Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses | Hacker News Reader

Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses

techcrunch.com

158 pointsnotintokyo75 comments

I 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.

Great 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.

So, 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!

http://VidCaster.com has been building branded pages for companies for well over a year. We've been using them for 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).

Not cool man, really not cool. Hi-jacking is a lacking-services way of advertising.

This 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?

It'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.

Why 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.

>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.

iamelgringo is a customer of VidCaster, not a competitor of Vidyard.

I also don't understand your ignorance comment. Vidcaster and Vidyard are two competing companies.

iamelgringo brings up a salient point I think, YC companies get a disproportionate amount of coverage on TC as compared to other startups.

Customer of VidCaster? I don't think so, check his previous comments:

"I happen to know Kieran Farr quite well. http://www.vidcaster.com/ was one of the first companies in our Co-op incubator. And, I have no doubt, that Kieran is going to be far richer than some reporter who still makes his living writing for a company that think that selling yesterday's news written on pieces of dead tree is a viable business model."

Pardon me, I inferred from the hackersandfounders.tv site that uses VidCaster was an independent venture and not by a co-op incubator or anything.

The main point I have against this article are that

1) It's poor journalism in that little research into competitors was done. Leena Rao doesn't seem to be aware of the many competitors who have been in this space for years (like VidCaster) but only a few like Ooyala and Brightcove (which TechCrunch uses iirc).

2) Lack of disclosure as to the relationship between TechCrunch and YC startups is a problem. There's an inherent bias without full disclosure.

>I also don't understand your ignorance comment. Vidcaster and Vidyard are two competing companies.

Ignorance on the part of Sales executives who upload their videos on youtube.

Although the OP didn't phrase it in perhaps the most tactful way, there is a serious issue of undisclosed conflict of interest going on here. Techcrunch's own policy (I suspect general AOL editorial policy as well) requires full disclosure, and it's simply not happening here.

I agree completely. If there is a conflict of interest, it should be disclosed. (I don't know how there is a conflict of interest, I am not aware of how the investment graph looks like.)

Mike Arrington (editor of TC) is a limited partner in SV Angels who offer to invest in every YC startup via a convertible note.

maybe i'm mistaken, but i think the comment was made by Jonathan Nelson, who runs the Hackers & Founders meetup, not by anyone at Vidcaster (a 500 company).

also to clarify: 500 Startup is an investor in many YC companies (close to 20 at current count), so altho we may occasionally compete at the incubator level we have tremendous respect for PG & team, as well as their companies, and we would go out of our way to not talk shit about them, as well as taking issue with people who do.

kisses,

dmc

Copy pasted from below: "I happen to know Kieran Farr quite well. http://www.vidcaster.com/ was one of the first companies in our Co-op incubator. And, I have no doubt, that Kieran is going to be far richer than some reporter who still makes his living writing for a company that think that selling yesterday's news written on pieces of dead tree is a viable business model."

Now this is just a mean comment.

Nothing against 500 start-ups. Personally I don't think either YC or any company they fund considers 500start-ups as a competitor. There are tons of incubators in Silicon Valley.

The spirit in which the comment was made was just mean, in a manner that was directly attacking the company for being a competitor to their company(or his friend's company, or however it works).

No comments about Techcrunch's conflict of interest. I am not in the know-how of how the investment tree looks like.

>What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies.

How can you possibly not get that? YC is a bigger deal, so it gets more coverage. There's little nuance to the matter. If 500 Startups rattles off the hits and builds a pedigree similar to YC, it will receive commensurate coverage. I'm not saying other startups don't deserve coverage. I'm saying that the Valley and the tech crowd (TC's audience, by and large) are demonstrably interested in what comes out of YC -- so why wouldn't TC cover it well?

Hi all, I'm Kieran, one of the founders of VidCaster here. iamelgringo is a passionate fan of our service but does not speak for our company.

VidYard's product looks simple and solid. I am happy to see continued validation of the business video market and congrats to the team for addressing what we agree is a common and growing pain -- the difficulty for businesses to leverage video to drive sales and increase the efficiency of their operations.

Welcome Vidyard and congrats on the launch of a solid product. Let's grab drinks soon, we're still here in Mountain View for another few weeks before 500 HQ kicks us out :)

Sounds awesome. Thanks to both you and Ray for the positive comments, etc. E-mail re: beers is en route to your inbox.

Hey gang. Ray from VidCaster here. iamelgringo, as always thanks for the love. I've had a few conversations with Michael (Vidyard CEO) over Twitter and he is a great guy and their product looks great as well. On the TC story, I left a comment that we are looking forward to a friendly rivalry but the reality is that VidCaster offers a different value prop — we give our users the ability to create turnkey SEO-optimized video websites. In fact, I'm sure there is room for both VidCaster and Vidyard — as we look to the future of VidCaster we think it could very well be a player-agnostic solution for users of services like Vidyard (and Brightcove or Ooyala for that matter). As for the rivalry between 500 and YC, I liken it to the rivalry between Indiana University (my alma mater, as well as my two co-founders) and Purdue. When I meet someone from Purdue, I raz them about it but just for fun. I share your frustrations regarding coverage from TC -- I think one of the problems is that TC writers don't have "beats" (at least to my knowledge) so there is no one who has a comprehensive understanding of the OVP space and how each new entrant is differentiated. Contrast that with Ryan Lawler at Giga-Om who places new product announcements like Vimeo Pro in context of the larger OVP space. But as Ice-T taught us, don't have the player — hate the game.

"What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies."

Bucketloads of free traffic from HN.

Please delete the above comment, or failing that..

Downvote my comment to get it to the bottom of the page.

Sorry about the above, if it came off as dickish, or as trying to steal the thunder from VidYard. That's my bad.

I'm still seething from this crap article in the NYT yesterday, and feeling full of piss and vinegar about the whole thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907570

I'm my pissy attitude bled over into my comment about TechCrunch and YC. Poor form. I apologize.

This is VidYard's chance to shine. I have no right to post links to another startup.

Apologies...

Pretty 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 ?

Our 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.

So, essentially you're a front-end on the YouTube API?

It'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).

It 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...

We'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.

YouTube 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.

That'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.

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.

Vimeo recently released Vimeo 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?

It'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.

What 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.

Good feedback. We needed some way to refer to the plans on calls, this was an easy solution.

The 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.

This. 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?

This 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.

Maybe 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...

Almost 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.

Touche. I say that a lot :-) But there are things I could easily do for cheaper that I still happily pay for - example freshbooks & formstack

We funnel all of our encoding through ZenCoder (it's an awesome service). Our focus is on the simplicity of putting video online.

SproutVideo (http://www.sproutvideo.com) is already well established and probably their closest competitor as opposed to Vimeo PRO.

Hi, founder of SproutVideo here!

There are a ton of players in this space. Here are some others:

Edit: I'd also like to congratulate the founders of VidYard on their product. It looks great. Good luck you guys!

SproutVideo'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.

VidYard 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.

Wistia customer here (correct url: 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.

SproutVideo: http://www.sproutvideo.com/

And Vively: http://www.vive.ly/

EDIT: Sorry, I noticed SproutVideo founder's list was missing SproutVideo; I failed to notice it was in the grandparent.

I've heard pretty great things about SproutVideo, I've also tried VidCaster with success in the past as well.

As 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.

Using vidyard on my site and Tumblr blog. Best part is seeing the viewing analytics.

Thanks (I'm a founder). We're super glad you're getting value!

I like the site - very nice. Has a somewhat similar look to mine...only better (http://www.growtap.com). Well done.

Your 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.

An entire company built around an incremental change to youtube/vimeo/100 other video sites?!

Really?

An entire company built around yet another version of Friendster/MySpace/Orkut?

Facebook will never pan out.

Good point. Anyone want to start an automobile company?

Elon Musk beat you to it ;-)

Depends 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.

I'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). 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.

Thanks for the insight - we'll definitely change it, we just thought it was something fun for launch :)

Didn'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.

I have been wondering why YouTube have not started something like this.

BTW, there is also 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?

Looks 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.

Personally, 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?

Will do! Thanks for the positive feedback.

The branding opportunity for online videos here is huge. It looks like YouTube missed a large niche here that Vidyard's going to eat up.

Looks 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...).

Article says they're using RTMP streaming. Doesn't that mean it won't work on iPhone/iPad because there's no Flash there?

We do HTML5 fall back for iOS/Android devices.

I'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.

The description "Foo is an X for Y" only works when it doesn't provoke the obvious response: "No, X is the X for Y".

Yet another startup with tons of competitors and no real innovation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com