Online Video Sector Heats Up
Nearly a year since Google acquired video-sharing service YouTube for $1.65 billion, a new generation of online video services are maturing — and attracting new rounds of VC funding.
French video-sharing website Dailymotion landed $34 million in funding from venture-capital firms Advent Venture Partners and AGF Private Equity. With 1.2bn page views and 37 million unique visitors in July 2007, Dailmotion claims to be the largest ‘independent’ video site.
Online video advertising network VideoEgg received $15 million funding from Focus Ventures. WPP, August Capital, and Maveron. VideoEgg streams 680 million video views each month, to 23 million unique viewers across 80 social networks; including AOL, Bebo and Facebook.
White-label social network developer KickApps secured $11 million from SoftBank Capital and Spark Capital. KickApps provides free video tools over 5,000 sites, drawing revenue from ads that run next to their widgets on publisher sites - and on license fees to Autobytel and other publishers that sell their own advertising.
Online video service Joost announced it has launched an API allowing third-party developer to extend the functionality of its service.
