Beginning in January, according to founder Rob Millis, the Dynamo player will no longer be open to any creators wishing to charge users for their content — instead, the company will be refocusing on white label services for those in need of digital distribution.

“Really, for us it’s about how the market doesn’t need a public option like Dynamo anymore — it makes more sense to go the private contract path,” Millis said via phone. “It’s been our best users and their needs who have driven this decision — our biggest users are people asking for more tailored develpment.”

Dynamo will continue to support existing projects that earn at least $100 a month — those not generating sales and continuing to use Dynamo as an archival player will have to pay a monthly fee to continue doing so. Future customers will have to contract with the company to distribute via the Dynamo player.

However, those contracts come with the options of broader services, such as iTunes distribution or custom app development. “You have professionals going to three different firms to get all these things, but we have enough expertise in these fields — we’d like to be a one stop shop,” Millis said.

Founded in 2009, Dynamo was early to the pay-to-play business model — its proprietary player, beta-launched in May 2010, let creators set the pricing and terms for their content, with a 70/30 profit split.

“Online revenue at that point was a 50 percent split with advertisers, with no real transparency,” Millis said. “Now, after being out for a few years, the market has a few options out there.”

Those options include companies such as VHX and Chill, which have both in the last few months refocused on creating marketplaces for paid content. But while Millis mentioned being intrigued by them — “VHX and Chill have interesting things they’re doing with destination sites and introducing people to content” — the company he was really interested in seeing move further into the paid content space was Vimeo.

“We’ve been waiting for them to get into this market for four years now,” he said. “If they take it seriously and move away from the tip jar beta testing approach, I’m much more confident about where Vimeo is in five years than Chill is in three years.”

When asked if there were things he’d have done differently over the course of Dynamo’s development, Millis said that while he would have made the same decisions, he might have made them faster.

He also mentioned that he “completely overestimated the foresight and innovation within Hollywood. It’s an industry and community that really wants to be more innovative but doesn’t know how to. It’s why Dynamo making changes, to help.”

“You beat piracy by making content available easily at a reasonable price,” he added. “That’s something the big media companies haven’t figured out yet.”

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Distrify

Founders: Peter Gerard (CEO) and Andy Green
Founded: June 2011 (soft launch)
Content it hosts: Primarily feature-length films, though there are plans available for short films and web series
Can any creator use it? Yes.
What the creator gets: 70 percent of every sale. If anyone registered as an affiliate shares a film, however, they receive 10 percent of the revenue for all sales made from that location, which Distrify and the creator split equally. The first film you upload to Distrify is free — uploading subsequent films costs $3.17 per month per film.
What it costs the viewer: Creators set their own pricing.
What makes it different? According to international business manager Stephen Green via email, “Distrify puts rights holders in complete control… You can sell films on our platform, and use our technology to build your own platform. Our affiliate scheme incentivizes sharing, so your platform is not just a destination, it’s a launchpad for the viral distribution of your films. We have placed a payment gateway within the Player, and by aligning the point of discovery with the point of sale, a film-lover doesn’t have to leave that site to buy or watch the film. It’s quite simply the easiest way to watch a film.”

Dynamo

Founders: Will Coghlin and Rob Millis (Millis runs Dynamo full-time)
Founded: March 2010
Content it hosts: Primarily independent film, though not exclusively — examples including the web series Anyone But Me, which used the player for a fundraising drive.
Can any creator use it? Yes.
What the creator gets: 70 percent of each sale.
What it costs the viewer: Creators set their own prices, as well as the length of rental period.
What makes it different? According to Millis via email, “Dynamo Player offers producers and distributors the fastest, most effective way to offer online rentals on their own sites, Facebook pages and anywhere else online without any up-front cost. Simply upload, set your price and then embed the video player on your own site or anywhere else online. We give you total control over pricing, rental period, geoblocking, and the ability to include all the bonus content you want, or bundle a complete season of episodes for a single price.”

Just the Story.tv

Founders: Carter Mason (CEO) and Matthew Arevalo (COO)
Founded: February 2012
Content it hosts: Web originals including previously-released series like Asylum, GOLD, and Vampire Zombie Werewolf. This spring, JTS will have the exclusive on the first seasons of Generic Girl and Continuum, as well as the second season of Jeff Lewis 5-Minute Comedy Hour.
Can any creator use it? JTS is curated, but creators can submit their series for consideration.
What the creator gets: A certain percentage of 50 percent of the subscription revenue, determined by viewcounts. As Mason explains via email, “If a show got 10 percent of the views in March, it will receive 10 percent of the creator’s pool. 50 percent of all subscription revenue we receive goes into the pool.”
What it costs the viewer: $3.99 a month for unlimited access.
What makes it different? According to Mason, “We’re more like HBO for Independent television than other distribution platforms out there for web series. In fact, ‘distribution platform’ probably does not accurately describe JTS.TV, and we prefer to be characterized as a premium independent tv network… While we do try to look at anything sent our way, we select our shows, screening them for quality and the willingness of the show’s producers to work within the JTS.TV system. We get several submissions weekly from producers who would like their show to be on JTS.TV, and most of them do not meet the high bar we set.”

Prescreen

Founders: Shawn Bercuson, Dan Rummel, Tyler Seymore, John Smart, Wes Donohoe, Lee Wilson
Founded: September 2011
Content it hosts: A limited selection of independent films, which are available for at least 60 days. Titles include From Time to Time, starring Maggie Smith and Dominic West, and the Australian blockbuster Tomorrow, When the War Began.
Can any creator use it? Prescreen is a curated service, but filmmakers can submit their work for consideration.
What the creator gets: 50 percent of the revenue from the film.
What it costs the viewer: Film prices range from $2-$8 (usually $4).
What makes it different? According to Rummel via email, “For the consumer, we pride ourselves on a curated selection of films, some of which are pre-theatrical and/or exclusive. Also we are a highly social platform that provides exclusive access to filmmakers and members of the cast. For the film industry, we collect unprecedented amounts of data that will enable the film industry to rejuvenate and optimize both their marketing and investment strategies.”

VHX for Artists

Founder/CEO: Jamie Wilkinson and Casey Pugh
Founded: March 2012
Content it hosts: Aziz Ansari released his new stand-up special through the service just this week; the program is not yet open to other creators.
Can any creator use it? Limited to a project-by-project basis, though Wilkinson hopes to open it up to all in the future, and welcomes creators to email artists@vhx.tv for more information.
What the creator gets: “We have not finalized costs or revenue sharing specifics, but we like the Kickstarter model: sharing in the profits invests us in our artists, because we share in their success,” Wilkinson said via email.
What it costs the viewer: TBD — Ansari, like Louie CK before him, is charging $5 for his special.
What makes it different? According to Wilkinson, “[Pugh] and I have a long history with Internet video and online communities, and our goal is to help both consumers and creators achieve media nirvana in an increasingly post-TV environment. What differentiates VHX and our technology is a laser-focus on the video and the user experience… Success stories like Kickstarter and Louis CK’s special really demonstrate the latent economic power that exists inside fan communities. It’s clear that if you take a new approach to Internet distribution — ditch old-media-mandated DRM and region-restrictions, and just make it easy for people to buy your awesome videos — that people are not only willing but excited to support artists directly. In the process consumers get a much better experience — fast, restriction-free, easier than torrenting! — and artists make more money and retain more control.” UPDATE: Also, Wilkinson adds, “We actually provide downloadable files! We’ve seen incredible response to that one small fact. People want to own it, put it on their PS3, iPad, Xbox, Kindle Fire… we’ve been really quite amazed.”

Watchbox

Founder/CEO: Jerad Anderson, Matthew Staver, Tienshiao Ma
Founded: January 2012
Content it hosts: Films, short films and web series, including 100 Monkeys – Live in Concert and the web series Whole Day Down, starring Sex and the City‘s Willie Garson.
Can any creator use it? Yes.
What the creator gets: 50 percent of the rental price.
What it costs the viewer: Creators set their own pricing, with a minimum price tag of $1.99.
What makes it different? According to Anderson, “We allow any content owner to upload to the site and set a price for rent. We give content owners total control of their content and provide a dashboard for analytics and transparency.”

Any more we should consider adding? Let us know in the comments!

Picture courtesy of Flickr user edenpictures.

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Millis and Coghlin, who in September told us they were ending Political Lunch to focus on developing Dynamo, opened the discussion with an exhaustive comparison of the options currently available to independent producers hoping to monetize their content — including making deals with advertisers directly, partnering with indie film distributors like Indie Flix, and working with bigger dogs like Amazon VOD and the YouTube rental system.

The problems with those systems, according to the pair, include the challenges of finding the right advertisers to partner with content, overly complicated contracts that greatly favor the distributor and take a long time to set up, and a lack of transparency when it comes to the actual amount of payment. A major issue was said to be the fact that when a creator signs up to distribute their content via YouTube, there’s no disclosure of the percentage of sales you’ll actually get; the contract only specifies “a portion.” Millis theorized at one point that the reason for this might be that “YouTube is giving a better deal to the bigger guys [aka Hollywood studios] — you’re subsidizing that.”

Meanwhile, during the hour-long panel, Coghlin filmed a short video, uploaded it to Dynamo, embedded it on a Blogger blog and demonstrated the payment process.

People who already know that they might be interested can sign up for the beta version by emailing beta@dynamoplayer.com, but if you want more detail first, tomorrow I’ll be getting an up-close look from Millis and Coghlin. So stay tuned!

Yahoo revealed a few weeks ago how it approaches unstructured data on an Internet scale with MObStor, the technology that “grew out of Yahoo Photos” but now serves the unstructured storage needs across the company. Earlier this year, Facebook unveiled Haystack, its solution to managing its growing photo collection (which could reach 100 billion photos in 2009 if it continues with current growth rates). In 2007, Amazon outlined Dynamo, an “incrementally scalable, highly available key-value storage system.” All of these were predated by The Google File System, presented as a research paper in October 2003.

While none of these systems are exactly alike, together they represent a complete change from traditional file systems and data stores. The Google GFS authors note that their design “reflects a marked departure from some earlier file system assumptions,” causing them to “re-examine traditional choices and explore radically different design points.” These are not the systems we once knew.

Since MObStor, based on when information was released, is the new kid on the block, let’s take a look at some of its standout characteristics:

• It’s designed for petabyte-scale content that is site-generated, partner-generated, or user-generated
• Handles tens of thousands of page views every second
• Unstructured storage/objects are mostly images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript libraries
• Reads dominate writes (most data is WORM: write-once read-many)
• Only a low level of consistency is required
• It is designed to scale quickly and efficiently

These capabilities ensure that Yahoo can maintain its ability to store and monetize content effectively, and they are a far cry from solutions developed just 5-10 years ago. The scale, load, file types, read/write pattern, and consistency requirements represent another world compared with conventional enterprise solutions.

Perhaps as part of a migration effort, Yahoo’s MObStor incorporates existing storage systems, like NAS filers. This makes sense for Yahoo, which over the years has been one of NetApp’s largest customers. Facebook has jettisoned any attachment to storage devices other than commodity servers with internal drives, at least in Yahoo’s description of Haystack and the Facebook engineering blog post. And Amazon and Google appear to have made this all-commodity move long ago.

The telling shift is the overwhelming focus on smart software on inexpensive servers. This is not how storage industry giants like EMC, IBM, HDS and NetApp were born. But if the advance of Internet computing continues, the Goliath web properties will provide a crystal ball to how we will more broadly handle unstructured data on an Internet scale. Startups reliant on big data for their business have little choice but to innovate as well, finding ways to accelerate time to market and maintain outstanding service. Enterprises handling big data will need to modify their approach, too, otherwise they leave the door open to competitors that will take advantage of these cloud infrastructure economics.

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