Found a description of the service at Ugo Cei’s Weblog: “
- P2P technology to stream videos without having to wait for download to complete.
- High-quality content from mainstream providers, not lots of crappy homemade videos like you can find on YouTube.
- Later on, user-generated content also, but always with an eye towards quality.
- Social aspects like reviews, ratings, IM, tagging, and other similar stuff. “
Sounds interesting – but makes me wonder about the business model.
Content from mainstream providers makes me think revenue sharing of advertising, or a payment & substution model along with some form of tracking for audience size validation. It opens the opportunity for aggregated profile and viewing data (views, shares, – possibly at the scene level) flowing back to content producers – which can be useful to tune shows to specific audiences.
Screening user content for quality, especially in an application that has community building aspects presents both challenges and opportunities. On one hand not being able to post goes against the sharing and dicussion on which community is built, however the implied endorsement that the work is of high quality acts as an incentive - especially if it results in more views because the work stands out.
Also is there a subscription (either fee or information) that’s required and helps focus advertising beyond the profiles used for TV content.
