Comments on: EXCLUSIVE: Coming To A Screen Near You: Veveo Beefs Up Mobile Video Search With Personalization, Recommendation & The Wisdom Of Crowds; Gears Up For Handset & Operator Deals

By: Mobile Youth Survey » Blog Archive » Is Flat-Rate Data Really The Catalyst For The Mobile Web & Mobile Advertising? Or Are We Missing The Point? Also: How Mobile Operators Can Earn Billions More

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:27:15 +0000

[...] then there is the rise of mobile search verticals, such as Veveo, whose vtap mobile search service (profiled here) is built from the ground up to let users browse and snack mobile video content from the Web. Veveo [...]

By: msearchgroove » Blog Archive » Is Flat-Rate Data Really The Catalyst For The Mobile Web & Mobile Advertising? Or Are We Missing The Point? Also: How Mobile Operators Can Earn Billions More

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:27:24 +0000

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:36:25 +0000

Character by character search engine Boopsie is in my opinion the best such search engine in that category for mobiles. Check it out at http://boopsie.com
Their “smart prefix search” is really cool. To search for “Jacqueline Kennedy” all you need to type is “ja ken”, ie, only the first few characters from the search words. Boopsie has indexed a number of information sources such as Amazon, CitySearch, Wikipedia and many others.

By: Nancy G

Nancy G — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:37:39 +0000

Very informative article. Myself and a colleague from one of the “AltSearchEngines top 100″ were intrigued by Veveo spokesman’s claim of having built up 3 million global content topics. By using the vtap web site we also found where those topics are coming from. If you go to http://vtap.com and search with any keyword, it gives a list of “Related Topics”. If you click on any of those, it gives videos on that topic and in addition gives information about that topic from Wikipedia, IMDB or last.fm. Now, Wikipedia has close to 2.4 million topics, the other two databases probably have another 600 thousand more unique topics, all put together 3 million topics! So, it appears Veveo’s 3 million content topics are coming from Wikipedia, IMDB or last.fm. These open source projects are an awesome source of information and nothing wrong in leveraging them, but it would have been better if Veveo had acknowledged the sources instead of appearing to claim to have built the content topics themselves.

By: tarekesber.com» Blog Archive » Carnival of the Mobilists #126

tarekesber.com» Blog Archive » Carnival of the Mobilists #126 — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:23:50 +0000

[...] about the possibility of producing a Mobile Blog in audio format at Mobscure. Peggy Anne Salz takes an in-depth look at Veveo, the Mobile Video Search tool, at MsearchGroove. And to finish things off Sachendra Yadav thinks [...]

By: Apoorv P

Apoorv P — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:11:59 +0000

Veveo’s transcoding servers in the US defeat IP-based geo filtering of content hosts and put them in trouble with advertisers. For example, NeeTeeVee is reporting that Veoh is blocking access from a number of countries for commercial reasons. However, when a user uses Veveo’s vtap, what Veoh sees is only Veveo’s transcoding servers in the US even if the user is in one of the countries Veoh doesnt want to serve. Advertisers will pay for the high US rates when actually the ad impressions are served in places like Guyana. vtap comes across more as a demo than a well thought out business system.

By: M Garafano

M Garafano — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:49:32 +0000

Veveo is a big advertiser in the network of WAP download sites that I am familiar with in AdMob’s publisher network. They have a decent mobile video service vtap and are aggressively advertising and promoting that FREE service. I wish them success.

By: Jason G

Jason G — Sat, 31 May 2008 02:29:29 +0000

Another excellent mobile web video application that I have used is Avot MV. You can check out the comparison of Avot MV with vtap @ http://avot.tv/corp/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=48

By: Jason G

Jason G — Sat, 31 May 2008 02:23:26 +0000

Another excellent mobile web video application that I have used is Avot MV. You can check out the comparsion of Avot MV with vtap @ http://avot.tv/corp/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=48

By: John G

John G — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:02:01 +0000

Daren G: It is interesting to hear you say you are in discussions with large media companies. By that you are also acknowledging you don’t have any content agreements now and yet you are licensing to Motorola, Sony Ericsson and an IPTV operator according to the article. There is the problem. To distribute content (which is what you are doing when you are reformatting content and resending) you need proper rights, either via explicit agreements or via Terms of Use of wherever you are taking the content from. Take the case of YouTube itself. YouTube Terms of Use specifically allows only “streaming”. They also define what is streaming very clearly. “Streaming” means a contemporaneous digital transmission of an audiovisual work via the Internet from the YouTube Service to a user’s device in such a manner that the data is intended for real-time viewing and not intended to be copied, stored, permanently downloaded, or redistributed by the user. Accessing User Videos for any purpose or in any manner other than Streaming is expressly prohibited.” (see http://youtube.com/t/terms). You are obviously violating the above by interjecting your servers in the stream, doing a stream grabbing, reformatting and retransmitting to the end user. You are allowing users to download the videos with your “Play from Memory” option, again prohibited by YouTube. YouTube also prohibits circumventing geo-based IP filtering which gets totally circumvented by you since your transcoding servers are most likely in the US and hide the real place of origin of the requesting end device. You mention YouTube mobile APIs. The privilege to use these APIs also come with terms of use that expect “Powered by YouTube” branding, no mixing of YouTube results with other sources etc, none of which you seem to be following in your iPhone application which you claim follows YouTube APIs. You cannot selectively use the services provided by content rights holders and ignore the responsibilities that come with it. So much for YouTube. What about the 99,999 other web sites? Thats why the central problem in the Novarra controversy and your system is the activity of intermediaries who act on other people’s content without their explicit or implicit permission for purposes never intended by the original content owner. “Technology innovation moving content to new platforms” etc is desperate handwaving which always get tossed by the courts. That’s why smart startups always abide by the law. YouTube for all its challenges was able to prevail only because it had a solid defense in the form of the Safe Harbor provisions in DMCA. In your case, I couldn’t see any coherent defense. Your system comes across as an interesting demo, but the problem comes when it is marketed as a finished product ready for prime time. By licensing what is essentially a demo, you are putting your licensees at a heavy risk. I also couldn’t understand why you say you are not monetizing the service today when you actually have licensing deals with two mobile companies and an IPTV operator.

By: Daren G.

Daren G. — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:33:41 +0000

This is Daren from vtap responding to the points raised by John G. With respect to content adaptation, I did not mean to be blasé by saying “no issues or hiccups” — my statement was focused on the user experience and undertaking the transcoding effort to enable most web videos to play on a variety of handsets. However, the content rights are extremely important and there are always “issues” raised by technology innovation moving the content to new platforms and new experiences. We take these issues very seriously and we are actively in discussion with the large media companies and providers of web video content. With respect to YouTube, they have made APIs available for mobile services such as vtap (or any other service) to connect directly to their mobile content repository and access the URL which contains the RTSP stream of a specific video. The YouTube APIs do not require the services to land on a browser page before going to the video; the APIs provide the ability to launch the phones media player and connect directly to YouTube’s RTSP stream for the video. We are in the process of coding to these APIs, as it will significantly reduce our costs as no transcoding will be needed. We currently use this paradigm in our iPhone application where there is a native YouTube client on the phones.

With respect to the advertising issue related to the ads on a typical web page, mobile is an interesting paradigm due to the small form factor and the browser capabilities. The variety of advertising surrounding the video on a typical web page will not render in a standard mobile browser, nor will the inline video player (I am excited about the prospect of Flashlite 3 and whether it will change the playing field). The iPhone has made significant improvements with the capabilities of its safari browser, but it is still limited with respect to inline video players and certain forms of interactivity. The video itself, which is the content that the users are seeking and vtap has helped them to find, can be played on most mobile phones through the phone’s media player with the appropriate stream. There is quite a bit of advertising in web videos that will be faithfully rendered when streamed to a mobile (pre-rolls, post-rolls and interstitials). However, there are still many issues to be worked out such as dynamic ad insertion, targeting, etc. We are in discussions with many web video providers to explore various ways we can accommodate their advertising needs.

To be perfectly clear, we are not monetizing the service today. We are still working on the advertising model and gathering more information about the vtap audience.

By: Alt Search Engines » Blog Archive » Coming To A Screen Near You: Veveo Search

Wed, 28 May 2008 22:38:08 +0000

[...] In-Brief: An in-depth analysis of Veveo’s vtap mobile video search offer and product roadmap. [...]

By: John G

John G — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:03:22 +0000

I just checked out the vtap service, first on their wap site and then using their “Instant Search” client. I find the company to be incredibly naive to think “there are no issues or hiccups” with content adaptation. Whatever issues have been discussed in the mobile community about Novarra with respect to content adaptation without content owner’s permission, multiply that by 100 and you get the issues faced by Veveo. They seem to just pluck videos out of web pages, reformat them and monetize the service, and think the content owners wont have any issues. The thinking seems to be “we know whats best for content owners”. Take the case of YouTube itself. YouTube has a wonderful application on the iPhone and for Java phones. How could one argue that videos taken from the YouTube PC web site and transcoded into a poorer quality video and served without any of the accompanying services of YouTube (such as login etc) is better than YouTube’s own mobile service which serves out high quality videos. How can it be said that this is not damaging the content host YouTube? To say that vtap gives “content owners impressions for their ads” is strange. Content owners sorround their video content on the PC web sites with ads which Veveo doesnt display at all. Plus content owners’ advertising audit systems may throw out the impressions coming out of Veveo’s transcoding servers as being bogus hits since they dont come from genuine end user devices, same as Google would filter out click fraud. Content owners may be able to get higher ad rates if they serve it themselves on mobiles (by User Agent detection etc). What is also annoying is how tiny companies such as this tend to belittle YouTube by saying things such as “YouTube’s brand hasnt carried over to mobile”. Well, YouTube has the biggest web video brand out there and I can bet that YouTube mobile has 100 times more subscribers than vtap. This is even more ridiculous considering the fact that most videos served by vtap are from YouTube. In searches that I conducted on vtap 80-90% of the video results are from YouTube.