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Last year I did my very first interview with Brian Houston of video aggregater VideoSift for a site that was later integrated into How To Split An Atom one. In that time a lot has changed for both of us. Recently, I took some time to take a second look at VideoSift and I decided to sit down with Brian and catch up.

VideoSift

What is VideoSift? It takes all of the best videos from across the internet and pulls them into one place. The first big change is that they recently moved away from the open-source “Digg-like” CMS Pligg to their own custom software. It is extremely clean and a substantial improvement over their previous implementation.

Take a look at this post for a full list of new features, but some of the major points are the addition of Channels, Invocations and a feature they call The Dead Pool.

Here is the rest of our discussion,

Business Model

So, since the last time we spoke (a year ago), has your business model evolved? From a traffic standpoint the site is doing great, what are your plans for monetization?

Brian: It’s traffic first for us. We want to establish ourself as “the” dedicated video aggregator. But we recognize there is a lot of competition now. So we are focusing on making enough money to keep the site going and paying ourselves little stipends.

We recently incorporated in Delaware - and there’s no doubt that our goal is to be be full time Sifters at some point, but at the moment we all have day jobs. There are 3 of us who are partners in the corporation. We also have a JV with partners in Poland who run VideoSift.pl. It’s very different, but has taken off in a similar way, but with local Polish content.

We haven’t taken any seed money - we’re completely self-funded, so we aren’t having to answer to a board of investors. We’re hoping we can continue to grow this way. We have a very active community with some really dedicated members - we’re also conscious that any kind of sell-out could leave a bad taste. So we’re doing our best to “keep it in the family” and grow organically through buzz and blogging.

Marketing

Explain what you’re doing with “buzz and blogging”.

Brian: Well, when people embed from VideoSift, it often leads them back to us. There’s a case to be made also, that when you send someone a link to a VideoSift page, it’s more permanent then what you would get on YouTube because we revive dead posts. Although the majority of our clips are from YouTube- we expect that to change over time. We are trying to be provider agnostic.

There’s not doubt that we’re up against a lot of different choices out there for video aggregation. So we’re focusing on the community culture, making VideoSift a place where there is work to do, and friends that know you. One of the drawback with something like FaceBook and even Digg is - what do you “do” there once you’ve connected with your friends, or voted on news.

At VideoSift we organize videos and try and make the community a better place. Playlists, channels, tags, conversations. We promote videos to the front that are really good, but maybe overlooked the first time. We save videos that are in our “unsifted” queue, but about to expire.
We have taken a leaf from Wikipedia in letting the community run the place- and giving them tools to organize information.

Managing Growth

Have you found it easy to keep this close knit feel as you’ve expanded?

Brian: It gets harder, but we’re adding new tools all the time. We have a very active community discussion area. You can see that it’s filled mainly with ideas on how to improve VideoSift. We couldn’t ask for a more engaged community. A recent example - we decided we wanted to make videos play on load when selecting a thumbnail.

We needed the flashvars like “autoplay=true” for all the different hosts that we use. The Sifters went and tracked them all down and posted them for us in the talk area. Many hands make light work.

James- one of the partners mentioned that we are building a platform agnostic video API, I never thought about it that way, we’re just trying to make VS as useful and fun as possible. We’re also snagging thumbnails for all the hosts for inclusion on the front page, and RSS etc. Some of the hosts have APIs to snag thumbs. Others we have to screen scrape. But it is coming together as a pretty neat bit of software.

Copyright

Since all of your content is user-submitted, do you ever worry about people uploading videos that infringe upon copyrights or do you let the video hosts deal with that?

Brian: We are shielded for the most part by our video hosts. However, we have gotten a few DMCA type take down notices. We comply with these. Though part of me wants to say: “Don’t you get the interwebz?” We’re not hosting it.

Steve: People sue Google for indexing websites, it doesn’t really surprise me.

Brian: Yeah, sad but true. But the DMCA is pretty clear about what we have to do. Who would have though that the big bogeyman the DMCA would actually help sites like YouTube and even us.

Next Big Thing

Last question, you get to see video from the standpoint of an aggregator. What do you think the ‘Next Big Thing’ in online video distribution will be? To be more clear, is YouTube the be all end all of video or is there something more on the horizon?

Brian: No crystal ball - but I have a few ideas. I don’t think the TVisation of the Internet is a good way to go. I’m thinking about Joost. It’s just crappy TV through the Internet. My dream is that someday there will be as many clips on the net as there are web pages, and all searchable, indexable, tagged and easy to find. From season 3 episode 12 of Lost in Space to your Nephew’s baptism.

We think there is so much video out there, but I think we’re only about 5% into this thing. There so many vast archives of video, home movies, etc. plus the increasing stream of new sources coming in. (camera phones) When you have this kind of video environment- you can see the value of having a service like VideoSift that uses experts to find the good stuff.

It’s coming - no doubt about it. It’s going to be pretty crazy 5 years from now - I’m not sure what it’s going to be like. But Viacom, Fox, NBC. They’re not going to be calling the shots I don’t think.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I would like to thank Brian for taking some time out to talk to me. Videosift is a fantastic service and if you want to see it in action, I suggest stopping by to explore Videosift 3.0.

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