In the world of web video: for Google read Youtube. There’s not too many people that would search for anything on Bing rather than Google. Likewise there’s not too many people that would look for a video on Dailymotion or Veoh rather than Youtube. It’s probably only a matter of time before ‘to youtube’ becomes a verb in common usage along the lines of ‘to google’.
But despite their relative underuse there are a load of different free video hosting sites out there. But most are just trying to be Youtube without the Youtube brand. Hardly any of them have made a really big effort to be different than youtube and to find their own USP. A notable few have tried to give their site a spin of some kind. Vimeo is laudibly trying to go upmarket and become an opnline home for the filmmaking community. Dailymotion has gone in exactly the opposite direction – hosting videos that Youtube won’t allow. But that’s about it. Perhaps the remaining myriad of video hosting sites hoped that somehow they would catch up with youtube’s juggernaut. That’s like Panda Pop hoping they could outsell coca-cola.
But now viddler has woken up and smelt the e-coffee by offering something truly different. They’ve established the first easy to set up video subscription service. This means anyone with a video (or more likely series of videos) they feel is worth charging money for can quickly and easily upload that video and put a paywall in front of it at a price of their choosing.
For a web series creator such as myself this is pretty exciting. Until now there were platforms such as blip or the Youtube partnership programme that could run third party adverts on your video. But as I’ve referred to on a previous blog post the return per view was pitifully small. I’ve run adverts on shows that have got about 50,000 views and ended up generating about £10 in revenue from the adverts. If I charge 50p on viddler for the whole series and get just 20 people (or 2,500 times fewer people) to pay to watch the show I’d make the same amount of money.
I’m sure that lots of web series creators will flock to viddler to take advantage of this great new service. When they do I wouldn’t be surprised to see youtube go the same way and start offering their users the chance to charge viewers to see their videos. If it does the growing movement pioneered by the Times to charge people for online content will have captured a major scalp.
I’ve recently come across Viddler and am thinking of uploading my DVD segments onto the subscription service. This would allow consumers to pay for only the segments or groupings they want and not the entire DVD – either they don’t want all the contents or would rather have it streaming immediately.
Is there anything that I can’t find on Viddler’s site – either from others you have spoken with or from your own experience – that I should be aware of?
Thanks.
Hi Perry. The other nice thing about viddler is that you can highlight interesting points of note on the timeline by putting markers on it. You can mouse over the marker to see what it signifies and then jump to that point in the video if you want to. Good luck with the DVD. Pete
Thanks for this post! I’ve never heard of Viddler, but I’ll have to check it out. On another note, how familiar are you with Web TV platforms? Do you have any suggestions or preferred recommendations for what you feel are the best in the Bay Area?