Each day we hear about another white-label video service — those friendly people who power video for your site. White-label is the new black; it’s a hugely popular second- or third- or sixth-try business model from people looking to avoid their VCs’ wrath when their YouTube clone hits a wall. Some people say YouTube’s even going to announce one of these Plan B’s next week.
We’ve written about a lot of these enterprise video players, but we know there are more out there. We want to map out the emerging sector and the relative strengths of the participants. Help us out — tell us who you like and why. If you want to pimp your own thing, that’s fine, please just disclose the relationship.
AdBrite released one the first free white-label video platforms/services to market, called AdBrite InVideo, in Jan. ’07. They don’t host video, but they do provide a great system for playing, managing and monetizing videos you may have hosted elsewhere. (Disclosure: I used to work for AdBrite).
We’ve been playing with HD video on our site. Shooting in 1080 on Sony AVCHD. We’ve tried Vimeo, Blip, Smugmug Pro, Youtube and Viddler. We’re settling on Vimeo for now. Seems to give the best results with the least hassles. Easy and fast uploads and transcoding.
Brief comments on the others:
Blip – too slow to load videos (on a paid account) and too many flash conversion errors requiring reloading. Quality not as good as Vimeo.
Smugmug Pro – no flash, not easy to embed in blog, new player coming (they say). Not cheap. Good quality though.
YouTube. Bad quality. Haven’t played with the HD stuff I’ve seen mentioned in the last week or so.
Viddler. Bad quality.
Opened in April 2007, http://www.TV4B.com (TV For Business), whitelabel video site for Business.
Mainly in The Netherlands.
(Founded by Edo van Santen)
Disclosure: I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Castfire!
Castfire was founded in February of 2005 and is a white label, content management system for audio and video. Beyond players, transcoding, and delivery, managing brand consistency, monetization and integration are key attributes of our offering. Our platform allows publishers to build their solution and chose many different services for the final product. In addition, we treat audio and video like a website cms treats text, by separating the content from other assets such as branding, advertising, promotions, and copyright.
Client examples:
KCRW uses their Limelight account for bandwidth/delivery, OpenAds, a flash player (developed by Digitaria), and has fully integrated their Plone CMS with Castfire.
Next New Networks powers all of their networks for Castfire, including distribution through AOL, their sites and Bebo, using their own custom player.
Ask a Ninja, Boing Boing TV, and WebbAlert utilize Federated Media for ad sales, a Castfire player, and Castfire’s integration with Bebo, Facebook, and syndication tools.
In each of the examples above, the delivery is not just through flash, but in downloadable media as well, such as quicktime and mp3.
Feel free to contact me – brian at castfire (dot) com for additional information.
Hi Liz,
Forbidden Technologies ( forbidden/co/uk ) have been doing this somewhat for years, well before youtube, though it’s not even their core product.
There’s also Sumo.tv / cellcast/com which has a pretty multi-faceted and unique approach. They have their own destination site (which is doing really well) and a pure white-lable solution where it’s near impossible to tell they mananage a site (including human moderation). They come from a more broadcast and mobile background, so they think differently, with their own technology, and do a lot more than just stick up flash server.
They also operate in India, China, Brazil and in English.
There do seem to be many other who think it’s a hobby, or for local businesses -have they seen how much Brightcove has raised!
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
I believe the FeedRoom was one of the first of the white label video solutions, and arguably is one of the largest. They service NYTimes, Conde Nast, The Pentagon, etc. Long list of Tier 1 clients.
Full Disclosure: I’m a former employee of the FeedRoom.
Current employee of Brightcove. This page says it all:
http://www.brightcove.com/customers/selected-customers.cfm
Hi,
There’s also twistage, Vidiac, possibly Vividas; Sorenson and On2 also provide the tools to do so (inc. Saas -i think!).
There really are a lot of barrel-scrapers.
However, unless they have specific and proprietary technology and products, with white-labeling being just to ease things for clients or showcase the technology, what dfferentiates any of them from simply being bandwidth-wrappers.
That’s why I mentioned the previous 2 companies, Sumo.tv and Forbidden.co.uk with specific unique technology, though everyone might not be aware of that.
There’s also a list on Light-Reading and Lifegoggle of possibly related sites.
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
Dear Liz,
I’m Benjamin Wayne, the CEO of Fliqz, you and I have spoken in the past.
I think it’s important to define what we mean by a white-label provider. Presumably we mean a provider whose solution carries either no branding, or allows you to customize the look and feel of your player, uploader, webcam tool, etc. so that it uniquely reflects your brand. This is the white-label promise. Ideally this should extend into status messages, thumbnails, watermarks, messaging, and even loading spinners. And we must mean more than simply the ability to cut and paste an embed code, but rather the ability to have a truly integrated video solution.
A provider should also presumably provide a whole product, meaning:
And importantly:
Once we look at the world in this way, the number of companies providing true solutions narrows considerably.
It’s also important to recognize that while solutions like Brightcove may be superb for CNN’s of the world, they are too costly and too difficult to integrate for the majority of the market. More than 95% of the world’s sites lack the ability to do deep technical integration, or have the financial resources to pay thousands of dollars a month for a video solution. The majority of the market requires inexpensive, plug-and-play solutions that put video within their reach.
Fliqz provides a true white-label solution that is easy to implement, extremely cost-effective, and offers customers the ability to customize every aspect of the user experience. We support many different ad networks, but we force no advertising and no syndication on our customers.
With more than 3,000 customers on the Fliqz platform, we are one of the largest and fastest-growing video solutions providers. Our clients range from large enterprise customers like Major League Baseball, Virtual Tourist and VH1, to small- and medium-sized businesses.
We provide a completely white-label solution, and in the last 30 days, more than 200 clients have built branded video solutions using the Fliqz platform.
And while we think we offer a superior solution, there are other guys we like a lot as well:
There are obviously a lot of companies trying to re-invent themselves as white-label providers as the shake-out of consumer video continues. Very few offer complete white-label solutions.
Companies wishing to learn more about Fliqz should please reach out to us at sales(at)fliqz(dot)com.
http://www.episodic.com
We’re building a service in this space that we’ll be launching in the next couple of months. That’s all we’ll say for now.