Viddyou, a video startup focused around vlogging, has been beta testing their premium services account over the last week. I’ve been in contact with Aaron Wadler, one of the guys behind Viddyou, ever since I wrote Make This Startup: HD Video Serving Service so I was interested in hearing about what Viddyou was working on.
From what I can tell through beta testing over the last few days, the yet-to-be-released premium account will cost around $35 for a year of membership. With that membership users most notably get the ability to upload, embed and share 720 and 1080 HD videos. I’ve uploaded a few of my own videos to their development server to test it out. I didn’t immediately get a sense of high def from the small video player within the site but it was clear upon switching to full screen mode that the higher quality was indeed there.
The one thing I am looking forward to Viddyou Premium for is this ability to embed HD. I will almost certainly switch from using Vimeo to Viddyou primarily for this ability. Vimeo does not let users embed HD content at the moment. Hopefully the premium membership price will be enough for Viddyou to cover the high bandwidth costs associated with serving HD content.
However, I have a few reservations about what the introduction of HD capabilities will do to the Viddyou community. At the moment, Viddyou is focused on vlog-type content and opposed towards web shows as videos are limited in length. Most videos deal with people talking directly into their iSight-equipped MacBook or iMac. I think that the introduction of premium accounts that allow longer video uploads and HD content will have people using Viddyou as more of a video sharing service than a vlogging service. I’m not sure if that’s what Viddyou is aiming for as it might change the type of community that the service was originally created to cater to.
No word yet on when the premium accounts supporting HD video will launch but I’m looking forward to them. What do you do with your HD content after you shoot it? Similar to what I do with my pictures, I like to put them online and delete them from my computer. Flickr lets photographers have access to the original files, as does Viddyou Premium, so there’s no need to keep things locally.
Update: Viddyou’s Aaron Wadler replied:
In response to how our community will respond to the new features: we’ve always been a video sharing site exclusively for personal content and these new features are only meant to augment that. We are very active in removing any content that doesn’t fit within our focus (eg commercial content of any kind) to preserve the personal nature of our community.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m curious how Viddyou’s $35 cost will impact Flickr’s price point once they add video (HD or sans).
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I think it may take time to figure out a good business model to bring HD content to the masses on the scale of YouTube. Though, it’s good to know people are testing the waters for this capability. To start off, a hybrid of Clickable Adds on top of Paid Subscriptions will get it off the ground… Hopefully long enough for Google to pay out big for the service and add it to YouTube rather than developing it themselves.
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Hi Paul. You should take a look at bambuser.com. A few students started a company called Bambuser and they have developed a service that let you stream live video through your cellphone onto the internet. The site is still in “BETA”-mode couse they haven’t quite yet figured out how to use this excellent oppurtunity, but it’s open for everyone – no invites.
Check it out and tell your freinds about how cool it is.
/Johan, Sweden
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oh…and it’s free of charge.
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Psssst… I hear there’s something new happening at Viddyou.com today ;]
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@Johan – http://QIK.com does the same thing, free of charge as well..
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Paul, I see you’re really getting into video from the past few posts. Pretty exciting stuff you’ve got going. For $35 / year, that’s very decent considering that they’ll store and offer bandwidth for such high-def video.
The only foreseeable problem with this is that basic streaming flash video (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo) still plays poorly beyond the States, especially over international lines. Adding HD to the mix only ensures that viewers overseas are unlikely to access videos at an acceptable rate. They’d have to go to the page and leave it to buffer for the rest of their afternoon. Digital divide again?
Makes me wonder if someone should have startup offering specialized cache proxies for redundant bandwidth in further countries.
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Do you use your video for any practical purposes besides 360 walk-arounds of cars and testing zoom functionality?
I only ask because while I think that there’s a lot of cool technology when it comes to camcorders, I could never bring myself to buy one because I know I would never have any reason to use it.
Thanks for the preview! I think it is wonderful what Viddyou is doing, pushing the technology and letting users run free with HD content online… i shudder to think of all the close-up ways that this will fit people’s interests!! :)
I also posted a mini-review of the newly announced upgrade: http://LEGENDmag.net/thelegendonline/?p=324
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Paul –> Qik can’r be compared to bambuser. Bambuser actually works – with flowing video and synced sound. Can’t say that about Qik.
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I would never delete the original video files if I had the slightest intention of editing them again. You are still uploading very compressed versions to all of these video sites, and the fact that they let you download the uploaded file, I would just take this as a given for almost any decent video sharing site.
As for uploading to Flickr, I only do so with my good pictures. Everyone is bound to have a lot of throwaway pictures, and I’d rather not upload them in the first place, then have to clean them out later, meanwhile they just add clutter to your photo stream.
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i like vimeo alot, better! the video is high quality enough for blogging and readership puposes and paying is pretty stupid if the difference isn’t that significant.
Its not like i need to see the hairs on a bubble bee!
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