Shelly Palmer and Steve Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net, discuss the company's new online video tools which let you find, filter, and share videos from across the web -- even upload your own -- and create a branded video channel that you control.
LINK to Podcast
Running Time 07:45 minutes (File Size: 7.1 MB)
Shelly: Hey, you're listening to media 3.0 the pod cast, news you can use about technology, media, and entertainment. I'm Shelly Palmer, here with Steve Rosenbaum, Audrey Adams, my brother Jason Palmer at Andrew's Diner in the middle of absolutely nowhere. We've been attending pod camp NYC, the un-conference about pod casting. In my s-field of vision I see Bill Sobhl, Mike Mollins, and a bunch of people chowing down on what looks like extremely healthy food, but we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about Steve. In case you don't know Steve Rosenbaum, let me tell you all about him. Steve has a company called Magnify.net. Right now, stop what you're doing, you can even stop listening to this pod cast and go to magnify.net and you will be blown away. What magnify does is take your videos from all over the planet and...
Steve: organizes them into a format so basically you can present to your audience, either on your website, or a site you build on magnify, an organized way to find and participate in video. It's as simple as that, it's a platform, a video platform.
Shelly: It's a video platform, but I have no cost to me, I have no muss, no fuss, I have nothing to download.
Steve: Let's go back to the no cost to you. If you have an audience of people that are participating in your community, and you are delivering them to us, and we're going to share in the ad revenue, that's a good business model for everybody. As of today we have 4,200 channels, we're adding about 100 a day. Which means 100 different people are bringing their community to our platform, and saying hey, help us organize video and we'll bring you some traffic. It's really kind of MySpace.
Shelly: We're talking about magnify.net and how I magnify. How many videos are on magnify.net?
Steve: About a million and a half videos on the network. But really, remember, we're not a destination, we're a platform, 4,200 individual channels built, and you can go build one today.
Shelly: Maybe you should quickly just explain to everybody what magnify.net is.
Steve: If you're thinking about doing something with video on the web, either with your existing website, or you want to create one from scratch, you need 4 different things. The first thing you need is a page, you need a page design tool to put that there. Second thing you need is an upload tool, the ability to take a video, encode it and put it on a server somewhere. The third thing you need is probably some type of discovery search engine, in case your videos are already floating around the world, you need a way to find them and organize them. And the last thing that you need is some way to basically monetize that so that you can eventually make some money. So those are 4 distinct things you need. And you need a content management tool on the back end to organize, sort, reject, publish videos. So those are four kind of complex things and magnify does them all. You know there's this whole thing that hasn't been discovered yet in video, and that is curation. Shelly Palmer for example has this idea about Media 3.0 and has some view of the world. He makes a video a week, but he also notices 50 videos a week that he would kind of like to put in a box. So magnify makes that really easy. Both publishing and curating. And then we bring advertising, at the moment from Google ad sense, but we're in the process of adding a whole series of other add tools.
Shelly: Are there ultimately going to be video ad tools brought to magnify.net?
Steve: The answer is that we don't have any idea. We think the ad market is changing in a really interesting way, and part of what is exciting about web 2.0 is that it isn't our job to solve the world's problems, so we know a bunch of companies doing great stuff in advertising and we talk to all of them. We're not a fan of pre-roll, we're not a huge fan of post-roll, we think mid-roll and play lists is interesting, we think adjacent video advertising is interesting. I don't know if you've noticed, but Google is now playing with some photo ads that play adjacent. So, what we really do is basically know if we're bringing an audience, and aggregating a vertical audience, there's going to be a revenue stream that's going to come to it, and we're open to that.
Shelly: So, who competes with magnify?
Steve: So, there are companies that we partner with that we like a lot, we love the blip guys, we love the rever guys. We have worked in the past with video ag and I suspect we will again. There are companies out there that do pieces of what we do, and we think of them as kind of friends, not as competitors, so for example we like the ning guys, we think the ning has some related pieces to magnify. There are folks called kickaps that do pieces of what we do. On the big, high end, fancy side, there are the guys at BrightCove, but if you're a right customer for us, you're going to go, hey this solves my problem, this is really cool, and if not, there a lot of other people to use.
Shelley: Now why would you consider BrightCove big and fancy as compared to magnify?
Steve: So BrightCove doesn't do video discovery across the web, they do video upload, and they do video that you can basically find from within the BrightCove network. But if you've used a BrightCove player and BrightCove tools, pretty complex. It really optimized for publishers that have drm issues and scheduling issues, and really a better fit, I would say, with big media publishers. The other thing is that Jeremy, who I really like and admire, is focused on building the BrightCove network. Magnify is different, we're not about promoting the magnify brand, we're about kind of getting out of the way and letting you build your network.
Shelly: That's fantastic. Let me remind our listeners, you're listening to Media 3.0 the pod cast. I'm Shelly Palmer here with Steve Rosenbaum. We're in a diner, there's bizarre music playing in the background. We're sitting here over a couple diet cokes with lemon to kill the taste, and we're trying to figure out the future of video on the net. We're talking a little about magnify.net, let's talk a little conceptually. Where does this all go? You know, its April 2007, what happens in April 2008? Where does this lead?
Steve: So I think the living room is on the horizon, and there are a bunch of guys doing interesting stuff. I think you're going to see apple TV with an rss component sooner rather then later. I already watch lots of pod casts on my tivo, and I think that's going to expand. I think the joost guys are really interesting, or I guess joost depending on how accurate you want to be.
Shelly: joost at joost.com. Joost, you call it as you see it basically it's a peer assisted streaming mesh network with very good content partnerships, and it's a pretty nice platform, yes?
Steve: Yeah, I like it, but you missed the headline. And the headline is it's built by the same guys who that did skype so... and the patents are related.
Shelly: And kazza, so I missed the headline for a reason.
Steve: I drop the kazza credit off, but skype's a really solid extensible platform, and I think that the relationship can't be overlooked given the fact that they sold to eBay for 5 billion dollars, right?
Shelly: By this day and age, 5 billion, that's chump change, right?
Steve: It means they've got some cash to burn, and they're smart, smart guys. So when they say, hey we want to reinvent TV in the living room, you pay attention. So, how does that affect our view of the world? Well, someone built about 4 days ago on magnify a radio controlled airplane network of people making videos of their radio controlled airplanes. Guess what, if I'm a radio controlled airplane fan, I'd like to see those videos on my TV in my living room. And I think Jobs understands that, I think the joost guys understand that, and so I think a year from today you're going to see people programming via rss their video feeds into their living room.
Shelly: Yeah, I would have to agree with you. We're talking about private networks over the public internet, that's got to be the probable near term future of TV. Well, this has been all kinds of fun, we have to go back over to pod camp and do a little talk. For Media 3.0, I'm Shelley Palmer, you can find us on the web at Media30.com, that's media30.com, or you can find magnify.net at magnify.net. For Media 3.0 I'm Shelly Palmer, have a great day.
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