Archive for July, 2007

The Swedish Television, SVT just put up some clips from a new show called Anaconda TV beginning in October ‘07. There’s very little information at this moment on their site, but the target group is said to high school students.
This means that SVT has begun their YouTube distribution (earlier post) already letting their employees more or less randomly upload content. The tagging, description and the video ending are different on the two videos available right now.

Fri TV will with great interest follow SVT out on the free web.

Here’s the more interesting clip of the two currently available:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVai3u8MP2A]

 Update: After writing this, I sent the link to this post to IDG.se. This is the result.

We all know that the guys behind the leading Swedish free video site Bubblare are masters at creating a buzz. They often figure in media and now they have ripped off the most popular format of the Swedish radio, Sommarpratarna. They’ve interviewed 11 Swedish semi celebreties and are publishing the videos at their site calling it a vlog, instead of blog (IDG article).

I don’t know the difference between a vlog and an interview, because that’s what it is, but it’s a damn good idea and effort. It’s nice to see local content made specifically for video sites, but there remains one big problem: they don’t have any advertisers connected to this project!

They have the content, they have the PR and they should have the viewers (they’re not showing it on these clips for some reason), but nothing of this is getting capitalized. I say there’s a need for a collective struggle to establish advertising on free video sites and making it easier.

Fri TV could be that initiative. More information coming up in Aug/Sep 07.

Collected Video Stats

Techcrunch reports on a new German service, videocounter.com. The service tracks video traffic from different video sites like YouTube, Revver, Daily Motion, iFilm, My Space etc. and collects it at one place. Besides that the site has big design issues, problems with the language selection and the confirmation e-mail got registered as SPAM, they have a somewhat unique video ad (look at the bottom of this post). The idea is good though and they’re not alone. Another company, Vidmetrix, has done it better though and TubeMogul is doing this even better.

But I must also say, all of these sites have a long way to go, before they in a satisfying way can help professional content owners.

What’s it Good for?

First of all, it’s useful and relevant for anyone who spreads a large amount of videos clips on different sites. It’s necessary in order to analyze and understand how the content is spreading around the web and also to understand if and how different video sites differ from each other.

But, if you think one step further, these collected statistics could be a fundamental part of a future video advertising system on the web. The statistics are the raw material of the content owners and should somehow be transformed into a currency, just the way other advertising systems work. It should be used as a reciept to the marketing manager that has placed his companies money on advertising, so that he show his boss what they got back for the invested money. So what we need is a trust worthy and independent online video measurement system in order to create this currency. And with the currency in place, the free video sites can be used by professional content owners for, not just creating buzz, but generating new income.

Finally, I hereby help the German founders of Videocounter.com by spreading the word of their service. Maybe something for the Cannes Lions 2008 advertising awards?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmAFWAT_NJY]