Ed: This is a great idea, about 10 years ago we built something similar called EMP with a company called Enikos that I inherited after the VCs and the founders parted ways…. (I did two of these and was known as the Cleaner for a while).
Enikos was a video spinout from one of the Universities which helped create the MPEG21 standard for digital media containers, essentially allowing you to package video and supporting elements into a single XML container that could draw them all together on a timeline.
It wasn’t as pretty but it was a long way ahead of its time. EMP allowed you mash-up video from any source into a timeline with all sorts of other media, sound, ads, Javascript code, maps and it sort of worked.
There is a thousand stories and lessons in that startup most of which I can’t share, however the one that is most salient is that often success and failure is a matter of timing.
Back then we had to build all sorts of tools to make this work, streaming and mixing video is very server and resource intensive.
It’s still not a trivial problem, managing video ingestion and serving at scale is a massive challenge but many of the platforms and tools available today make that process a lot easier.
10 years ago Amazon was only just releasing their first cloud services and many of the tools and platforms that we can spin up on Amazon or Google in a few minutes were not available.
Also the iPhone had only just been released and there was no 3rd party apps and it struggled to do video at all.
Broadband was only just being widely adopted so this added challenges as well.
Interestingly in a less enlightened time the first user of the platform was a raunchy Swedish Gay TV site. They worked out how to use our platform to serve ads along with their video and even live TV. It was quite advanced for early 2000s.
As they say the street always finds its own use for your product.
Sadly the VCs behind the company did not share our enthusiasm for the potential that serving advertising for soft core gay porn held.
Quite ironic when you think about it when you look at the leaders in web technology the guys at the front line have always been the entrepreneurs trying to sell Pills, Porn and Poker (PPP).
Serving and Scaling Video, Affiliate Marketing, e-commerce, SEO, the PPP entrepreneurs always beat mainstream online businesses.
Anyway, none of that matters now, its long hit the dead pool but bad timing either to soon or too late is a bitch.
However here is our concept reincarnated as Videopath a new slick player and platform that is completely platform compatible and timeline based.
Not sure about their pricing, but to be honest we never worked out how to price our service, stepped, per play, per $ revenue earned there are so many ways to slice it, so I don’t envy them trying to get the pricing that will work for their target market.
Based on the experience we had I would be very focused on getting people using it and wouldn’t even worry about pricing until they had 10s of thousands of users.
Get mass adoption for the basic system and perhaps introduce pricing based on number of videos hosted or even offer to serve advertising for users and split the advertising revenue with them or allow them to add their own advertising or e-commerce on the premium service.
I think the model that’s reasonable is if the user uses your system to make money they pay, otherwise users get it free and you get to serve the ads and share the revenue.
It’s not hard for a decent video to get 2000 views so essentially Videopaths pricing model is forcing everyone onto a plan, which will mean a lot of people won’t ever bother to adopt it.
Good luck guys, it’s a great concept and I hope it works, I suspect the timing is much better this time around.
| Startup Name | Videopath |
|---|---|
| What problem are you solving? | Video is a growing medium, but it is also a very crowded space. Viewers have increasingly low attention spans and as a result content marketers and brands need new way to engage and convert viewers.Videopath offers a curiosity driven viewer experience, which has shown to deliver better engagement and conversion. First metrics from the Videopath format are showing consistently high viewer engagement and better conversion numbers over all other major video players. |
| What is your solution? | Videopath is a video application that lets users connect web content directly to specific moments in a video.The result is an easy to use, customisable HTML5 video player that plays on all browsers and all mobile devices. With Videopath, curious viewers can find out more about a topic, without ever leaving the video player. |
| Target Market | marketers, content creators |
| How will you make money? | Subscriptions/Advertisement |
| Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? | Anna Rose, CEO & co-founder: Anna has over 8 years of experience in video media technology, specifically in the roles of business development, marketing, and product management.Previous to founding Videopath, she worked at Gracenote, Berlinale film festival, and Gameforge. She holds a degree in Business Management and Music Technology from McGill University |
David Scharf, CTO & co-founder: David is a graduate of Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, where he studied a mixture of graphic design and computer science.
During this time he wrote, directed and edited the award winning animated short films called “The Big Brother State” and “The Forest”. After graduating, he worked for 5 years as a freelance mobile developer creating innovative video and augmented reality apps for international clients such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Fershau.Founders NamesAnna Rose, David ScharfWhat type of funding has the company received?BootstrapWebsitehttps://videopath.com/Twitter Handle@videopath
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