SAN JOSE, Calif. -– Who will be the next YouTube? Steve Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify, gave a clear, simple answer to the audience at the Web Video Summit here: “You.”
Rosenbaum said that rather than the big media concentration of traditional network television, there will be thousands if not millions of video channels and platforms on the Web in years to come. His company Magnify.net is designed to be an enabler of vertical or niche content video sites, currently at over 6,000 and growing rapidly. The company also offers content creators a 50/50 share of ad revenue.
Magnify.net was one of several start-ups and more established firms on hand Wednesday at Web Video Summit (owned by Jupitermedia, the parent company of this Web site). At Magnify.net, the most trafficked site is RC Universe with a whopping 300,000 registered users. The site caters to videos like this of radio controlled airplanes and cars.
Rosenbaum had a receptive audience, as there was plenty of buzz about user-generated video and the tools to create them at the show.
And expect to hear more about this topic. “You can’t talk too much about Web video right now, I believe it’s one of the biggest markets of the next decade,” Alex Lindsay, chief architect at
The reason Lindsay thinks the market opportunity is so huge is because for all the popularity of YouTube and other video-related sites, the potential has barely been tapped. “Everything will eventually need a video component or companion and I’d say over 99 percent of that work hasn’t been done yet.”
Larry Irving, a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information under Bill Clinton, said video is the killer consumer application that will continue to find its way into the corporate world as well. “Seven out of ten Americans already say they stream video,” said Irving, who runs his own telecom consulting firm and is co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance.
The IIA is a coalition of non-profit organizations and businesses promoting universal broadband access. Irving told internetnews.com that part of the reason for his group’s existence is to make broadband access and speed in the U.S. more competitive with the rest of the world. “What we have now is unacceptable,” he said.
While pre-recorded videos are far more prevalent on the Web, a company called uStream.tv is promoting a platform that enables live broadcast over the Internet.
“Live is interesting because so may things can happen, you can be surprised and there’s more anticipation,” said uStream.tv CEO Chris Yeh. “And we enable interactivity.”
