Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses(techcrunch.com) |
Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses(techcrunch.com) |
1) The "Venti" plan says "unlimited videos". Does that mean that there's no storage quota? If there is no storage quota, how would you make money off of a large customer? Like, we have a decently sizable video library (about 250GB and it grows by about 25GB each year) and it isn't that high trafficked, but I can see a video library like our's becoming a burden on your service.
2) Do you support captions for the videos?
3) Is there any way to export our data out of the system?
4) Is there any API in case we want/need some further customization in front of it?
Your service looks excellent, but what makes me so hesitant is that it seems potentially low-to-no-margin and my boss would want to know that we aren't getting into a service that's destined to raise prices or cut us off.
2) Captions are currently not supported - would you be looking for transcriptions on the videos, or time-coded captions based on the point in the video? We're working on some cool features for time-coded commenting that probably covers what you're looking for.
3) Data can definitely be exported - but unfortunately it's not something we've implemented into the tool quite yet. Would be happy to manually support in the meantime.
4) A Player API (for custom controls), Wizard API (for player setup and design), and Content API (for uploading) are in the works. Assuming from the question it's a player controls API you'd need.
Good Luck!
VidCaster's also more than just a wrapper around the YouTube API.
They let you import the videos that are already on YouTube and Vimeo, and move them over to VidCaster's streaming service. Crazy good service. Team has been working with online video for years.
Also, VidCaster just demoed at 500 Startups last week and already has paying clients like Microsoft, ZenDesk AirBnb, Twilio, etc...
What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies. I suppose it's nice to have Arrington as the LP of one of your investors (SV Angel).
Downvote my comment to get it to the bottom of the page.
Sorry about the above, if it came off as dickish, or as trying to steal the thunder from VidYard. That's my bad.
I'm still seething from this crap article in the NYT yesterday, and feeling full of piss and vinegar about the whole thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907570
I'm my pissy attitude bled over into my comment about TechCrunch and YC. Poor form. I apologize.
This is VidYard's chance to shine. I have no right to post links to another startup.
Apologies...
VidYard's product looks simple and solid. I am happy to see continued validation of the business video market and congrats to the team for addressing what we agree is a common and growing pain -- the difficulty for businesses to leverage video to drive sales and increase the efficiency of their operations.
Welcome Vidyard and congrats on the launch of a solid product. Let's grab drinks soon, we're still here in Mountain View for another few weeks before 500 HQ kicks us out :)
How can you possibly not get that? YC is a bigger deal, so it gets more coverage. There's little nuance to the matter. If 500 Startups rattles off the hits and builds a pedigree similar to YC, it will receive commensurate coverage. I'm not saying other startups don't deserve coverage. I'm saying that the Valley and the tech crowd (TC's audience, by and large) are demonstrably interested in what comes out of YC -- so why wouldn't TC cover it well?
That's just bull-shit. Just because they covered your competitor doesn't mean you get to talk shit about the coverage.
In addition, I just don't get why are you getting so excited about this. You know who is eating your lunch, not VidYard, it's YouTube and the Sales executive who don't know any better than uploading video on YouTube. You have a common enemy called ignorance. Instead of getting riled up about competition may be you guys should work together.
also to clarify: 500 Startup is an investor in many YC companies (close to 20 at current count), so altho we may occasionally compete at the incubator level we have tremendous respect for PG & team, as well as their companies, and we would go out of our way to not talk shit about them, as well as taking issue with people who do.
kisses,
dmc
iamelgringo is a customer of VidCaster, not a competitor of Vidyard.
I also don't understand your ignorance comment. Vidcaster and Vidyard are two competing companies.
iamelgringo brings up a salient point I think, YC companies get a disproportionate amount of coverage on TC as compared to other startups.
Bucketloads of free traffic from HN.
What makes this company different ?
- it appears from the techcrunch article your PC based players are using RTMP. which essentially is a flash based solution(?). Is there a html5 based solution as well?
- Is there support for livestreaming or is this just progressive download?
- How are you different from these services: Brightcove/Ooyala/Panvidea/etc...
If you want to prevent click throughs, after the video starts to play, just put up an invisible div over the video, but above the controls, so the user can't click through, but can still controle the video.
Once the video ends, pop up whatever you want if you don't want their recommended videos to show.
Best of both worlds.
See clause 4F, doing this would result in Youtube blocking your site from embedding, and would possibly result in a "google death penalty", definitely not a good idea.
Many of our customers aren't technical and like having a customized player + instant detailed analytics + landing page creation + chaptering, etc.
Is Vidyard competing with Vimeo or are you addressing a different need?
Venti means 20. Grande means big. Short means...what the hell? What am I buying here?
I don't know whether this will be the eventual solution vs. ZenCoder (or something similar) and S3, but this certainly seems like a potential option.
I'm saying that from a relatively small business that is looking to do more video perspective. I'm small enough to be able to host this myself with my own player and not have problems, and not large enough to see the value in $20 or $50 a month. I could see doing the free trial, but 1 video makes it not seem as attractive to me.
If I were you I'd consider doing the trial for a certain number of views instead of the 1 video - that way your true functionality grows with the views (and value) coming to the business. If it were 5000 views a month or something then I get to use the cue up features, see the analytics, etc, but when I'm doing xxxx number of views a month on the videos then I'm more likely to drop the money and convert to a paid plan.
Anyway, just my opinion, but I doubt my monthly small business video hosting will ever be nearing the cost of my invoicing system...
There are a ton of players in this space. Here are some others:
Edit: I'd also like to congratulate the founders of VidYard on their product. It looks great. Good luck you guys!
And Vively: http://www.vive.ly/
EDIT: Sorry, I noticed SproutVideo founder's list was missing SproutVideo; I failed to notice it was in the grandparent.
If one video of mine in particular was running over-bandwidth, wouldn't it make more sense for me to buy an additional plan at half the price, rather than pay the bandwidth fee? I know it's potentially inconvenient to do so, but it makes the pricing a little silly. I could also host the same video multiple times, and have a rand() select between them, or select the ones that have been selected the least in order to redistribute bandwidth.
It's kind of like on some McDonald's menus, where an Apple Pie is $0.69, or you can buy 2 for $1.39.
Edit: I'm going to email your sales with the FYI.
Really?
Facebook will never pan out.
Most businesses would be more than willing to pay for a small change if it results in them making more money.
Edit: Downvoters, please explain. I didn't mean to insult, but am offering honest feedback on a perceived weak spot - one which I fear could impair the founders intention to make the right impression on their target audience.
BTW, there is also http://vidcaster.com which doing the same thing. Vimeo is doing the same thing now.
Personally, I think if you have multiple sites, then with Adobe Suite and Amazon CloudFront and a few dollars on odesk you can make excellent "video presentation" site for your business. Maybe there is a market for even more customizable service? Something like heroku for Video/FAQ/Tour part of your site?
A key selling point in platform selection is YouTube's massive traffic, while tons of other platforms may win based on the feature set, at the end of the day, the views are on YouTube.
Vidyard seems to be playing the youtube traffic angle well by allowing the videos to remain on YouTube while wrapping the YT API + chrome less layer.
GOOD WORK by you! I'll be testing out that 100GB cap soon.
Maybe just get rid of that pricing line in the comparison?
That solution would cost about 10-20 cents a month (unless you've got heaps of traffic, in which case you're hopefully making heaps of sales anyway...).
At the very least, if you're going to embed youtube, turn off comments on the video :)
Vidyard looks like a great solution for a lot of people.
Now this is just a mean comment.
Nothing against 500 start-ups. Personally I don't think either YC or any company they fund considers 500start-ups as a competitor. There are tons of incubators in Silicon Valley.
The spirit in which the comment was made was just mean, in a manner that was directly attacking the company for being a competitor to their company(or his friend's company, or however it works).
No comments about Techcrunch's conflict of interest. I am not in the know-how of how the investment tree looks like.
"I happen to know Kieran Farr quite well. http://www.vidcaster.com/ was one of the first companies in our Co-op incubator. And, I have no doubt, that Kieran is going to be far richer than some reporter who still makes his living writing for a company that think that selling yesterday's news written on pieces of dead tree is a viable business model."
The main point I have against this article are that
1) It's poor journalism in that little research into competitors was done. Leena Rao doesn't seem to be aware of the many competitors who have been in this space for years (like VidCaster) but only a few like Ooyala and Brightcove (which TechCrunch uses iirc).
2) Lack of disclosure as to the relationship between TechCrunch and YC startups is a problem. There's an inherent bias without full disclosure.
Ignorance on the part of Sales executives who upload their videos on youtube.