MEGAVIDEO — The New Sheriff in TubeTown

Few weeks back I wrote about Comscore publishing metrics around the online video market. They reported that Google was the clear leader with 21.5% of the market-share. This obviously is post their YouTube acquisition.

Since then there hasnt been much noise in the space. There have been few blurbs here and there about similar services offering incremental features but nothing groundbreaking to speak of. However while browsing TechCrunch today I stumbled upon a post about a new service from HongKong called MEGAVIDEO.

These guys are solely aimed at displacing YouTube from the #1 spot. Please bear in mind that they feature nowhere in the ComScore top 10. Talk about focus.

The video below presents their 10 reasons to use their service versus YouTube.

Some of the key elements, which impressed me were:

  • Great international presence
    • These guys have the service running in 20 languages
  • Huge upload size, up to 5 Gigs
  • Rewards Program
    • The value for this goes without saying.
  • Direct revenue enablement by hosting AdBrite ads
  • Premium offering which has been really lacking in other services

YouTube has slowed down a bit after acquisition, which is typical. Hence I do think they have an advantage over them. Megavideo can learn from YouTube’s mistakes to get it right.

Now let’s discuss concerns and recommendations:

With big Video, comes big Lawsuits
Megavideo is planning to offer up to 5Gigs in storage and unlimited length videos. Now this is something which YouTube has shied away from. Although as a consumer I would love this much storage, but this is typically just a lawsuit waiting to happen. Google video still has hundreds of DVDs ripped and uploaded. The same will happen with Megavideo. I haven’t seen any method of controlling such content. Any legal action from the big boys may severely effect their dreams of being #1. YouTube has been struggling around this for months and Megavideo must learn from this.

Need to Partner with the big Players
Some of YouTube’s success can be seen with all the partnership with TV networks. NBC and CNN are two of many who have partnered with them. Megavideo needs to take this path and establish some great relationships to make it even more mainstream.

Value based Revenue Share
Introducing Rewards program and AdBrite is great, but Megavideo will have to truly move towards rewarding its best publishers fairly. YouTube was sold for $1.6 Billion and LonelyGirl15 didn’t make a single penny from that. In my opinion this is probably the most negative element about Web 2.0.

Megavideo can really race ahead by introducing fair revenue share programs where it offers the publishers a 50% split for the ad revenue related to their posts.

Finally it remains to be seen as how successful Megavideo will be. However I do wish them good luck and hope they succeed in climbing to the top spot. I will keep my eyes open for the next ComScore report.

August 8th, 2007 in Media 2.0, Web 2.0

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