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