Better for business ? You Tube founder puts cash into start-up
Does business need an alternative to You Tube? A new American start-up called Vidyard believes it does, according to Adweek, and it looks as if at least one of YouTube's founders agree.
Welcome to Vidyard
Jawed Karim (founder of You Tube with Chad Hurley and Steven Chen in 2005) has just participated in Vidyard's first $1.75 million round of funding. Other investors include Gmail creator Paul Buchheit.
So what's Vidyard's case?
At a Demo Day for investors held by start-up incubator Y Combinator, Vidyard showed a promotional video for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet that had been posted on YouTube.
The video was surrounded by ads for rival devices, Vidyard points out. The first comment complained that the PlayBook "sucks,"and when it was over, there was no obvious way for the viewer to learn more or actually buy the device.
In contrast, Vidyard promises to give companies more control over their videos. There are no ads, customers can add a call-to-action at the end of a video, and they also get access to analytics data about who's actually watching.
Have a look at https://secure.vidyard.com/
You see the difference right away: Vidyard's Instant-Start technology allows the video to play immediately without any buffering. " Scroll down a little further to see a live analytics report," says Vidyard.
Vidyard announced new features this week: including the ability to post videos on Facebook and Twitter, to optimise videos for search engines, and to play them on iOS and Android mobile devices. Customers can publish Vidyard videos on YouTube too.
Adweek comments:"The startup may be trying to build a YouTube alternative, but it's not doing it without YouTube."