In the wake of YouTube fully embracing HD video online video aggregator WorldTV hopes to take advantage by turning all embedded online video into a, linear, TV-like experience. The end-game is to funnel all this web video towards the next generation of Browser-enabled, WIFI-capable TV sets. To that end Ireland-based WorldTV has added a new EPG feature and hit 100,000 channels.
The new EPG feature has arisen after users suggested it and allows viewers to browse other channels while watching an existing channel, and to browse the videos within a channel, something not previously possible. Future updates will allow users to pick and choose which channels appear in the EPG on their channel, in effect allowing anyone to create their own TV network of channels. The experience is much closer to a TV one and that’s important.
In some sense WorldTV is going up against other user-generated video sites like YouTube, Magnify.net and Kyte.tv. But the difference is that this has been built from the ground-up to actually work on a TV. Alx Klive, Founder and CEO says they are now aiming head-long at an open platform for TV sets.
Next year TVs will start to appear with WiFi built in, and almost certainly simple Linux-based operating systems. Significantly, the Opera browser is the only browser company to exhibit at all the major TV trade shows. While other video sites are concentrating on clips, WorldTV is going for a more linear, TV-like experience that will ultimately work on gaming consoles or simple TV set browsers.
There are clearly people who like it. The service now has about 100,000 channels created by 70,000 users in 190 countries and has about 600k uniques per month. Users don’t upload video to WorldTV – they add it from Google video, YouTube, Metacafe, Myspace or AOL.
WorldTV recently added an advertising platform where revenues are shared with users. That, and the fact that the site has reduced staff to 5 and cut burn rate by 50% means they are now in month of breaking even, they say.
That’s just as well. A fund-raising exercise this year has drawn a blank – largely due to the downturn – so the site is still boostrapping and aiming to run on revenues for longer.
Trust me – everybody who programs in any language is a monkey. Have you actually used any software lately? It all sucks rocks – even most of the OSS stuff. but you see for home http://www.liginmaclari.blogcu.com
Oh please. You have bought some marketing spin. The traffic numbers are hardly stellar and in order to use the site at all – all new visitors “create” a “channel”
Not true. From the homepage you can create a channel or watch channels. You do not need to create a channel to watch channels.
Also Compete.com graph only shows US traffic and is woefully inaccurate (by a factor of 6 in this case).
Alx Klive Thanks You http://tinyurl.com/4rdhmc
HI,
With respect to all the other great partricipants in this nascent market, and all our long-held visions, Sumo.tv’s been doing this for a few years already, before the recent re-trenchment.
Also:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/sumo.tv+worldtv.com/?metric=uv
When I say “this”, I mean individual users “programming” there own programme streams/channels composed of web-clips which are then broadcast on a real broadcast television channel In the UK and some other areas of the world.
The same for being available on mobile without dependency on walled-gardens, but also available on Orange, O2, etc in different parts of the world as part of an operator service.
It was even doing Qik/Ustream-like live streaming before those other companies existed and the world woke up to the potential, thougn it now reserves that for special occasions.
Kind regards,
AT
Glad to see the WorldTV guys doing good work in the video aggregation space… there’s plenty of room in this pond!
Just to clarify Magnify.net’s view on all this – we’re not sure we can clearly define what will be ‘tv’ and what will be ‘web’ when all screens are connected to broadband. Our guess is that there will be ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ experiences, all delivered by broadband.
A few points of distinction – while we think agregation is important, and underserved in the market, our partners don’t want to force visitors who want to share with them to upload to a 3rd party host. So Magnify.net provides both upload and aggregation, as well as mobile upload and geo-tagging and full ‘pixel perfect’ css matching and web layout tools.
We totally dig the vision of Magnify.net channels on our living room flatscreen – but given the history of this evolution… we think it’s still a bit of a way out.
That said – happy to see World TV pushing the Flat Screen evolution… more power too them!
As far as YouTube and video aggregation I think this looks very interesting… http://www.yourtubemanagement.com