What they're saying about Magnify
For more information see our press kit.
October 2007
Magnify.net attracts publishers looking to build communities around aggregated video content
NEW YORK – October 31, 2007 – Magnify.net, a peer-driven online video discovery and broadcast channel for people, groups and businesses, announced new statistics that point to the growth opportunity for the emerging video curation market.
In October 2007, more than 4,000 new users registered and built content-specific video channels with Magnify.net’s technology.
Twice a month, Magnify.net chooses four sites to feature on its home page – providing new visitors and potential publishers a glimpse at the diverse community of users that have adopted the platform.
Among the sites launched in the past two weeks, Magnify.net is featuring a fast growing ethnic social network, the world’s third largest community of student community service members, a progressive and locally engaged newspaper chain, and a unique e-commerce site for very expensive toys.
The Spanish language site, Que Pasa, added a community news feature, inviting members of its one million-strong registered member base to discover, submit, and share video on the new Que Passa News Network (www.QPNN.com).
QPNN is a carefully curated mix of Hispanic focused news content, user submitted video footage, and targeted feature videos. With the success of QPNN,com, QuePasa is now considering adding a number of other themed video channels to the service, also to be built on the Magnify.net platform.
Executive producer, Patrico Espinoza, chose Magnify.net to build the service after an extensive investigation into the tools and services available in the video space observing, “I thought that Magnify.net was the leader in this space and they continue to provide extraordinary support for the service.”
AIESEC is the world’s largest network of active students and the third largest non-profit organization in the world. The organization realized that there were thousands of videos out there on various posting sites of AIESEC, but there wasn’t a channel for the organization.
Site creator, Andras Bodrog, found Magnify.net easy to implement stating, “It is very user friendly and even more editor friendly. The site is fully customized and extends our brand cosmetically even though the content is mainly user generated.”
Shifting from global to local, the TimeLeader in Wilkes-Barre, PA is using its Magnify.net channel to gather video created about the region from the Web and also from members of its community. The TimesLeader is one of a number of newspaper partners – both local and newspaper chains – that are building video offerings on the Magnify.net platform in order to enhance video around its social network strategy.
AeroHunter, an extreme e-commerce site, added video of private pilots and aircraft owners. AeroHunter is a community for people looking to buy or sell their fixed-wing aircraft. Using Magnify.net, the team at AeroHunter was able to allow visitors to post high-quality video recordings of the aircraft they have for sale.
Magnify.net supports every site with its market-leading free video curation and upload tools and provides free bandwidth and storage to support every customer.
LINKS: 1. http://videos.qpnn.tv/ 2. http://aiesec.magnify.net/ 3. http://timesleader.magnify.net/ 4. http://video.aerohunter.com/
GRAPHICS:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/futureworks/sets/72157602813811081/
About Magnify.net Magnify.net is founded by a team of experienced media, technology and Web development entrepreneurs with a strong track record of best-of-breed innovations. The Magnify.net team is led by Steve Rosenbaum — one of the early innovators in the use of small format video, and user-created video. Rosenbaum created MTV Unfiltered — the first series produced entirely by viewers, and directed the multi-perspective feature Documentary “7 Days in September”. Magnify has been financed by its founders, Venture Capital firm Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, and Active Angels Investors, and a group of private individuals. More information can be found at www.magnify.net
Contact: Alison McNeill FutureWorks PR alison@future-works.com 408-428-0895 Ext. 112 Follow us on Twitter and Jaiku
Link to each: http://www.twitter.com/futureworkspr http://futureworkspr.jaiku.com
magnify.net magnify steve+rosenbaum video curation [MORE »]
NEW YORK – October 31, 2007 – Magnify.net, a peer-driven online video discovery and broadcast channel for people, groups and businesses, announced new statistics that point to the growth opportunity for the emerging video curation market.
In October 2007, more than 4,000 new users registered and built content-specific video channels with Magnify.net’s technology.
Twice a month, Magnify.net chooses four sites to feature on its home page – providing new visitors and potential publishers a glimpse at the diverse community of users that have adopted the platform.
Among the sites launched in the past two weeks, Magnify.net is featuring a fast growing ethnic social network, the world’s third largest community of student community service members, a progressive and locally engaged newspaper chain, and a unique e-commerce site for very expensive toys.
The Spanish language site, Que Pasa, added a community news feature, inviting members of its one million-strong registered member base to discover, submit, and share video on the new Que Passa News Network (www.QPNN.com).
QPNN is a carefully curated mix of Hispanic focused news content, user submitted video footage, and targeted feature videos. With the success of QPNN,com, QuePasa is now considering adding a number of other themed video channels to the service, also to be built on the Magnify.net platform.
Executive producer, Patrico Espinoza, chose Magnify.net to build the service after an extensive investigation into the tools and services available in the video space observing, “I thought that Magnify.net was the leader in this space and they continue to provide extraordinary support for the service.”
AIESEC is the world’s largest network of active students and the third largest non-profit organization in the world. The organization realized that there were thousands of videos out there on various posting sites of AIESEC, but there wasn’t a channel for the organization.
Site creator, Andras Bodrog, found Magnify.net easy to implement stating, “It is very user friendly and even more editor friendly. The site is fully customized and extends our brand cosmetically even though the content is mainly user generated.”
Shifting from global to local, the TimeLeader in Wilkes-Barre, PA is using its Magnify.net channel to gather video created about the region from the Web and also from members of its community. The TimesLeader is one of a number of newspaper partners – both local and newspaper chains – that are building video offerings on the Magnify.net platform in order to enhance video around its social network strategy.
AeroHunter, an extreme e-commerce site, added video of private pilots and aircraft owners. AeroHunter is a community for people looking to buy or sell their fixed-wing aircraft. Using Magnify.net, the team at AeroHunter was able to allow visitors to post high-quality video recordings of the aircraft they have for sale.
Magnify.net supports every site with its market-leading free video curation and upload tools and provides free bandwidth and storage to support every customer.
LINKS: 1. http://videos.qpnn.tv/ 2. http://aiesec.magnify.net/ 3. http://timesleader.magnify.net/ 4. http://video.aerohunter.com/
GRAPHICS:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/futureworks/sets/72157602813811081/
About Magnify.net Magnify.net is founded by a team of experienced media, technology and Web development entrepreneurs with a strong track record of best-of-breed innovations. The Magnify.net team is led by Steve Rosenbaum — one of the early innovators in the use of small format video, and user-created video. Rosenbaum created MTV Unfiltered — the first series produced entirely by viewers, and directed the multi-perspective feature Documentary “7 Days in September”. Magnify has been financed by its founders, Venture Capital firm Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, and Active Angels Investors, and a group of private individuals. More information can be found at www.magnify.net
Contact: Alison McNeill FutureWorks PR alison@future-works.com 408-428-0895 Ext. 112 Follow us on Twitter and Jaiku
Link to each: http://www.twitter.com/futureworkspr http://futureworkspr.jaiku.com
magnify.net magnify steve+rosenbaum video curation [MORE »]
http://blogstring.com, by Nathan, October 28, 2007
Talk about timing. I am just finishing up some work before the big Podcamp Boston kickoff tonight, and just heard about Magnify.net. Magnify.net is a “video curation platform,” allowing people to create online channels to display their video content all over the web. You can create video channels and easily upload video to your site. Since online video communities are hard to distinguish from each other (for instance, Revver is just like YouTube, but you can upload longer videos with Revver), I decided to give this one a test drive to learn how Magnify.net is different from the rest. And since this is podcamp weekend and I’ll be bringing my FlipVideo with me, I can kill two birds with one stone.
Step One: Create a channel. Throw in a username and password, name your channel, and add your site’s address.
Step Two: Describe your channel Enter information about the kind of content you’ll produce. You can also choose whether other users can post video to your channel (I like that idea). You can then upload your logo to make your channel more unique and branded. Here’s the blogstring Magnify.net channel: http://blogstring.magnify.net/
Step Three: Design You can choose from 18 different templates. I’m kind of a sucker for orange, so I picked a theme called creamsicle:
Step Four: Do Stuff. Rather than just uploading your own videos, you have a couple of options: a. “Stock the pond”- Using magnify.net’s “AutoFind” feature, you can have magnify find some videos that are relevant to your channel. For the blogstring channel, I selected web 2.0, tech, and startups as keywords, and autofind found these:
You can then go through the videos in your channel to select which ones belong and which do not. For instance, I want to keep the TechCocktail vids, but want to get rid of one called “e-commerce site owners: we want to interview you.” I click the “trash” link and it is gone. While looking through the vids, I noticed that some are not in English. I can’t seem to find a way to filter by language, but I don’t see that.
b. Search the web to find video for your channel- using the search form, magnify.net will search YouTube, Google, Revver, Blip.TV and Yahoo to aggregate content for your channel.
c. Upload your own- I’ll give that a shot this weekend after I have some podcamp stuff to add.
As a channel admin, you can also add the “Grab a video” browser bookmarklet, which allows you to add videos to your channel right from the browser. So if I’m watching a video and want to add it to my channel, I’ll just click the “Magnify to blogstring” button in my toolbar. I’m curious whether this will work on *any* video site, or whether the site only supports aggregated content from YouTube, Google, Revver, Blip.TV and Yahoo. I’ll check that out.
Magnify.net also incorprates a social media component in the service. As a site editor, your profile lists the videos you’ve submitted and the videos you’ve rated. magnify.net also creates an automatic RSS feed for each site editor, so anyone could subscribe to my feed (both of videos I’ve uploaded and videos I’ve rated).
Step Five: Profit Apart from the features above, there’s a little something called the AdShare network. From a company release:
he new AdShare Network gives site owners complete control over their advertising strategy, including singing up and deploying their own ad inventory. This program lets owners monetize their pages — while balancing the unique needs of their visitors and advertisers.
Right now, Magnify.net offers both AdSense and Revver syndication. In the case of AdSense, you simply add AdSense code to your magnify options and “Your AdSense publisher ID will then be used half of the times that a AdSense ad is shown on your site. The overall revenue share is thus 50% to you and 50% to Magnify.” Here’s how it works for Revver:
Your Revver affiliate ID will be used half of the times that a Revver video is shown on or downloaded from your site. Your Revver affiliate earnings are recorded at Revver, reported through Revver’s affiliate login interface, and paid to you directly by Revver according to their terms and conditions. Revver gives distributors like Magnify and its affiliates a 20% share of the pay-per-click revenue generated by the post-roll advertisement integrated into every Revver video. The overall revenue share is thus 10% to you, 10% to Magnify, 40% to the video creator, and 40% to Revver. (And of course, Revver will continue to pay you the creator’s share for any videos that you personally uploaded.)
Conclusion: Like everything else I review here, I will need more time with the service to work out what I like and dislike. But from a first look perspective, I like the idea of being in control of my own video channel, and I especially like the idea of putting a widget on my blog that shows all of the videos I’ve selected for my channel. And yes, there’s the whole “making money” thing……
Hopefully I’ll get some compelling video content this weekend at podcamp, and can see if magnify.net is right for me. [MORE »]
Step One: Create a channel. Throw in a username and password, name your channel, and add your site’s address.
Step Two: Describe your channel Enter information about the kind of content you’ll produce. You can also choose whether other users can post video to your channel (I like that idea). You can then upload your logo to make your channel more unique and branded. Here’s the blogstring Magnify.net channel: http://blogstring.magnify.net/
Step Three: Design You can choose from 18 different templates. I’m kind of a sucker for orange, so I picked a theme called creamsicle:
Step Four: Do Stuff. Rather than just uploading your own videos, you have a couple of options: a. “Stock the pond”- Using magnify.net’s “AutoFind” feature, you can have magnify find some videos that are relevant to your channel. For the blogstring channel, I selected web 2.0, tech, and startups as keywords, and autofind found these:
You can then go through the videos in your channel to select which ones belong and which do not. For instance, I want to keep the TechCocktail vids, but want to get rid of one called “e-commerce site owners: we want to interview you.” I click the “trash” link and it is gone. While looking through the vids, I noticed that some are not in English. I can’t seem to find a way to filter by language, but I don’t see that.
b. Search the web to find video for your channel- using the search form, magnify.net will search YouTube, Google, Revver, Blip.TV and Yahoo to aggregate content for your channel.
c. Upload your own- I’ll give that a shot this weekend after I have some podcamp stuff to add.
As a channel admin, you can also add the “Grab a video” browser bookmarklet, which allows you to add videos to your channel right from the browser. So if I’m watching a video and want to add it to my channel, I’ll just click the “Magnify to blogstring” button in my toolbar. I’m curious whether this will work on *any* video site, or whether the site only supports aggregated content from YouTube, Google, Revver, Blip.TV and Yahoo. I’ll check that out.
Magnify.net also incorprates a social media component in the service. As a site editor, your profile lists the videos you’ve submitted and the videos you’ve rated. magnify.net also creates an automatic RSS feed for each site editor, so anyone could subscribe to my feed (both of videos I’ve uploaded and videos I’ve rated).
Step Five: Profit Apart from the features above, there’s a little something called the AdShare network. From a company release:
he new AdShare Network gives site owners complete control over their advertising strategy, including singing up and deploying their own ad inventory. This program lets owners monetize their pages — while balancing the unique needs of their visitors and advertisers.
Right now, Magnify.net offers both AdSense and Revver syndication. In the case of AdSense, you simply add AdSense code to your magnify options and “Your AdSense publisher ID will then be used half of the times that a AdSense ad is shown on your site. The overall revenue share is thus 50% to you and 50% to Magnify.” Here’s how it works for Revver:
Your Revver affiliate ID will be used half of the times that a Revver video is shown on or downloaded from your site. Your Revver affiliate earnings are recorded at Revver, reported through Revver’s affiliate login interface, and paid to you directly by Revver according to their terms and conditions. Revver gives distributors like Magnify and its affiliates a 20% share of the pay-per-click revenue generated by the post-roll advertisement integrated into every Revver video. The overall revenue share is thus 10% to you, 10% to Magnify, 40% to the video creator, and 40% to Revver. (And of course, Revver will continue to pay you the creator’s share for any videos that you personally uploaded.)
Conclusion: Like everything else I review here, I will need more time with the service to work out what I like and dislike. But from a first look perspective, I like the idea of being in control of my own video channel, and I especially like the idea of putting a widget on my blog that shows all of the videos I’ve selected for my channel. And yes, there’s the whole “making money” thing……
Hopefully I’ll get some compelling video content this weekend at podcamp, and can see if magnify.net is right for me. [MORE »]
videonuze.com, October 17, 2007
Yesterday I had a chance catch up with Steve Rosenbaum, CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net.
One of the things I really enjoy about being an analyst in the burgeoning broadband video industry is getting first-hand exposure to all the clever innovation that's going on. I find it endlessly fascinating to hear directly from entrepreneurs on the front lines where the kernel of their idea came from which led to their business plan. A user experience issue? A technology deficiency? A business model flaw? Over the years I've heard many stories. Some kernels have real weight, while some don't quite resonate for me.
Magnify.net falls into the former category. My read is that this is a company trying to solve a real problem with a very clever solution and the right "corporate attitude" to make it a likely winner.
Magnify is actually solving a number of real problems, many of which relate to the highly distributed or "Long Tail" nature of the Internet and broadband video. First is that while consumers love broadband video, finding what they want is problematic. Novelty quickly turns to frustration when rummaging through big video sharing sites to find something relevant. No matter how much users want choice, some level of editorial or "curation" is essential to optimize their experience.
Magnify enables existing enthusiast or vertical web sites (whether independent or major media) to obtain video from the best video sharing sites (YouTube, Metacafe, etc.) and coherently present a screened assortment to their users. The sites' use their editorial skills to sort the wheat from the chafe, with easy-to-use admin tools ensuring that no offending video slips through the cracks.
So the second problem Magnify solves is enabling thousands (17,500 and counting to be exact) of sites to provide quality video to their users without the hassle and expense of creating it themselves (the "matchmaker" role). These sites get 50% of the revenue from the ads Magnify sells around the video (or they can keep up to 50% of the inventory to sell themselves), leveraging their audience and subject matter expertise. Incorporating video into web sites is becoming online table stakes. I agree with Steve, in the years ahead, sites without video are going to look "charming".
The only real hole I can find in Magnify's model is that it doesn't currently compensate the content creators themselves (a la Revver for example). However I'd expect that to change as creators upload directly to Magnify and the company's network and traffic builds out over time.
Lastly, I like Steve's attitude. He views the market as an incredibly expanding pie, and not "winner take all." As a result, while there are others who touch on Magnify's space (Brightcove, ROO, VideoEgg, Ning, KickApps, etc.), he's less concerned about competition per se and matching feature-for-feature, but rather on responding to the needs and wants expressed directly by their own user base. Companies that do this ultimately win, regardless of competition.
The Magnify story plays into a number of areas I follow closely - the changing role and power of video distributors, the continued "nichification" of video, the challenge of video discovery and the reliance on ads, not subscription fees. To the extent that their approach succeeds it will further morph traditional video models. For a 10 person company that's only done an angel round, they've accomplished a lot in addressing genuine Long Tail issues in the broadband video industry. (Btw, TechCrunch has 2 great reviews, here and here). [MORE »]
One of the things I really enjoy about being an analyst in the burgeoning broadband video industry is getting first-hand exposure to all the clever innovation that's going on. I find it endlessly fascinating to hear directly from entrepreneurs on the front lines where the kernel of their idea came from which led to their business plan. A user experience issue? A technology deficiency? A business model flaw? Over the years I've heard many stories. Some kernels have real weight, while some don't quite resonate for me.
Magnify.net falls into the former category. My read is that this is a company trying to solve a real problem with a very clever solution and the right "corporate attitude" to make it a likely winner.
Magnify is actually solving a number of real problems, many of which relate to the highly distributed or "Long Tail" nature of the Internet and broadband video. First is that while consumers love broadband video, finding what they want is problematic. Novelty quickly turns to frustration when rummaging through big video sharing sites to find something relevant. No matter how much users want choice, some level of editorial or "curation" is essential to optimize their experience.
Magnify enables existing enthusiast or vertical web sites (whether independent or major media) to obtain video from the best video sharing sites (YouTube, Metacafe, etc.) and coherently present a screened assortment to their users. The sites' use their editorial skills to sort the wheat from the chafe, with easy-to-use admin tools ensuring that no offending video slips through the cracks.
So the second problem Magnify solves is enabling thousands (17,500 and counting to be exact) of sites to provide quality video to their users without the hassle and expense of creating it themselves (the "matchmaker" role). These sites get 50% of the revenue from the ads Magnify sells around the video (or they can keep up to 50% of the inventory to sell themselves), leveraging their audience and subject matter expertise. Incorporating video into web sites is becoming online table stakes. I agree with Steve, in the years ahead, sites without video are going to look "charming".
The only real hole I can find in Magnify's model is that it doesn't currently compensate the content creators themselves (a la Revver for example). However I'd expect that to change as creators upload directly to Magnify and the company's network and traffic builds out over time.
Lastly, I like Steve's attitude. He views the market as an incredibly expanding pie, and not "winner take all." As a result, while there are others who touch on Magnify's space (Brightcove, ROO, VideoEgg, Ning, KickApps, etc.), he's less concerned about competition per se and matching feature-for-feature, but rather on responding to the needs and wants expressed directly by their own user base. Companies that do this ultimately win, regardless of competition.
The Magnify story plays into a number of areas I follow closely - the changing role and power of video distributors, the continued "nichification" of video, the challenge of video discovery and the reliance on ads, not subscription fees. To the extent that their approach succeeds it will further morph traditional video models. For a 10 person company that's only done an angel round, they've accomplished a lot in addressing genuine Long Tail issues in the broadband video industry. (Btw, TechCrunch has 2 great reviews, here and here). [MORE »]
Magnify.net is launching its latest release, which lets you 'curate' content for its video aggregating and sharing platform. What this amounts to is the ability to better control the content that's shown on your Magnify network. There's a new browser plug-in lets you grab videos as you surf the web, and currently supports videos from YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe, Daily Motion and Blip.tv.
You can also allow multiple editors to manage and sort videos with the expanded curator logins, and icon customization options let you replace Magnify [MORE »]
You can also allow multiple editors to manage and sort videos with the expanded curator logins, and icon customization options let you replace Magnify [MORE »]
Video discovery and broadcast service Magnify.net has launched a new platform for the aggregation of web video.
The new platform offers [MORE »]
The new platform offers [MORE »]
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