Saturday, December 30, 2006

Attack of the YouTube Clones

I have seen a surge of video sharing sites lately, each attempting to land another google-youtube type of deal.

Some of them have a different spin:

VideoJug: http://www.videojug.com
I like this site because it has nifty video tutorials like 'How to wear a Tie Windsor Style', 'How to Make Kadhai Paneer' and 'Disappearing Card Tricks'! This is certainly a step beyond the text based tutorials like learnto.com. The videos are shot by the VideoJug folks themselves and are very professional, there is a section on user uploaded videos too.

ApnaVideo: http://www.apnavideo.com
MeraVideo: http://www.meravideo.com
These are desi startups focusing on the Indian market. They could end up like baazee and bidorbuy did with eBay, get swallowed up by a global player...or get eliminated by a special Indian Videos section in YouTube

DailyMotion: http://www.dailymotion.com
I like this site because it has all the Dave Chappelle shows. I wonder how long before it is taken offline by ComedyCentral

MetaCafe: http://www.metacafe.com
MetaCafe has been showing up a lot in digg stories lately, may end up with Yahoo.

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com
I havent seen anything starkly different here, infact I have seen a lot more YouTube videos on Myspace profiles.

Google Videos
Yahoo Videos
MSN Videos
Dont know/Dont Care.

A sign of the saturation in the market is the exit of Guba, another video sharing site. A new site eefoof.com has sprung up which promises to share advertising revenues with the videographer.

I am sure in time we will see innovative video search capabilities that span these sites just like search engines did with plain ol' web sites.

1 comment:

indwebservice said...

Hey did you miss out on AapkaVideo? This one is the only service out there which isn't the small brother of YouTube! They have a pretty simple and neat interface coupled with great features that makes this service worth visiting every hour as the content is always updated. The concept of 'video specials' is unique and they display theme based videos there which is very interesting and not found any where.

AapkaVideo supports almost all the popular video file types like .way, .mpeg, .mpg, avi etc. They have these categories which you can browse through and watch the videos of your choice. The most popular videos and the most recently updated videos are featured on the AapkaVideo home page itself.

There is an in-built mechanism to monitor the videos uploaded for offensive and obscene content. This feature makes the site pretty clean and office friendly.