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

Techcrunch is reporting, via Jossip, that Wallstrip - one of my favorite video blogs and part of Mefeedia here - is being acquired by CBS for around $5 million. Jossip reported that the vlog has zero ad revenues, but does have a great show and some great talent (Lindsey Campbell does a great job). Congrats to Wallstrip!

As part of the videoblogging community, this brings some great validation that a great show is a great show - whether that means it is produced independently or by a larger entity. This is a sign of things to come in the vlogging space. We will be sure to do our part in helping people discover great video blogs through Mefeedia’s community discovery engine!See more in:cbs, jossip, techcrunch, videoblogging, videoblogs, vlogs, wallstrip

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