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Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses
- OmarIsmail 15y agoAs a fellow entrepreneur from sunny Waterloo, Ontario I've had the pleasure of interacting with michaelrlitt and what I can say is that these guys are going to be big. There's obviously a lot of competition in this space and everybody has good technology under their belt. But what sets these guys apart is that they really get sales and marketing and that's exactly the service they're providing. I have no doubt these guys are going to crush it.
- zabeth24 15y agoUsing vidyard on my site and Tumblr blog. Best part is seeing the viewing analytics.
- michaelrlitt 15y agoThanks (I'm a founder). We're super glad you're getting value!
- jcc80 15y agoI like the site - very nice. Has a somewhat similar look to mine...only better (http://www.growtap.com http://www.growtap.com). Well done.
- tommy_mcclung 15y agoWe're using them as well. We like the ability to queue up videos in the player. Has helped conversions. We also found out that the average attention span was just about 20 seconds on a 90 second vid, so we cut it down to 15 seconds. Cool stuff.
- ccollins 15y agoVimeo recently released Vimeo Pro (http://vimeo.com/pro http://vimeo.com/pro) which seems to be addressing a similar market. Is Vidyard competing with Vimeo or are you addressing a different need?
- michaelrlitt 15y agoIt's directly competitive. We've bundled in more features (chaptering, real-time analytics, player customization, etc.) that should make it much more compelling. We're also an easy implementation of YouTube Chromeless + analytics.
- ig1 15y agoPretty poor journalism, the article is written as if there were no alternatives to youtube for hosting. There are a couple of dozen companies in the video hosting/serving space from Brightcove to Viddler. Wikipedia even has a "List of video hosting services" page. What makes this company different ?
- michaelrlitt 15y agoOur focus is on consolidating your web video. Many companies leverage YouTube, that makes sense. We help them kill the outbound link created by the YouTube embed on their site. You can host with us or YouTube and your video players will all look the same.
- justinph 15y agoSo, essentially you're a front-end on the YouTube API?
- michaelrlitt 15y agoIt's part of the product - customers are using it to transition from YouTube to a more professional (no outbound link, real-time data, customization, etc.) video platform (us).
- shad0wfax 15y agoIt is not very clear from your website so have a few questions: - do you transcode on your servers to support different devices? - it appears from the techcrunch article your PC based players are using RTMP. which essentially is a flash based solution(?). Is there a html5 based solution as well? - Is there support for livestreaming or is this just progressive download? - How are you different from these services: Brightcove/Ooyala/Panvidea/etc...
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- philipkimmey 15y agoThis is why I love Hacker News - although there are other options out there, their feature set (and pricing) pretty much perfectly describes what I was looking for. I don't know whether this will be the eventual solution vs. ZenCoder (or something similar) and S3, but this certainly seems like a potential option.
- matdwyer 15y agoMaybe I'm just cheap, but I don't see the pricing as very attractive relative to the free options available. I'm saying that from a relatively small business that is looking to do more video perspective. I'm small enough to be able to host this myself with my own player and not have problems, and not large enough to see the value in $20 or $50 a month. I could see doing the free trial, but 1 video makes it not seem as attractive to me. If I were you I'd consider doing the trial for a certain number of views instead of the 1 video - that way your true functionality grows with the views (and value) coming to the business. If it were 5000 views a month or something then I get to use the cue up features, see the analytics, etc, but when I'm doing xxxx number of views a month on the videos then I'm more likely to drop the money and convert to a paid plan. Anyway, just my opinion, but I doubt my monthly small business video hosting will ever be nearing the cost of my invoicing system...
- jeffreymcmanus 15y agoAlmost anytime you see a product and your reaction is "I could do that myself slightly more cheaply," it means that that product isn't intended for your use.
- matdwyer 15y agoTouche. I say that a lot :-) But there are things I could easily do for cheaper that I still happily pay for - example freshbooks & formstack
- michaelrlitt 15y agoWe funnel all of our encoding through ZenCoder (it's an awesome service). Our focus is on the simplicity of putting video online.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y agoArticle says they're using RTMP streaming. Doesn't that mean it won't work on iPhone/iPad because there's no Flash there?
- michaelrlitt 15y agoWe do HTML5 fall back for iOS/Android devices.
- jordanroher 15y agoWhat was behind the decision to use Starbucks' size names for your plans? I really like the site and the prices are reasonable, but the thought of signing up for a "Venti" video hosting service doesn't sound appealing to me.
- michaelrlitt 15y agoGood feedback. We needed some way to refer to the plans on calls, this was an easy solution.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoThe usual solutions of Bronze/Silver/Gold work rather well for that and have the advantage of self-evident meanings and widespread usage. If you want something more amusing, you might try a movie or video metaphor.
- bdesimone 15y agoThis. 100x this. Not only only does it personally rub me the wrong way, but also it is confusing to people who don't have Starbucks in their country. Venti means 20. Grande means big. Short means...what the hell? What am I buying here?
- tlogan 15y agoI have been wondering why YouTube have not started something like this. BTW, there is also http://vidcaster.com http://vidcaster.com which doing the same thing. Vimeo is doing the same thing now. Personally, I think if you have multiple sites, then with Adobe Suite and Amazon CloudFront and a few dollars on odesk you can make excellent "video presentation" site for your business. Maybe there is a market for even more customizable service? Something like heroku for Video/FAQ/Tour part of your site?
- jpdoctor 15y agoAn entire company built around an incremental change to youtube/vimeo/100 other video sites?! Really?
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- cal5k 15y agoAn entire company built around yet another version of Friendster/MySpace/Orkut? Facebook will never pan out.
- jammur 15y agoDepends what the incremental change is. If the change results in increased conversion rates, then it sounds like a legitimate business to me. Most businesses would be more than willing to pay for a small change if it results in them making more money.
- bretthopper 15y agoSproutVideo (http://www.sproutvideo.com http://www.sproutvideo.com) is already well established and probably their closest competitor as opposed to Vimeo PRO.
- podman 15y agoHi, founder of SproutVideo here! There are a ton of players in this space. Here are some others: http://vzaar.com http://vzaar.com http://viddler.com http://viddler.com http://fliqz.com http://fliqz.com http://wistia.com http://wistia.com http://dovie.tv http://dovie.tv Edit: I'd also like to congratulate the founders of VidYard on their product. It looks great. Good luck you guys!
- cwhepburn 15y agoSproutVideo's pricing model seems a little mis-aligned in the space with Vidyard and Vimeo Pro. Half the bandwidth for double the price? If you know anything about bandwidth, $1/GB seems excessive.
- podman 15y agoVidYard and Vimeo Pro are both incredibly new offerings. If you look at just about every single established player you'll see that they have very similar pricing models to SproutVideo. VidYard and Vimeo Pro's pricing models seem to be based on the assumption that the majority of their users will not use that much bandwidth.
- seliopou 15y agoWistia customer here (correct url: http://wistia.com http://wistia.com). I haven't used any of the other products listed here (it's the first time I've heard of any of them), but I will say that Wistia has a nice clean player, awesome web app, and amazing customer service.
- Terretta 15y agoSproutVideo: http://www.sproutvideo.com/ http://www.sproutvideo.com/ And Vively: http://www.vive.ly/ http://www.vive.ly/ EDIT: Sorry, I noticed SproutVideo founder's list was missing SproutVideo; I failed to notice it was in the grandparent.
- iamelgringo 15y agohttp://VidCaster.com http://VidCaster.com has been building branded pages for companies for well over a year. We've been using them for http://hackersandfounders.tv http://hackersandfounders.tv for months, and we've been thrilled. VidCaster's also more than just a wrapper around the YouTube API. They let you import the videos that are already on YouTube and Vimeo, and move them over to VidCaster's streaming service. Crazy good service. Team has been working with online video for years. Also, VidCaster just demoed at 500 Startups last week and already has paying clients like Microsoft, ZenDesk AirBnb, Twilio, etc... What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies. I suppose it's nice to have Arrington as the LP of one of your investors (SV Angel).
- awfycooper 15y agoNot cool man, really not cool. Hi-jacking is a lacking-services way of advertising.
- olivercameron 15y agoThis trend of other companies trying to hijack other companies launches is really disappointing, especially when said company is in your incubator. Why not submit something for Vidcaster separately?
- ig1 15y agoIt's perfectly reasonable to discuss competitors in a thread discussing the announcement of a new company/product, we should of course keep such discussion civil and respectful, but HN is a discusion site not a cheerleading one.
- cal5k 15y agoWhy the hate-on for Vidyard? It was founded a bunch of smart young guys from Waterloo with a passion for building a good product... I, for one, think it's great that they got a writeup in TC.
- prayag 15y ago>What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies. I suppose it's nice to have Arrington as the LP of one of your investors (SV Angel). That's just bull-shit. Just because they covered your competitor doesn't mean you get to talk shit about the coverage. In addition, I just don't get why are you getting so excited about this. You know who is eating your lunch, not VidYard, it's YouTube and the Sales executive who don't know any better than uploading video on YouTube. You have a common enemy called ignorance. Instead of getting riled up about competition may be you guys should work together.
- metachris 15y agoI've just seen the pool-party video which appears after clicking on any of the pictures on the about page (https://secure.vidyard.com/about_us https://secure.vidyard.com/about_us). It's weird, and the background music reminds me of erotic movies. I understand that you want to come across as young and dynamic, but I'm not sure this is bringing the message across for your target audience. Edit: Downvoters, please explain. I didn't mean to insult, but am offering honest feedback on a perceived weak spot - one which I fear could impair the founders intention to make the right impression on their target audience.
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- michaelrlitt 15y agoThanks for the insight - we'll definitely change it, we just thought it was something fun for launch :)
- metachris 15y agoDidn't mean to take out the fun - I'd recommend to think about changing at least the music though :) Good luck with your startup! I really like what you are doing; this market is ripe for some innovation.
- scotje 15y agoPersonally, I find the "Pricing" line of the comparison chart to be misleading. For $199 (a year) you get 50GB of space and 250k views with Vimeo Pro. Under the Free Viyard plan you get 1 video and 101GB of bandwidth. Also, the "Unbranded Player" line of the comparison is checked for Vidyard even though the pricing page says the Free plan uses a branded player. Maybe just get rid of that pricing line in the comparison?
- michaelrlitt 15y agoWill do! Thanks for the positive feedback.
- anandkulkarni 15y agoThe branding opportunity for online videos here is huge. It looks like YouTube missed a large niche here that Vidyard's going to eat up.
- ryanjmo 15y agoYouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Not using them for your embedded videos (and getting the extra views on your site that will launch you higher in search) could be a mistake for many businesses. If you want to prevent click throughs, after the video starts to play, just put up an invisible div over the video, but above the controls, so the user can't click through, but can still controle the video. Once the video ends, pop up whatever you want if you don't want their recommended videos to show. Best of both worlds.
- michaelrlitt 15y agoThat's a good solution for devs. Many of our customers aren't technical and like having a customized player + instant detailed analytics + landing page creation + chaptering, etc.
- throwaway32 15y agohttp://www.youtube.com/t/terms http://www.youtube.com/t/terms See clause 4F, doing this would result in Youtube blocking your site from embedding, and would possibly result in a "google death penalty", definitely not a good idea.
- chedigitz 15y agoLooks like a Compelling offering! Congrats on the techcrunch coverage. A key selling point in platform selection is YouTube's massive traffic, while tons of other platforms may win based on the feature set, at the end of the day, the views are on YouTube. Vidyard seems to be playing the youtube traffic angle well by allowing the videos to remain on YouTube while wrapping the YT API + chrome less layer. GOOD WORK by you! I'll be testing out that 100GB cap soon.
- mdasen 15y agoI have a few questions that the Vidyard site doesn't seem to address (that I'd need answers to in order to sell it to my boss). 1) The "Venti" plan says "unlimited videos". Does that mean that there's no storage quota? If there is no storage quota, how would you make money off of a large customer? Like, we have a decently sizable video library (about 250GB and it grows by about 25GB each year) and it isn't that high trafficked, but I can see a video library like our's becoming a burden on your service. 2) Do you support captions for the videos? 3) Is there any way to export our data out of the system? 4) Is there any API in case we want/need some further customization in front of it? Your service looks excellent, but what makes me so hesitant is that it seems potentially low-to-no-margin and my boss would want to know that we aren't getting into a service that's destined to raise prices or cut us off.
- michaelrlitt 15y agoGreat questions re: price and margins. The unlimited videos is achievable both through the scale with the number of videos we host; along with scaling of the file-size post-encoding. 2) Captions are currently not supported - would you be looking for transcriptions on the videos, or time-coded captions based on the point in the video? We're working on some cool features for time-coded commenting that probably covers what you're looking for. 3) Data can definitely be exported - but unfortunately it's not something we've implemented into the tool quite yet. Would be happy to manually support in the meantime. 4) A Player API (for custom controls), Wizard API (for player setup and design), and Content API (for uploading) are in the works. Assuming from the question it's a player controls API you'd need.
- mdasen 15y agoSo, we actually have time-coded captions for some of our library. It's more just a place to upload the caption file and have it served by the player. Although, now that you mention it I'm not personally thrilled with the service we use so more power to you! And it's nice to know that 3 and 4 are on your radar for the future. I tend to trust YC backed companies not to do the evil vendor lock-in type things, but it can be a hard sell to my boss who has gotten burned many times by vendors that promise the world, we put our content in, deliver poorly, and then we're stuck. Good Luck!
- rorrr 15y agoYet another startup with tons of competitors and no real innovation.
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- Shenglong 15y agoYour pricing says $40 per 100 GB, up to 3 TB, but your Grande plan is only $20, which also includes 100GB. You also make the claim that for most businesses, that 100GB is enough bandwidth - which I assume means businesses that go over probably do so on account of multiple videos. If one video of mine in particular was running over-bandwidth, wouldn't it make more sense for me to buy an additional plan at half the price, rather than pay the bandwidth fee? I know it's potentially inconvenient to do so, but it makes the pricing a little silly. I could also host the same video multiple times, and have a rand() select between them, or select the ones that have been selected the least in order to redistribute bandwidth. It's kind of like on some McDonald's menus, where an Apple Pie is $0.69, or you can buy 2 for $1.39. Edit: I'm going to email your sales with the FYI.
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- wmboy 15y agoLooks like a great easy-to-use service, but not one that I expect hackers would use. Why wouldn't you just host your video on Amazon S3 and play them back on your website using something like JW FLV Player? That solution would cost about 10-20 cents a month (unless you've got heaps of traffic, in which case you're hopefully making heaps of sales anyway...).
- rdl 15y agoI'm always amazed at people who embed YouTube videos on corporate websites, after agonizing about fonts, colors, etc. to get pixel perfect design everywhere else. At the very least, if you're going to embed youtube, turn off comments on the video :) Vidyard looks like a great solution for a lot of people.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoThe description "Foo is an X for Y" only works when it doesn't provoke the obvious response: "No, X is the X for Y".