Veoh TV: TiVo for Web Video

Next to YouTube, Veoh is my second favorite video site. They offer the industry’s best video superdistribution by uploading your video to other video sites and distributing DRM-free high-quality versions peer-to-peer, while still giving you good ol’ Flash embeds. Now, they’re poised to offer the industry’s best superaggregation through Veoh TV, the next version of their desktop client. Instead of just letting you watch high-quality videos from Veoh, Veoh TV will allow you to play and record video from anywhere on the Web — from huge aggregators like YouTube to niche podcasts like Ask a Ninja. It’ll even let you search for those videos right from the client, via Yahoo Video Search. Think of it as TiVo for all Web video, a video browser if you will.

Longtime readers may have noticed that I give absolutely no attention to Joost, the video startup that’s been tripping all over itself to push the same old TV stuff over P2P. Veoh CEO Dmitry Shapiro tells you why: “Joost is your old man’s TV.” Instead of sucking up to Hollywood, video aggregators seeking to replicate the simplicity of TV should instead tap the millions of hours of content that’s already on the Web. Instead of seeking to be the most licensed, they should seek to be the most meta. That’s what Veoh will do, and that’s why they will succeed. Copyright trolls will try to enforce streaming-only stupidity, but they’ll eventually have to rethink their business models. If Veoh TV isn’t the killer app that makes the power of online video as simple as TV, a clone of it will be.