SXSW - Colin Devroe of Viddler gives me the lowdown on how to grow a video sharing site
I finally met up with
Colin Devroe from the online video sharing site
Viddler.
He's doing a good job of blogging his SXSW experience and we bumped into eachother virtually on the
SXSWi group on Flickr.
I got a first hand explation of some of the new developments that the site is going to be showing over the coming months. Colin got the job at Viddler after leaving his job as CTO of "last year's big community site"
9rules.com - he said that when he heard about Viddler and their plans he got in a car, drove up to their offices and told them that he was now going to be working with them! I like it!
Since then, the site has been launched and seems to be holding up well to a massive storm of traffic, especially after getting dugg heavily here at SXSW.
So how does Viddler compare to other video sharing sites like Google Video / YouTube?
Quality.
Apparently Viddler is able to handle full quality HD files, that in the future will be available as full resolution download via TiVO, Wii, Apple iTV and any other platform. YouTube et al are concentrating on mass market appeal and going for quantity, not quality. And as the man says, there's plenty of room for multiple platforms for video sharing.
Another great feature is that all of the videos can be internally tagged and linked at key points, and if you see a particular point in a piece of video content you can add a comment directly at that point rather than just on the video itself.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg - there's plenty more where that came from. Colin says he left the highly successful 9rules network because of disagreements on how they were monetising their content. Whilst Viddler doesn't yet have a commercial model it's clear that the way to get ahead is to build your community first and work out the monetisation later. And if he's as serious as he sounds, commercialising shared video didn't end with the sale of YouTube - that's where it all begins.
Oh, and as a side note, he kindly offered to fly over for the Digital event that's happening in Birmingham, UK in 2008, film it, upload all of the talks live to Viddler and effectively give us a video broadcast channel. I guess by 2008 he's probably going to be a billionaire, so we'd better take him up on that offer soon!