We wrote earlier asking why Flickr still isn’t doing video and have done several updates since the news broke (again) that Flickr will be adding video and that Yahoo will be revamping their video site after “losing” to YouTube and Google.

From the sound of it, the new site sounds like it will compete with the likes of YouTube, AOL Video, MSN Video, and the new Joint Venture between NBC and Fox. Ho hum. Deals with all sorts of music labels and content companies just isn’t an important distinguishing factor. Contents companies are very smart nowadays - they realized that non-exclusive deals with as many big portals as possible is the best way to increase viewership.

Let’s hope Yahoo embraces what made Flickr successful in the first place - a great place for the indie photomakers that are passionate about photos and the tech influentials who wanted a collaborative place to put photo streams up around an event or topic. It is this influential and passionate audience that causes these sites to “go viral” and be widely adopted. As Om Malik pointed out, YouTube really became popular and the “winner” because it focused on becoming viral throughout the Internet, not just remaining as a destination site.

Mike Folgner, Yahoo’s general manager for video, said “We’re going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content.'’ Let’s hope that Yahoo really means it. What would truly be a distinguishing factor? From what we have seen at Mefeedia, users want a place to find interesting video content from any destination, and then watch that content when they want it and where they want it. YouTube and others aren’t quite delivering on this promise yet. Mefeedia delivers on this promise today and we are continually improving the experience. Here is some information to back up that claim:

Any Content - over 24,000 feeds from over 14,000 video sites

• Mainstream Video Feeds - ABC, CBS, NBC, HBO, Fox, BBC, NPR, CNN, and more from around the world
• Music Video Feeds - see our music video guide
• Video Sharing Site Feeds
• Video Blog Feeds / Independent Content Producers
• Video Feeds around Events
• Video Feeds that are Local / Location-Based
• News Feeds
• Sports Feeds
• Audio Podcasts
• Video Podcasts

How You Want It - Personalized - Mefeedia allows you to have:

• My Personal Mefeedia Channel
• Social Discovery through your Friends to help find why you like

When and Where you want it - Mefeedia Personal Channels and Category Channels have been watched on:

• Feed Readers
• Media Players
• Mobile Devices
• Set-top Boxes
• Game Consoles
• Widgets
• Second Life Media Kiosks

See more in:flickr, mefeedia, video, yahoo

UPDATE 2: Techcrunch, again, is confirming that Flickr is adding video soon. Maybe they actually are going to do it…

UPDATE: Yahoo again said today that they plan to add video to Flickr. Om Malik expressed concern as to whether this was a good idea or not. I agree.
Back in March of 2005, Unmediated called Mefeedia the “Flickr for video“. Fast forward 2 years to 2007, and we still don’t see video support on Flickr, although back in May, Michael Arrington from Techcrunch wrote that they are working on it. But do we really need it? There are so many options for uploading videos nowadays. Just a run through some of key stats demonstrate that:

• Mefeedia aggregates:

• 24,000 video feeds
• Over 14,000 video sites (i.e. any site that contains some form of video - video sharing sites, video blogs, video news, etc.)
• These video sites include over 300 “video sharing” sites, all major blogging platforms, video blogger sites, and news sites.

This results in a huge volume of video. Some video tracking examples:

• iPhone videos (943 videos currently)
• Harry Potter book release
• There are a lot more examples of tagging videos, creating video playlists, putting together video guides, and creating personal channels.

Would Flickr be better off being a hyper-aggregator for video? Ff they do go that route, they could do the same thing to Yahoo Video that they have done to Yahoo Photos. Of course, this would put them in competition with Mefeedia, but i am confident our 2 year head-start will help. Mefeedia already kicked butt when it came to hyper-aggregation of video compared to the “big guys” back in April:

See more in:flickr, hyper aggregation, techcrunch, video, yahoo

From: Internet Video Hyperaggregation

About a week ago, the hot topic online was NBC Universal and News Corp launching a joint-venture to provide “the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled.” The joint-venture is still months away from being finalized - and from reading TechCrunch’s notes of the conference call, it is obvious a lot of details still need to be worked out.

However, there are currently hundreds of sites that allow you to upload a video and share it with others. While partnerships like NBC Universal/NewsCorp demonstrate that offline video content will be coming online, how those videos are organized and delivered to end-users still is an open question. I believe a new set of companies serving as ‘hyperaggregators’ will emerge to fill that role.

What is hyperaggregation?

For the purpose of this post, I’m focuing on the lightweight web services that empower users to select videos from the hundreds of video sharing web services and point to them for distribution. Om Malik coined the term ‘hyperaggregators’ to describe this approach on the web in February’s Business 2.0:

“This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators. The way of the Web is to go meta - a website is born and covers politics, then another, and another, and that leads inexorably to … a blog that covers all the websites that tackle politics.”

I agree with Om’s characterization of hyperaggregation. So for the remainder of this post, I’d like to highlight some web services that are trying to achieve this in the online video industry.

3 Step Process

I’ll start with the set of services that I believe offers the most compelling approach for online video hyperaggregation. At a high-level, this approach involves users:
1. Selecting videos they find interesting as they surf around the web;
2. Categorizing these videos and adding additional meta-information about the videos;
3. Syndicating the videos they have selected to their ‘audience’.

See more in:business 2.0, dabble.com, flickr, google video, hyperaggregators, magnify.com, meta, nbc universal, news corp, om malik, readwriteweb, techcrunch, videoblogging, vodpod.com, youtube