Veoh is my second-favorite video site after YouTube. A lot of the good stuff we see from the company is driven by founder Dmitry Shapiro’s vision to superaggregate online video and CEO Steve Mitgang’s ability to fend off copyright trolls from offline video. Wired features an interview with Shapiro, where he presents his vision for their latest product VeohTV.
VeohTV gives users access to practically all video on the Internet, from YouTube, Yahoo, wherever. Joost or Babelgum are closed-wall gardens, showing video that the company has cut deals to air. Plus, VeohTV feels like television. It’s a much more intuitive and …read more

Neilsen//Netratings has released August numbers showing that, while YouTube’s monthly traffic is up 66% from last year at 56 million uniques (no surprise there), smaller players are growing faster. Yahoo Video saw a 101% rise in monthly traffic over the year, while Veoh is up a whopping 346%.
MySpaceTV, meanwhile, is down 6%. Even though they paid for first dibs on some “premium” content this year, most notably with Weird Al Yankovic for Trapped in the Drive-Thru and lonleygirl15 for the first season finale, they focus too much on exclusivity and not enough on superdistribution. That, and MySpace just isn’t cool …read more

Veoh CEO Steve Mitgang saw this coming. He even tried to get a court order preventing it. Universal Music Group faces a confident and prepared opponent as it sues Veoh. Mitgang is unfazed:
UMG’s action is not surprising and reflects their limited understanding of Veoh and of the online video space as a whole. Veoh is recognized by many media companies as a DMCA-compliant company and is committed to respecting the rights of content owners. In fact, we’re currently working cooperatively with major media companies and the MPAA to develop standards for copyright protection. It’s unfortunate that UMG prefers to continue …read more

Here they go again — and this time, they’re going lower. After supporting a third-party suit against YouTube over LA riot footage, NBC and Viacom want to support a porn site’s suit against Veoh.
Last week Viacom and NBC petitioned to file a document known as an Amicus Brief in a little known case between Veoh and an online porn site called IO Group. Amicus briefs are a way for people or entities not involved in a given case to let the court know what they think – they are usually filed by those who have some interest in the outcome …read more

Last month, I voiced my concerns about ex-Yahoo exec Steve Mitgang taking over as CEO of Veoh, seeing as Veoh’s so innovative and Yahoo’s so bleh. Mr. Mitgang’s done something to ease those concerns a bit: proactively defending Veoh’s status as a DMCA safe harbor. He’s asking a court to prevent Universal from suing them.
Apparently, Universal’s been threatening Veoh for months, making allegations of infringement instead of actually filing the takedown notices required by law. As a Veoh user myself, I can tell you Veoh abides by DMCA takedown notices, all the way down to deleting local files downloaded through …read more

I like Veoh founding CEO Dmitry Shapiro. His independence from mass media mindsets, his focus on user experience over content control, made Veoh what it is today: my second-favorite video site after YouTube, poised to make organic online video as easy to watch as fabricated TV shows.
That’s why I’m terribly wary of Veoh taking on ex-Yahoo exec Steve Mitgang as CEO, with Shapiro becoming Chief Innovation Officer.

A while back, I noted that Veoh TV Beta’s Yahoo-powered video search left much to be desired. Veoh addresses this concern in their latest upgrade, adding tabs for both Google/YouTube video search and Veoh search.

Yesterday, I said Veoh TV would be the first application to successfully combine the infinite choice of online video with the intuitive ease of TV. I’m watching Ask a Ninja on Veoh TV Beta right now, and I’m happy to report that I like what I see so far.
Video browsing is dead simple — it actually has to prompt you to use the keyboard for search. The personalized widget tabs powered by yourminis will satisfy any information overload junkie, with widgets autoconfigured to match what you’re watching. My Veoh TV Flickr widget, for instance, often looks up anime photos.

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 …read more

Veoh’s DRM-free DVD-quality P2P download versions of their embeddable streaming videos make it my second favorite video destination after YouTube. That’s why I’m glad to hear from Kevin Nalts that, like YouTube, Veoh will soon be sharing revenue.
In the coming months, Veoh will be launching advertising and revenue sharing with Pro Publishers. We are building our own advertising technology to suit the needs of our publishers and audience, but in the meantime, we have decided to investigate external possibilities.
Over the next week, we will run a trial with a company called Brightroll, to see if their technology suits the advertising …read more