VideoEgg Trims Partner List
VideoEgg sent around a note to some of its publisher partners yesterday saying they had 90 days to store their video assets somewhere else. Silicon Alley Insider printed a copy, which explained the company is now focused on “video and rich media monetization,” a.k.a. its ad network.
We spoke with VideoEgg CMO Troy Young last night about the change and he explained that VideoEgg is not actually discontinuing platform service for all of its partners, but rather dropping the ones that are “smaller” and “unprofitable.” I couldn’t get the full list out of him but he mentioned Piczo and AboutMyBaby as discontinued partners.
VideoEgg will continue to provide both platform and advertising services for larger sites like Bebo. It also provides advertising on sites that do not use its platform and its video player, such as Flixster’s Facebook app. Back in the day when VideoEgg was first founded, it provided video hosting for small sites, so this is the last step in shedding that business, said Young.
It seems a little strange to me that VideoEgg wouldn’t hang onto whatever video views its smaller platform publishers provide. You’d think in aggregate they could be monetized, maybe not today but eventually. I’m not clear on where the pressure is coming from to trim the fat.
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What sucks even worse is all those people who were using it for personal videos. We have put countless ones up there which we linked to in our blog. Wonder what happens to those (they have already cut off the upload and encode service).
As to the reason why they are cutting off this traffic my guess would be bandwidth costs (probably the same reason BC shut down their free services). They provided a higher quality encode and are likely incurring higher transfer charges per video. Not everyone has the pursestrings of Google to float them until they figure it out.
(Disclosure: I am one of the founders of Tremor Media, ostensibly a competitor to Video Egg. These are my opinions and not my companies.)
Jesse Chenard on March 4th, 2008 at 8:56 am - Permalink
Also, in their latest “engagement framework”, they said that they only work with companies with over 10 million streams. The narrows down the field quite a bit. That leaves a lot of room for the new Google Video overlays to reach a lot of publishers.
Frank Sinton on March 4th, 2008 at 9:59 am - Permalink
and I thought google video overlay was the final nail for videoegg….how many times can you change business plans?
john on March 4th, 2008 at 10:42 am - Permalink
I’ve started looking for alternatives. Looks like Fliqz has some nice customization options–better than what I had with Videoegg.
Dave Stone on March 4th, 2008 at 12:44 pm - Permalink
Would be interested to hear what you end up choosing, Dave.
Liz Gannes on March 4th, 2008 at 2:34 pm - Permalink
Maybe i’m just a ‘glass-half-full’ kind of guy, but I see this as a positive event in the space overall.
While the early platform players had to be all things to all people, there’s a maturity in the market as companies define needs in the market and evolve to serve them. Video isn’t going to be a one size fits all solution, and Video Egg has always been early in the space. The founders were right when they determined that uploading was a bottleneck, and build what was the most easily adopted uploader out there. Client side encoding is great, just expensive. Now Video Egg is narrowing their focus to turn their high volume customers in to a revenue stream. This makes good sense too. Luckily the video creator and video consumer market is still nascent, and there are some really great companies out there that will be able to partner with sites to provide video services. Years from now, there will be a whole array of video services, and the companies that thrive will have defined themselves, and provided a valuable service to their customers. Until then, smart companies will watch the space evolve, and be first movers as revenue streams emerge. Clearly Video Egg is doing just that.
Steve Rosenbaum (Magnify.net) on March 4th, 2008 at 7:33 pm - Permalink
Check out http://www.framecaster.com
Videoz on March 4th, 2008 at 10:48 pm - Permalink
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