Veoh raises 12.5 million. What is on the horizon?
Published by GabeMac on 18 Apr 2006 at 5:47 am.
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Filed under Vlog News.
We’ve all been reading about the VEOH scandal both here on WATM and in the Yahoo Videoblogger group. However today I read that VEOH has recieved another round of financing of $12.5 million. They received this funding from none other than Michael Eisner, former chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, Todd Dagres, managing partner of Spark Capital, and Time Warner. This is very interesting that these specific players are interestred in VEOH. My mind starts to wander as to why VEOH? It is interesting that the scandal of VEOH re-encoding the vloggers’ feeds and videos may have something to do with that. Here’s what I think.
Many media companies are looking as to how to add delivery of content through the internet as a new form of distribution. However the only real place to be able to distribute thier content on a pay per download basis is by using the iTunes Music Store. Now Apple has been very strict in setting the price for these downloads to a fixed price (and giving very little revenue back to the content holders from what I heard from an independent music label owner). This is not what the big movie studios want. These companies want to charge more money for thier films or TV shows than the iTunes $2, and recieve a higher revenue share from that service than Apple is allowing. Where am I basing this on? Have a look at this article talking about how Universal Pictures, among other studios, want to allow people to download the films at the same time as the DVD release, at a price of up to $30 for a download. Apple would not allow this. So they are looking for alternatives.
In steps VEOH. An aggregator which could be bought and add DRM and other functionality to allow this. Why re-encode those vlogs? Possibly to start making way for the VEOH DRM integration? Or just build up the library to rise up investment price? Who knows? All I say is don’t be surprised to see a link to download Spiderman 3 for $30 posted right next to your favorite video bloggers feed in VEOH.
That’s my €2 for free.
