Veoh Relaunches Powerful Video Sharing Service
P2P and web video sharing service Veoh will relaunch Tuesday with some important new features and a new look. Cynics looking for interesting video sites post-GooTube will find Veoh of real interest. The company has Michael Eisner on its Board, content deals with companies like Us Magazine and United Talent Agency and most important - some very good looking technology.
Starting this week, all users of Veoh will be offered video recommendations using an algorithm developed by Ted Dunning, developer of MusicMatch (now Yahoo!Music). Pro users can charge viewers to rent or own DVD quality videos downloaded through the P2P Veoh player. Pro users can have their videos automatically cross-posted to YouTube, Google Video and MySpace Video and automatically transcoded to QuickTime for iPod viewing.
Pro users will receive reports on the number of views and comments their videos have recieved across YouTube, Google Video and MySpace Video. This is likely to become a popular service; the viral video trackers at VidMeter will launch a similar service across 13 sites next week.
Other new features will include a very nice multi-video embeddable player. The functionality isn’t as flexible as a number of other companies’ offerings but it looks great. Users can display their favorites or other channels they’ve subscribed to.
Perhaps the biggest part of the relaunch will be the P2P Veoh Player. It will support full length downloads from Veoh, torrents, video sites around the web and any RSS feeds. A new browser bookmarklet will let you download videos from any site. The company highlights YouTube, Metacafe and others - presumably there’s some transcoding going on. The Veoh player can also be connected to your TV and controlled by remote. It’s like Joost for User Generated Content as well as select content partners.
All in all, it’s a very impressive relaunch. Presuming that users are willing to download the P2P application to their desktops, Veoh could end up seeing very wide use. If it does well in ease of use (and it looks like it does) it could fit the bill as a top-notch one-stop video service.
