VideoPlaza: right place and time for a video ad overlay service

Written on 13th July 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Swedish video advertisement overlay service VideoPlaza has received €420,000 seed investment from Nordic VC Creandum and angels Henrik Torstensson and Magnus Hultman. VideoPlaza has been doing well – partnering up with Sweden’s number-three pay-TV station Kanal 5’s website and two other clients – and operates in a booming market.

CEO Sorosh Tavakoli

The Swedes watch 115% more online videos over the last year, so VideoPlaza has enough content to monetize. The money will be used for international expansion.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal got two anonymous sources talking about YouTube’s failing advertisement strategy. The video giant generates 10 billion video views a day, but ‘only’ manages to make $200 million a year from advertising. Thus the Google-owned company might introduce pre and post-roll ads, said the sources to WSJ.

This YouTube story symbolizes the need for video sites to monetize their content. VideoPlaza – that offers overlay ads for Flash and Silverlight videos – will be one of many video ad start-ups that receive a financial boost. It’s time for them to fix those crappy business models.

By the way, VideoPlaza has an effective and friendly team page – good inspiration for yours.

business models, future of video, monetization, pre-roll ads, video ads, Video Interview, video service, videoplaza, youtube

3 Comments »

DimP: A Direct Manipulation Video Player

Written on 25th May 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

A few years ago someone described the difference between watching video and working with the web and ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ technologies. To me it perfectly described the difference between the two and it also explained very well why standard ‘Tv on the Web’ services don’t seem to work out. I consider Youtube different because there is a large amount of interaction going on around the video itself. The comments, sharing and Related videos combined with the short duration of all videos (Max. 10 minutes) makes it a nice ‘lean back & forward’ service.

But the videos itself are still pretty standard. You click play, sit back and after a while the videos end. The controls at Youtube are very awkward. You can’t seem to fast forward or scroll back through playing video and although the clickable area at the bottom gives you an idea of interactivity it is basically just an indicator how far you are in the movie and not much more.

Fast forward to DimP (Short for ‘Direct Manipulation video Player’) that makes it possible move scenes back and forth. And not by using a standard scrollbar but by grabbing items on screen and moving them back and forth. Technically it appears to be just a fancy way of scrolling through video but look closer and you can see that it actually is a great improvement to move things directly on screen.

Cool Demonstration video:

Technology explained video:

If you use Windows you can even download and play with DimP and your own movies. Let us know if you do and report your own results here in the comments please.

dimp, Direct Manipulation video Player, future of video, lean back, lean forward, youtube

4 Comments »