(This article has been co-authored with Ekalavya)

In this post we’ll review 20 sites who joined the video bandwagon, mostly after the acquisition of YouTube by Google.
Yes 20! And there must be a few more which we must have missed out on!

According to Compete, the average net surfer from the US spends about 1% of his total internet time on YouTube.

But is watching videos online that big in India?

How essential is a steady fast broadband connection to view online videos?

As per a TRAI release, for the quarter ending Dec 2006:

“Broadband subscriber base reached 2.054 million.(Please note that broadband continues to be defined by the TRAI as connections with speed >256kbps)“

The above figure wouldn’t make any online video provider smile.

Here’s another interesting figure:

According to Alexa…
YouTube gets 1% of its traffic from India.

JaviMoya, which one of the most popular sites for downloading YouTube videos - gets around 2% of its traffic from India and is ranked in the top 2500 sites in India
Downloadyoutubevideos.com and VideoDL.org are also highly popular in India.

One can perhaps conclude that Indians love downloading videos a lot more than watching them online!

Buffering can definitely be really painful…

Lets get to the video sites now:

NOTE: Sites have not been listed in any particular order. They have not been listed according to their popularity or any other parameter. 

AapkaVideo.com

Director ban jao – says their site.
 
AapkaVideo is supposedly a service aimed at the budding Mani Ratnams and Karan Johars. Just shoot your desi videos and upload them to AapkaVideo. Allow others to watch your desi videos and share them.
Though we could hardly find any user shot videos – almost all of them were either movie songs or movie clippings.
AapkaVideo is also accessible from ones mobile phone – so you can shoot, upload and share videos directly from your mobile.

MeraVideo.com

MeraVideo is a part of BrainGain Entertainment Private Ltd., a privately held Mumbai based Media Company.
Watch, share and Earn says their site.
Earn?
MeraVideo’s mission is to help the creators of video clips make money by sharing and distributing their work using their platform.
How?
The first video I see displayed on their site is – ‘Delhi college couple makeout in a car’!
Well anyways, this is how you can make money - The video creator gets a choice of attaching an ad to the video at the time of uploading. Every single time a viewer clicks on the ad, you get paid.
Interesting concept.
There was a talk about these guys getting funded! Do any of you know if that went through?
 
Here’s another nice post regarding the same.

ApnaTube.com

New users today: 243
New videos today: 1
Total videos played today: 7912

Decent amount of views for the day and 243 new users for the day is quite good. But the main reason which is driving ApnaTube is the Porn content.
The upload count is quite depressing.

No matter what time you log on to their site – the recently viewed video clips are always porn clips.

Infeedia.com

What stood out was the RSS icon almost everywhere on their site. They allow you to subscribe to the various category video channels.
So basically I can subscribe to the RSS feed of the category which I’d like to follow and I would directly get the embedded videos in my Feed Reader.

Convenient for the viewer – but this kills the revenue the site would be earning from advertising. They might have to rely on Feed based ads or embed video ads.

Nautanki.tv

Here’s something different – this site serves professional content and not user generated content.
They recently announced Rs 1 crore in Angel investment.

Nautanki.tv is an entertainment channel for people to watch original Indian content in the genres of drama, comedy, current affairs, live shows and so on.
They’ve also tied up with Reliance Communications to make its the channel Soul Curry from its video media network ’Nautanki.tv‘ available on Reliance Mobile World.
The service is currently free for everyone and will eventually move to be a paid service with premium content to be available to subscribers. The free subscribers will get access to limited content.
We would still say that charging users for viewing content online is not the best of revenue models. Knowing what your viewer is watching and serving with him targeted contextual ads is the way to go and of course there are lots of other ways of monetizing video content.

Rajshri.com

Rajshri are not too upbeat about User Generated Content and their vision is no where close to that of youtube.com.

Movies like Vivah and Hattrick were being released the very same day on their website – simultaneous with its release in Cinema Halls. (9.99$/download)
They have quite a lot of music videos on their site.
Free to view and 0.99$ to download.

They currently show a 25 second video ad before most clips:

VideoDubba.com

The first thing that will strike you is the logo!
Forget ripping off the concept from YouTube, these chaps have even copied the exact logo.
And the funny thing is that the logo on their site carries the Trademark symbol too.

Rest is same as others. Lots of sleazy content.

Here’s the YouTube logo for comparison sakes:

Sixer.tv

A niche vertical in the video sharing category. They aim at creating an online platform to connect global cricket fans.
You can share videos / pictures, join fan clubs etc.

Some key elements of Social Networking and user engagement are missing and Sixer does not please me too much as a cricket fan.

These guys have been backed by Linus Capital, who invested an undisclosed amount in them.

CricTV.com

Similar to Sixer. Another online community for cricket lovers.

Surprising this was that they have a section for uploading non-cricket related videos and these videos were actually the ones with the most views!

They have a nice widget which allows you to import a live scorecard on to your blog or site.
4Indian.tv

View, upload, tag and share videos.
Nothing new…

TubeDesi.com

Same as others. Amateur work. They haven’t even bothered to work on a refreshing design.

PunjabiTube.com

A niche channel. They’ve got around 400 Punjabi videos.

‘Welcome to the world’s largest, hand-pick quality collection of Punjabi music videos.’

Hand-pick!

But at least if you ever want a Punjabi music and it is not available on YouTube, you can give PunjabiTube a shot.

Toad.in

The sleazy content had been filtered. We didn’t find anything too offensive on the main page.
They are currently paying users Rs 100 to upload 50 videos.

Wonder who’ll actually be that desperate and spend a couple of hours to upload so many videos. But then of course – you never know!
TumTube.com

Yet another of the YouTube wannabes. Nothing impressive.

MotionFlicks.com

Nothing new. But they are one of the older players. They had around 3000 users in the span of one year – and this actually led them to being acquired! Quite interesting!

LayFile.com

Lot of sleaze. Nothing special. They even display YouTube embedded videos.

MeroVideo.com

Nepali based video sharing site.

ConnectFilms.com

Aiming at being a desi medium for both Bollywood and Hollywood content. They have some contests running.
Site has a little professional look to it. Even they are embedding YouTube videos.

Konkan.tv

These guys are actually planning to survive on YouTube videos and have introduced something known as YouTube Mashup.

They are inviting users to actually help them build a database of YouTube videos!
What they have to say?
‘This service is a Web 2.0 service, which does not download/convert/reupload (unlike many who do) the video on our servers, but simply adds it to our index and streams the videos directly from YouTube.’

CanaraVideo.com

Well nothing striking on their site

But they are looking at building up content by paying users too…
Highest Videos uploaded in a week - Rs. 1000/-
Person whose video has received highest no. of views in that week - Rs. 1000/-

Conclusions:

Crowded market! But if you want to join the party it is not too difficult. A video sharing site can be set up in around a couple of minutes and it doesn’t cost much! Almost all the above sites are using a video sharing script by AlstraSoft which helps you in making YouTube clones.

The most popular site would be a site like JaviMoya, via which you could download all these videos from all these sites!

Currently most of these sites are driving the porn industry. Complete soaps and serials haven’t yet started being featured on these sites to a great extent – but once that happens, a lot of legal issues are going to crop up.

I still don’t see a reason of going to these sites rather than YouTube.
Google Video + YouTube own 51% of the video market.

How are these guys planning to make money?
Currently they are looking at surviving on Google Ads.

What about video advertising?
Online video advertising is not going to happen, according to Gregory Coleman, executive vice president, global media sales, Yahoo. Coleman has said, “The big barrier we are facing today is the creative from the agencies which are not where they are needed to be.”

“When I am watching a music video online, I don’t want to see a 30 or 60 second ad. So what we believe is going to take place is that advertising will take place on video streaming and it will be much smarter,” Gregory Coleman has said. “I don’t have the final answer, but you can imagine a series of 5 second ads that are interesting and creative.”

A WAT Consult effort

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