What they're saying about Magnify

For more information see our press kit.

April 2007

Affiliate Tip.com, by http://www.makevideo.info, April 19, 2007
There is a quick, easy and free way to create a video community for a Web site with a service called Magnify.net. I recently met Steve Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify Networks, and he gave a quick summary of Magnify.net. So I'll let him explain...

It's really simple - if you're thinking about putting video on your Web site, and you're thinking I need an uploader, I need a page, I need someplace to store video, I need a way to organize it and a way to deliver it, basically what Magnify has done is bundled together all of those products into one package. So anyone who has an existing Web site can build a channel using Magnify really quickly. Or if you don't have your own Web site, you can use Magnify to build your own video channel. The idea is that it's simple, it's free, it's fun, and we have a great community off developers, so there are always new templates and ways to explore the service. it's been growing really nicely, so you should play with it. [MORE »]
David Cate: TimesNews.net, by David Cate, April 19, 2007
Magnify.net is one of many social media websites coming online giving you the ability to index and classify video content aggregated across websites like YouTube, Google Video and others. Put simply, this service gives you the tools to explore the world wide web for video and use that video to create your own personal website/Internet television channel. Magnify takes advantage of a worker-bee work force that sorts and classifies the content and they allow space for Google Ads which you will see on every page. [MORE »]
Media 3.0, by Shelly Palmer, April 19, 2007
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. [MORE »]
The Deal, by by Mary Kathleen Flynn, April 19, 2007
High-tech entrepreneurs trying to raise money today face a widening financial gap as the size of venture capital investments rise and the costs of starting a company fall. That divide is providing a funding opportunity for angel investors and for "micro-venture capitalists" targeting startups with smaller than usual investments.

At $7 million, the median VC round size last year was at its highest level since 2000, according to San Francisco's Dow Jones VentureOne. By contrast, the availability of low-cost, standardized Internet technology, open source software and outsourcing are making it cheaper than ever to launch certain kinds of startups.

"It costs much less to start a software-based company than it ever did," blogs Josh Kopelman, an entrepreneur and managing partner of First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture firm in West Conshohocken, Pa. In 1991, when Kopelman co-founded Infonautics Inc., an Internet information company that went public in 1996 and was acquired in 2001 in a reverse-merger by Toronto-based Tucows Inc., the company spent $5 million to get its first product to market. Today, he says it takes closer to $300,000.

Investments of that size fall well below the radar of most VCs. "Traditional, big VCs have a problem doing very early-stage deals today," says David Rose, chairman of New York Angels, a New York-based angel investor group. "Fifteen to 20 years ago, it might have cost $5 million to $10 million to get started. If a VC fund had $100 million, there might be 20 companies in the portfolio. Now, if it costs $500,000 and the VC fund has $1 billion, the fund would have to have 2,000 companies in its portfolio."

Although angels have always trawled for embryonic companies, VCs' growing focus on more mature players is driving investment - and innovation - lower down the chain. In 2006, total angel funding reached $25.6 billion, a 10% jump over the previous year, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H.

There's been an "explosive growth of organized angel investing," says Rose, whose group provides early-stage capital in the range of $250,000 to $750,000, amounts too low for the majority of VCs but too high for most individual angels. Since 1997, the 75-member New York Angels has invested roughly $28 million in more than 65 companies.

"If I have $50,000 to invest, maybe I can do a couple of deals a year," he says of the group's investment strategy. "If I get together with someone else, we can invest $100,000 in four deals."

For entrepreneurs, working with an organized group of angels can simplify things. "We manage New York Angels as a single investor," says Steve Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of Magnify Networks, a New York video-sharing site that in February raised a $1.2 million Series A round, co-led by New York Angels and Philadelphia-based VC firm NextStage Capital LP.

Yet while by definition angels typically invest their own money, rather than raising money from limited partners, the line between angel and VC finance is blurring. "There's really a hybrid of investors, where the angel groups are acting as a bit of a finder for venture groups," Rosenbaum says.

Indeed, it's common these days for early-stage companies to get funding from a variety of investors, including angels and VCs making private investments.

"The VC firm wants the partner to have 'skin in the game,' " says Gail Kantor, CEO and co-founder of eJamming, a Web site that lets musicians play together over the Internet. The Valley Village, Calif., startup, which has raised $1.3 million from angel groups, is now seeking $3 million to $5 million from VCs and strategic partners.

Not all VCs are ceding the micro-funding market to angels. A new breed of venture firm is emerging that targets startups with small investments. One perk for VCs operating at this scale is that they can tell more quickly if an investment is paying off.

"Today's model of failure is far more capital-efficient in allowing entrepreneurs and their investors to do this than the old model," Koppelman says. "While I'd much rather invest in a company that succeeds, if a company is going to ultimately fail, I'd rather it fail quickly."

Mary Kathleen Flynn is a senior editor at The Deal. [MORE »]
nowpublic, by Tery Spataro, April 09, 2007
I attended Podcamp NYC. As a kid I never went to camp but couldn't wait to get cross town on the M23 city bus. I was like a little kid when I finally arrived at the New Yorker Hotel. Yes, the famous New Yorker Hotel which was transformed from its deco and decadent days to the future of podcasting. Blown away by the herds of 20-30 something year olds, I found my peeps. Yes, indeed some of us early timers haven’t given up on internet. Podcamp proved to be a day well spent I learned about latest tips and tricks in podcasting.My favorite technology discoveries are: Magnify.net – love it! I could aggregate all of my videos from all the places I put my videos: YouTube, Google Video, and Blip.TV. Magnify.net creates a channel and provides a widget for all videos regardless of where the video is hosted. With a little help from Emeri Yarnoff, I created my DailyEats Video Channel. The other cool thing is I could select videos I want to feature on DailyEats Video Channel. Magnify.net is founded by Steven Rosenbaum, who I really enjoyed talking to.

I met Carter Harkins of CrowdAbout.us we had a great conversation about food. Besides food I found CrowdAbout.us easy to use. [MORE »]
Mashable, by Kristen Nicole, April 02, 2007
Magnify.net, the company that lets you create your own niche video channel, will announce a plethora of new features this week - they’re expected to go live on Tuesday.

First up, they’ve improved their drag-and-drop function to include your members on your Magnify frontpage, and block the members you don’t want on your site. They’ve also added a discussions board and a chat widget, powered by Gabbly to encourage member interaction on your site. Other widgets include buttons for bookmarking, and Paypal integration to accept credit cards.

First mentioned on Mashable back in February, Magnify has always been very inclusive in the video hosts they allow you to search from, and now they’ve added DailyMotion and Metacafe to the list. They’ve added to their search capability as well, allowing you to find a YouTube video based on someone’s username, their favorites, or the most popular videos. This is an interesting integration that I haven’t seen from any other third party video aggregating service. Another important addition is RSS integration, allowing others to subscribe to your Magnify site and get optional alerts when a new video is added by you or your members. Also important is their provision of support channels via screen-cast videos offering step-by-step instructions on how to manage your Magnify site.

In all, these new features are user-focused and aim to improve interaction and viral growth. Perhaps Magnify could become the Ning of video - less heavily integrated than white label video solutions, but offering anyone the ability to instantly create a niche video site. [MORE »]