What they're saying about Magnify

Magnify Opens Their Crown Jewels to the Public 9/18/08 Posted By: Andy

Magnify.net is a video publishing platform that makes it easy for you to integrate user-generated video, video that you produce, or video that you discover into your website. They provide a platform for you to tell your story through video and according to a recent press release:

…in less than 18 months they’ve become the largest provide of site-specific video aggregation solutions for publishers, brands, and Web-based communities. The results can be seen in the dramatic increase of Magnify-powered channels (now over 42,000), Magnify-hosted page views (approaching 1 million per day) and videos posted by the Magnify platform (now more than 5 million per month).

They’re in the news this week because they’re opening up their API to free the content in their ecosystem of 50M videos and enabling the content created, discovered and published in Magnify to be taken anywhere.

You can see the API in action here:

* http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/
 • http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/more.php
 • http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/playlists.php

This is essentially the same API in service today for 15 of the web’s most popular video hosting services included in Magnify’s service such as: YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Hulu, MySpace, Blip.tv, Google Video, Revver, Yahoo Video, AOL Video, ClipSyndicate, MTV, CollegeHumor, Redlasso, and Howcast.

Imagine what’s possible when the community of web developers gets their hands on the API? I can hardly wait! [MORE »]

Channels for Everyone IPTV International By Howard Greenfield

Channels everywhere for everyone. That's what's ahead, according to companies such as Magnify and Ustream.

In the good old days, channels carried a succession of linear programming that viewers could watch each hour. Today, TV programming is available online from the likes of Hulu, NBC and BBC iPlayer. 'Channels' are being re-defined as always-on web video destinations. But will there ever be an audience large enough to tune into so many channels and give everyone their 15 minutes of fame? And how long can the internet handle the exploding video traffic load before ISPs begin metering transmission costs to viewers?

YouTube has proven there is a massive audience for the individual clips - from catapulting squirrels to movie trailers to political rants. Now Magnify and Ustream are among companies making it possible for anyone to create a channel featuring on-demand or live video streams with built-in social networking features.

Magnify provides user-generated video channels for web publishers, media companies and video bloggers. Ustream's broadcast platform lets you cut and paste its live viewer player's HTML code in to any website (Facebook or MySpace page) for private or public showing.

....continued (follow link)

http://www.magnify.net/decor/announcements/Channels-For-Everyone-0908.pdf [MORE »]

Magnify APIs Open the Web’s Largest Video Aggregation and Curation Platform to Developers Developers can further customize, export, and mashup hosted social video communities

NEW YORK -- Sept. 16, 2008 -- Magnify.net today released a series of APIs that that frees its branded channels functionality from its layout.. All content that is discovered, currated and published on your Magnify.net channel can now be taken anywhere.

With the new APIs, developers can display videos and also add functionality that allows visitors to search, browse browse playlists, view comments and ratings, and see user profiles on their own domain or in branded Web applications.

In less than 18 months, Magnify.net has become the largest provider of site-specific video aggregation solutions for publishers, brands, and Web-based communities. The results can be seen in the dramatic increase of Magnify-powered channels (now over 42,000), Magnify-hosted page views (approaching 1 million per day) and videos posted by the Magnify platform (now more than 5 million per month).

Combined, the power and flexibility of the platform has made it a natural choice for publishers like Readers Digest have adopted the service for their fast growing user-based cooking site - TasteOfHome.com.

Now, Magnify.net is giving the developer community direct access to the service via the new Channel Access APIs.

"We have always known that there were folks out there who were looking to mix and match features, page designs, and functionality in ways that we didn't support with our hosted solution,” said Magnify.net CTO Simon Cavalletto. “Now that we’re releasing APIs into the wild, we're enthusiastic to see what developers will cook up using our data and metasearch technology. “

The new API gives developers the ability to use search, playlists, display comments, retrieve user profile information and more.

Features of the Channel Access API include:

- Allows customers to automatically retrieve information from their Magnify channel and display it on their own web site.
 • Enables tighter integration between the video functionality provided by Magnify and the other capabilities of a customer's web site.
 • Includes ability to search video content library, to browse through playlists, to display videos with user comments, and to show user profile information.
 • Standards-based REST-style API provides XML feeds over HTTP, allowing access from almost any software development platform.

Also included in this release is a simple cookie-based Single Sign On solution. SSO has been highly anticipated by the Magnify.net customer base.

Features of the Cookie SSO mechanism include:

- Allows customers who already have a database of user login accounts to seamless tie their Magnify channel into that system.
 • Users only ever sign in at the customer's main site, and every user who signs in there is automatically recognized
 • Lightweight implementation takes advantage of customers' existing authentication mechanisms.

The APIs are part of the new "Developers Toolbox" - designed to bring the power of video to Publishers, Brands, and Web communities in a flexible and manageable suite of solutions.

Said Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum, “we're constantly blown away by just how creative and talented our user community is. Now, we've given them far greater control over how to build and manage their video solution - and we have every reason to believe they'll build awesomely cool things with the new APIs.”

You can see the API in action here:

http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/ http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/more.php http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/playlists.php

Magnify aggregates, uploads, and facilitates curation on more than 42,000 sites, delivering a million page views per day. Fifteen of the Web's most popular video hosting services are included in Magnify's service, including: YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Hulu, MySpace, Blip.tv, Google Video, Revver, Yahoo Video, AOL Video, ClipSyndicate, MTV, CollegeHumor, Redlasso, and Howcast. [MORE »]

Magnify's New Multi-View Player allows both uploaded and discovered video to play on your site, in a single player. Puts fast growing pre-roll revenue in the hand of all site owners

September 16, 2008 – New York City – Web publishers adopting video have been dealing with two worlds, the video they create and upload to their professional players and the video discovered on the internet and embedded in their pages.

The New Magnify Multi-View Player (MVP) brings these two worlds together, providing a seamless player experience that allows sites to blend in-house content and discovered video into a consistent player experience.

The MVP player brings sites a complete video solution, embeddable player, back end upload, database management, curation, and moderation tools required to launch and grow a robust video community on your site. Magnify.net customers are finding that the impact of adding video is immediate - as Readers Digest site "TasteOfHome.com" discovered when they added Magnify.net video. They've seen a 50% increase in video views since the sites video channel launched in late August.

Magnify.net's video search and aggregation technology is growing rapidly as well, with now more than 5 million videos being added to channels each month.

Said Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum, of the MVP launch, "We've had a large number of requests from customers to be able to embed a Magnify.net style player on their pages. Now, with the MVP we can offer all of the features people have come to expect from our ASP model, but do so on-page with an iframe implementation.”

The New Player is offered in a number of colors and sizes as part of Magnify.net's free service. Magnify.net shares ad impressions on a 50/50 basis in this offering. There are additional features including customizable logo's and skinable player offered in the paid Pro and Enterprise offers.

Among the features of the Multi-View Player that leapfrog the marketplace:

- Offered in a range of sizes from 860 x 510 to 370 x 665
 • Includes both horizontal and vertical layouts
 • Choose from three color themes or "skins"
 • Magnify will also create custom skins for Enterprise customers
 • Add your custom logo
 • Choose which playlists from your channel should be shown
 • Plays a short video ad before in-house and user-generated videos.
 • No pre-rolls are shown before third-party syndicated videos
 • Integrates with DoubleClick's DART to obtain pre-roll video ads and synchronized companion ad banners.

The Magnify Multi-View Player is part of the new "Developers Toolbox" - designed to bring the power of video to publishers, brands, and web communities in a flexible and manageable suite of solutions.

About Magnify.net Magnify.net hosts more than 42,000 video channels for its Enterprise, Pro and Free customers. Magnify's video platform allows websites to easily add custom branded video channels to their existing sites. Please visit Magnify.net for more information on our custom video solutions for websites.

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Press Contact: Rebecca Reeve Rebecca@future-works.com (415) 240-8951 [MORE »]

Magnify MVP Merges Self-Uploaded Video with the Best of the Web MG Siegler September 16th, 2008

Magnify is the site that wants to be the one-stop-shop for all your web video needs. Not only does it allow you upload videos, but it allows you to make playlists including videos from other top sites including YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu and others. The problem was that the videos from other sites were separate from the video you uploaded to your own players on Magnify. Now the two sides are merging.

Magnify Multi-View Player (MVP) allows users to take the content they upload and merge it with their favorite videos from around the web. Playlists make the merging of these videos seamless and they can be placed on any other site. Magnify offers a new embeddable player that can be customized.

Alongside these new features, Magnify will also be opening their application programming interface (API) so users can take the data from their Magnify channels and put it on their own sites.

More options is always a good thing, and the fact that Magnify gives you a place to create a best-of web video of sorts is nice. But this MVP feature still doesn’t make Magnify YouTube. It lacks one key quality that YouTube excels in: An insane amount of users who watch an absurd amount of videos. But Magnify seems to be doing okay for itself, as it claims over 5 million videos being added to its channels each month.

Earlier this year, the site added professional tools for video creators as well as social networking elements for users. Numbers from Compete (which are far from perfect) show it growing at a pretty nice clip since then in terms of site visits. [MORE »]

Magnify Releases New 2.0 Video Solution

Magnify is launching a new all-around 2.0 video solution for Web publishers. The expanded Magnify Multi-View Player, set to be announced this morning, aims to give blogs the ability to post their own videos — either by administrators or by end-users — and also embed other video from the Internet seamlessly within their sites. Similar to competitors such as Brightcove, the goal is to create an individual “video community” of sorts, with custom channels and moderation options specific to each blog.

Magnify’s new player offers a pre-roll adserver integration option, letting you insert your own pre-roll ads before your content if you so choose. It can be linked with DoubleClick’s DART service for tracking purposes or can be used with Magnify as a pre-roll ad server. (In that instance, Magnify splits revenue 50-50 with you.)

The MVP, as it’s being branded, can be downloaded and installed with some options, such as color and size customization, for free. To get customizable logos and skins, though, you do have to pay for an advanced package.

So far, Magnify claims more than 42,000 video channels hosted on its servers. The company has been around since 2006 and is headquartered in New York. [MORE »]

Magnify Releases New Multi-View Player (MVP) September 16, 2008 By Doriano "Paisano" Carta

Magnify is releasing a Multi-View Player (MVP) that will allow Web publishers to blend their own in-house video content with video content from external sources in one seamless video player. This dual purpose player will be a welcome tool for members of the Magnify video search and aggregation service.

It provides a complete video solution and embeddable player that allows you to grow a robust video community on your site. This eliminates the need to maintain separate players for the original video content you’ve created as well as the video content that you’ve accumulated from other sites. The MVP can handle both forms of content.

The player is part of Magnify’s Developer Toolbox and comes in a variety of colors and sizes with the Magnify free account. The Professional and Enterprise accounts offer more features such as a customizable logo and skinable player with different themes. You can select which playlists to use from your channels. The player can have a vertical or horizontal layout depending on where you want to embed it.

Short ads are played at the beginning of your video stream, whether it’s original content or from another source. Magnify shares ad impressions on a 50/50 basis with members no matter which plan they choose. The MVP player could very well lead to greater success for everyone involved, including site visitors. [MORE »]

Magnify.net Launches MVP Video Player Written by Allen Stern - September 16, 2008

NY-based Magnify.net has announced the launch of their new MVP video player today. The MVP player (multi-view player) allows site publishers to bring together content created by their community with other Internet shared videos into one player. The player can be set to a variety of sizes and themes.

Magnify's MVP player includes a 50/50 split on ads displayed. One interesting note regarding the ads -- site publishers can select to serve pre- or post-roll ads in the videos that originate on their network. The video ads are served by DoubleClick's DART service.

The new Magnify player seems a bit similar to Kyte's player in terms of customization and options. Kyte offers chat within the video player along with more media options (e.g. images, live video, etc.) while the injected ad on Magnify's player allows Web publishers to generate additional revenue from ads that are served below the video channel.

Magnify self-reports over 5 million videos added to the social networks they serve each month. Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

Update: I met with Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum last night at an event in NYC and he mentioned a few things about the new player that I thought were worth sharing. He noted regarding the idea of the new Magnify.net player going for the big player market:

"We don't believe that all video players are created equal. If you've got a huge video collection, than a player that serves your videos is what you need. There are already a number of good products that do that, Brightcove, Maven, Blip.tv."

I also asked him about how he describes what's new in the player:

"As a video aggregation player - we're the first in the market. We think that being able to find, curate, and present video from multiple sources is a powerful new way to increase page views and therefore revenue." [MORE »]

New Multi-View Video Player from Magnify By Shawn Collins Sep 16, 2008

The New Magnify Multi-View Player (MVP), which enables affiliate sites to blend their own video content with relevant third-party videos in a consistent player experience.

The MVP player brings sites a complete video solution, embeddable player, back end upload, database management, curation, and moderation tools required to launch and grow a video community.

“We’ve had a large number of requests from customers to be able to embed a Magnify.net style player on their pages. Now, with the MVP we can offer all of the features people have come to expect from our ASP model, but do so on-page with an iframe implementation,” stated Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum.

Magnify.net is also providing an increased flexibility for managing pre-roll ads.

Some features of the Multi-View Player and Pre-Roll offering:

* New player is offered in a number of colors and sizes at no cost
 • Customizable logos and skinable players are offered in the Pro and Enterprise packages
 • Offered in a range of sizes and includes both horizontal and vertical layouts
 • Ability to choose which playlists from your channel should be shown
 • Plays a short video ad before in-house and user-generated videos
 • No pre-rolls are shown before third-party syndicated videos
 • Integrates with DoubleClick’s DART to obtain pre-roll video ads and synchronized companion ad banners

More details on the Magnify.net blog. [MORE »]