When Joost raised $45M in its recent outside financing, a lot of people assumed the company would leverage the hype surrounding it to coast to a supremacy position in online video watching of professional, high quality content.
Then Babelgum joined the party, Veoh rebooted its offerings to compete more directly with Joost and the space became more crowded.
Today we learn via Mashable, who in turn picked it up via WebTVWire, that WiTV is a new Italian-based service that shuns the P2P architecture and provides for more communications options than Veoh or Joost, and presumably, Babelgum.
Features include:
Channel Manager
Video Selector
Advertising Between Video and over Video
Synchronized Event Focus
Synchronized Event eCommerce
Subtitle Multilanguage
Chapter Management
Streaming / Progressive Download support
XML Driven
Send to friend video features
Comment video reader
On Video watcher Chat
Subscription for PodCast ready
Subscription for Vista Media Center ready
Subscription for Game Console Ready
History watched video
Interactive User Interface
Interface Adobe Flash 8 Based
Liquid interface
Use in Browser or as downloadable software!
The argument could be made that there will be more than enough viewers to make all of these services winners, but with the amounts that are being raised ($40M for Veoh and $45M for Joost) you have to start to wonder if the video platform space - be it for aggregation/distribution or advertising - is starting to look frothy and if these are indeed the next generation iFilm’s and UGO’s, i.e. companies that raise nearly more money over time than they exit for…
I suspect, and yes, this is somewhat based on personal experience, that the smart money will start to look at content producers. I am personally finding more and more VCs, for example, interested in investing in web video, though that could be that over time, we get on the radar of more media-focused VCs.
Either/or, this past month a handful of content producers raised considerable amounts of money, suggesting that content remains king, no matter what the medium.
It’s ironic that Joost is focusing on the US, where poor broadband networks make P2P a hit or miss, whereas WiTV is Italy-based (where broadband seems to be ahead of North American standards) yet it does not.
Disclaimer: Veoh, Joost are both distribution partners of WatchMojo.com.
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