What they're saying about Magnify

For more information see our press kit.

February 2009

Folio, by Vanessa Voltolina, February 17, 2009
Partnership to provide new platform, “curate” video from outside sources.

Magnify.net is expected to announce tomorrow a partnership with New York magazine's nymag.com to build and deploy a Web 2.0 video service. Magnify will build a custom video player and provide encoding, discovery and “curation.”

The platform allows publishers to integrate user-generated video, their own video or video from alternate sources—and build a large collection of video content without the cost of producing all original video. Nymag.com has already made significant in-house investments in video (video.nymag.com). (It is currently served by platform provider The Feedroom in a partnership will expire in March.)

The partnership with Magnify will start April 1.

“The Magnify platform offers all the key player customization and video content management features we need for our own video production, plus the ability to aggregate and curate video from around the Web that fits our brand and our users’ interests,” said Michael Silberman, general manger of digital media for New York Media, New York Magazine’s parent company. “Magnify will give our users and our advertisers a great new video experience.”

The idea of curated video content is an emerging one. “That video can be sourced, and appropriate video published from both user submissions and the wider Web is one that is taking hold quickly for publishers across the Web,” said Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum noted one current client, Reader’s Digest’s Taste of Home, provides 85 to 90 percent of its video content from outside sources.

For Paul Sweeting, editor at Reed Business Information’s Content Agenda, there are “certain sources that we know produce a lot of videos that work for us, such as TechTicker and blip.tv, so we tend to draw on those a lot,” he told FOLIO:. “We also group videos under specific topic areas to make them easier to find.”

It also helps with the problem of advertisers shying away from user generated content. “Ad agencies we’ve spoken with say, ‘We don’t want to advertise on the same page as unreviewed user generated content,’” Rosenbaum said. But with curated video content, they are generally more comfortable doing so.

While Magnify declined to reveal the cost of the platform, Rosenbaum said that in all cases publishers are paying significantly below $10 per thousand pages. [MORE »]
Spark Minute, by David Spark, February 07, 2009
On this blog, whenever I want to share a video I write a blog post and embed the video. And if there’s a related video I provide a link to another blog post with that video. If I want to connect multiple videos I have to provide multiple links.

But if I put up a skateboarding video, chances are you’ll be interested in seeing another skateboarding video. So why not put those videos back to back? Such a solution is possible with both Embedr and Magnify.net. The two work in different ways.

Magnify lets you create a skateboarding page/portal (see example) where all your favorite videos reside plus additional information and pictures. Embedr lets you create a video channel, that’s embeddable on your site or blog. I queued up six skateboarding videos that were sitting in my YouTube favorites. Now they’re available for anyone to watch on my blog. [MORE »]