Video Sphere

BrightRoll, the video ad network formerly known as PostRoller, helps publishers monetize their video traffic and helps advertisers connect with consumers in the rapidly growing online video market.

“Online video advertising is quickly becoming the most important and strategic medium for branded advertisers,” said Tod Sacerdoti, CEO and Founder of BrightRoll.

A brief overview of the company:

Based in San Francisco, CA, BrightRoll was founded by Tod Sacerdoti, a former executive with Plaxo and former Internet Marketing investment banker at Robertson Stephens.

Launched in late 2006, BrightRoll has established itself as an early leader in the video advertising market, providing innovative pre-roll, post-roll (before and after the delivery of video content) and click-to-play advertising solutions across a broad network of publisher sites.

In April, 2007, BrightRoll, Inc. announced that it has already served 500 million advertisements in video players since inception.

Massive growth expected in the online video advertising market:

With a rapidly growing publisher network and a strong pipeline of video advertisers, BrightRoll is well positioned to take advantage of the massive growth expected in the online video advertising market. A recent report from Lehman Brothers stated that U.S. Online Advertising Spending will reach $2.4 billion in 2010, representing nearly 10% of the total online advertising market.

Register and monetize your videos:

Publishers can sign up for an account at BrightRoll.com, get their BrightRoll ad tags and begin monetizing their sites within minutes.

BrightRoll is compatible with Windows Media Player, Flash players and Quicktime. BrightRoll also announced today that the PostRoller name will no longer be used on its products, as the Company now provides pre-roll, post-roll and mid-roll products in the marketplace.

Vidmeter gathers data from across the web to provide an accurate representation of the most popular online videos, by tracking and ranking those videos across 11 major video sharing networks.

Vidmeter’s resulting list of video provides a great tool for industry watchers to track trends in online videos, for marketers to see what’s hot, for makers and advertisers to track their video’s popularity, and for eager video watchers to get their fill of the most poplar entertainment online.

While it is impossible to tell the exact number of views a given video has received from every website and every download, Vidmeter gathers the reported view count from a large cross-section of web-based video sites, giving a very close indicator to the relative popularity of a video.

The ranking is performed in 4 simple steps:

1) The numbered of views and comments from the top listed videos are recorded once per hour.

2) Statistics from multiple websites but for similar videos are merged, allowing to count the views of a video on all websites as a single video, giving a more accurate ranking of a video’s popularity and not just a URL’s popularity.

3) Vidmeter automatically ranks videos for the day by counting the difference between that day’s view total and the previous day’s view total. The most viewed videos are the most popular and ranked highest.

4)The latest view and comment counts are set as the “all time” counts for the videos and they are ranked accordingly.

There are so many options proposed on each page, that most people does not even know about everything.

With more features to be added soon (see previous article about YouTube Remixer & AudioSwap), the user interface could be more and more complicated, and the overall ergonomics has to be improved.

But things could change rapidly with a new way of displaying pages, more ergonomic. For the moment, this new display format is only available through a small button in the top of the right menu:

Changes are not as impressive as we could expect, but remember that this new display is under beta test and that ergonomic added values are not always visible. It’s rather the experience that user are having than the design itself. Indeed, the new organization of pages seems to be more effective.

Related & Promoted videos (left: old version / right: new version)

Old version:

New version:

YouTube just introduced new online tools to change the sountrack of your videos (YouTube AudioSwap) and to mix videos (YouTube Remixer).

AudioSwap allows to replace the audio on your videos with officially licensed music provided directly on the YouTube AudioSwap interface. Don’t expect to upload your own mp3, that’s not allowed as for now !

With YouTube Video Remixer you can cut and aggregate videos, add transition effects, pictures and text. The Video Remixer is powered by Adobe Premiere Express, but don’t expect miracles, this is very basic and buggy for the moment…

Both tool are available through the Test Tube, where “YouTube engineers and developers test out recipes and concoctions that aren’t quite fully baked and invite you to tell how they’re coming along”.

After the recent launch of their new brand and platform Jubii for mail and multi web services, Lycos has decided to add video content.

Together with the French company Kewego, Lycos has thus decided to compete with leaders of this market such as DailyMotion or YouTube by launching its JubiiTV, a video sharing platform with a Web 2.0 flavor and based on solutions and contents of the Kewego company, which is already partner of the French TV channel M6 on Wideo.

Available only in France (http://tv.jubii.fr/) and the United Kingdom (http://tv.jubii.co.uk/) , JubiiTV will be launched soon in all European subsidiaries of the Lycos group, now targeting more than 44 million Net surfers per month.