There are nearly a 100 odd online video companies, each one with a different twist. All of them are growing like mad - for good or for the bad. They all need to grow their infrastructure. And since they are not making any money - and aren’t likely to make any money for a long time - they need sugar daddies, aka venture capitalists. The word on the Sand Hill Road is that yet another online video content player, vMix, raised $4 million from Enterprise Ventures and Mission Ventures. They are being valued at 4@4, I am told. Oh well - they will need a lot more than that, given that Google and You Tube are dominating the market.
12 comments so far
4:43 PM PT
What does 4@4 mean?
5:00 PM PT
What specifically do these companies need in terms of infrastructure, and at what stage of their development do they seek that funding?
5:04 PM PT
4 @ 4. $4 million at pre-money valuation of $4 million.
5:05 PM PT
not sure what stage they are at in terms of infrastructure deployment, but you can clearly tell that they need servers, storage and bandwidth - a lot of it.
i did a post earlier about you tube and how it has been growing by leaps and bounds, sending out terabytes of data.
5:14 PM PT
Do these companies own the infrastructure or is it outsourced? And why aren’t they making any money it seems that sites like iFilm are generating a good amount.
7:44 PM PT
Feel like a web2.0 dotcom bust yet? People think traffic drives everything. The race is long and very few companies will make it big, so the rest need to thing they all have almost no clue how to do - monetize!
10:07 PM PT
What in the world are these VC’s thinking? Throw a little money at a copycat here and there and hope something gets figured out and sticks? It drives me crazy to see things like this get funded and I cant get anyone to even hear my business plan. Such is life.
1:30 PM PT
As you said in your article, all the financed startups in this space are coming at it from different angles. If they didn’t, it is unlikely that they would be funded.
What sets us appart from our competitors is that vMix is a hybrid of both a technology and media company with executives and engineers coming from both worlds. It has allowed us to work closely with Fox and other entertainment companies from the very beginning. Our backgrounds from MP3.com at building scalable systems, based on Open Source standards gives us another key advantage.
We are also used to generating revenue and that has been part of our plan from day one. We think the strategy of garnering traffic without generating much revenue is very risky. Eventually you will need to pay for that traffic..
CEO, vMix
1:17 PM PT
The only reason vMix got funding is because Mission Ventures and Enterprise Partners missed out on Veoh (another San Diego company that was funded by a Los Angeles VC). Guess Veoh didn’t want to get a whopping valuation of $4 million pre. Wish Mission and Enterprise luck, but I think they picked the wrong player. With so many video companies in play, only the top 5 matter. YouTube, Google, Apple, Veoh, and FireANT. If you’re a VC and not in one of those, I think the game is over, move on.
3:19 PM PT
I think it is too early in the game to declare winners and losers. If you remember back to the early days of social networking Friendster was declared the winner.
Along came a series of competitors but it was MySpace that emerged months later and truly captured the hearts and minds of this generation. And it was MySpace that was purchased for $583 million.
This space is very exciting and changes daily and we are truly excited to be part of it.
[As and aside, the valuation and the money raised being quoted in this blog is incorrect. Om, please contact me if you would like to chat about vMix.]
CEO, vMix
12:11 PM PT
Om,
where can I find a solid list of all the 100 or so online video sharing companies?
12:06 AM PT
[...] and Enterprise Partners. So this makes about $26 million in total funding for VMIX; Om had written at GigaOM that the company’s first round, taken in 2006, amounted to $4 [...]
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