollo ecosystem. The media player will no doubt bring the capabilities and potential of Apollo to light and will show developers what this framework is truly capable of.

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CBS has announced its own content distribution network on the web, that is being dubbed as “CBS Interactive Network”. CBS is describing it as “The most widely distributed professional content provider on the Web.” Some of the salient features of the Network are:

• Free, but ad supported content.
• Akamai will be serve as the network backbone for this Interactive Content Network.
• Financial details are not disclosed yet, but it is likely to be a 90-10 split with CBS getting 90% of the revenues.
• Mobile distribution is not part of the partnership, but CBS is open to it.

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Vidmeter, a video tracking site has released some interesting statistics, which shows that the famous videos like the little guy, and the lonely girl that were removed from Youtube on the request of copyright owners just accounted for 5.93% of the sites most popular videos. Keep in mind that since its not possible to crawl and get statistics of the entire Youtube repository Vidmeter crawled a sample of 6,725 of Youtube`s most popular videos over the last three months for the purpose of this report.

Vidmeter checks Youtube four times a day for the 100 most popular videos of all time, the current month, the week and the day. The service gathered a list of videos which have been replaced with a takedown notice alert. The videos that were took down accounted for 9.23% of top videos and 5.93% of views, that is not even a half half proposition. The study clearly proves that the popularity of Youtube is not based on copyrighted content, another study showed that the Youtube traffic actually increased after the takedown of 100,000 videos on the cease and desist notice of Viacom.

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Vibe Solutions, has launched a video aggregator, Pyro.tv. Pyro.tv enables users to create personalized channels, search for popular channels, subscribe to these channels and others users etc. It is in essence a video feedreader, something that Youtube´s channel subscription feature has almost accomplished. Users can also embed their clips in MySpace, Friendster and other social networks.

The real value of creating channels for videos will come with the videos itself and unless and until pyro.tv gets a huge collection of that i dont see it to be of great use. When it comes to building a repository of videos even the great google couldnt beat youtube at its game. For now i guess users would be happy with making channels and subscribing to videos on youtube.