Magnify Consolidates Make-Your-Own Video Sites

In the last month, Magnify.net has taken over powering video hosting and collection tools for CarDomain’s Vidiac and Demand Media’s ChannelMe.tv service. Both sites invited users to create their own video channels, but Vidiac had been largely neglected, and ChannelMe’s video hosting provider, Eyespot, went out of business.

Through the Demand deal, Magnify gains an additional revenue stream as a reseller of .tv domains. The idea is (and has been for the last couple years) that new .tv domain registrants through Demand’s eNom can add video to their sites from the get-go. And Magnify could potentially power video for Demand’s other properties if the deal works out, said Demand’s Shawn Colo, co-founder and head of M&A. Existing ChannelMe.tv subscribers accounts will be shut down on July 1. While basic Magnify service is free, some features and support are paid.

Magnify will also share revenue with CarDomain for any Vidiac customers it picks up in the next few weeks; the domain itself will be shut down at the end of the month, said CarDomain CEO Glenn Rogers. Vidiac was a would-be YouTube that fell by the wayside when it started taking down copyrighted content early on, he said. The product was later pushed as a “create your own video site” tool, but its founders’ other project, StreetFire, was far more successful and eventually merged with CarDomain. Meanwhile, Vidiac has been operating at a loss of $100,000 per year, mostly in hosting fees.

While the deals aren’t huge wins, they do show strength for Magnify, which unlike many video startups, has maintained a focus on one thing since the beginning: video curation. Its competition in that space includes Vodpod, Yubby, Fliggo