UGC offers untapped opportunity
vTap from Veveo is a service that searches and indexes 115,000 web sites that carry large amounts of mobile video – totalling about 150 million video clips. It then encodes those videos on the fly to users who request them from their mobile device, using their vTap application. Its deployment could help operators unlock latent demand for access to user generated videos on the web, according to Guru Pai, VP of Marketing and Business Development, Veveo
“The free web video segment is a domain that’s exploding,” said Pai, “but it is disorganised and fragmented. We organize and find content, so we can deliver relevant video to our users regardless of whether they have carried out a specific vide search or are just browsing for content.”
“Veveo has been active for a while in the internet but we now plan to do this in the mobile domain,” Pai said. “There is increased complexity in terms of user input and display, but a user can find and view any content on the web in our index and then play it on their phone.”
Users can either set up a profile on vTap, allowing the service to build up a list of recommendations and so on, or they can browse the index which is organized into about three million or so topics. All the main free internet sites plus news providers and TV sites are included in the index, Pai said.. The service carries out the on the fly transcoding and matching to which player the device has.
Users can either take the service as a client on their phone, or as an xhtml solution. Pai said Veveo has an announced agreement with Motorola to include to client in its handsets, and has others agreed with other manufacturers that he can’t reveal. The application would be somewhere inside a handset Video menu structure, he reckoned, or even on the browser page itself.
Veveo’s business case is to make money through advertising, with Pai currently saying it is in “audience building” mode.
“Several ad networks think we’ve got something different,” he said, “because either we have user profiles or targeted user queries. We can interleave ads with search requests or have ads on each xhtml page to interface with the rest of the mobile advertising industry.”
As for the operators – they may need to change their business approach to video, Pai admitted, to benefit from such an app. If you look at operators like Verizon, it has about a thousand videos in a walled garden at any time, we have 150 million in our index” he said.
“I think operators are trying to figure out the video market. For linear TV they can address that through broadcast mobile TV, which has its place. But the non-linear user generated content world has hundred of millions of videos which is something mobile operators have not taken advantage of. Our value add is to work with operators to help get them addressing that audience. But today they are not doing a good job of monetizing that big audience for web video to the mobile device.”
Pai said that vTap can interface with Facebook or other social networking site APIs to integrate people’s profile into the mobile world.
“The science behind our services is very non trivial,” Pai said. “It’s not just an index and a simple search engine.”
Currently Veveo says it has 500,000 users in either alpha, beta or some form of pre-launch usage. The company has attracted $28 million so far from VC, has 55 employees and was founded in late 2004.