Video Portals @ Epik
Good discussion here. In response to the question on Epik's video portals, I thought I would add some updated perspective.
Video Portals are a pretty interesting development area for .TV domains. Here is the original post about what is being developed at Epik:
Video Portals – a sneak peak at what is coming next from Epik « Epik Blog
We also covered Video Portals at DevCon on Thursday morning. John Lawler's Powerpoint presentation on the Development Toolbox will be posted on Slideshow.com later this weekend. FYI, Slideshow.com is another Epik Development. The same team that built Slideshow.com is also building Video Portals.
The big unresolved question for video has been how to monetize it. People pay for Cable TV and Satellite TV but not for web video. That does not entirely make sense to me since the guys who produce the content have to make a living too.
So, our plan for Video Portals is that these sites, like Paranormal.TV or Racing.TV will combine both free content and premium content, meaning that the publishers/contributors of video can upload a video object and earn money when someone upgrades to premium membership when watching their video.
The evidence is pretty clear that Micropayments don't really work for content, and we are not suggesting to run online peep shows. However, the SuperPass model DID work in the past.
So, if someone wants to watch one particular video on say Paranormal.TV, they will buy a membership on the Epik Video Network which now lets them watch all videos, ad free, across the network, including both say Racing.TV and Paranormal.TV.
The publisher who uploaded the video that caused the new member to join now gets a rev-share of that new membership revenue.
It is still early days for Video Portals, but I am pretty sure of three things:
1. There is an opportunity to combine content, community and commerce around segmented online video channels using the .TV TLD.
2. There is a model for charging people for ad-free, high quality video content.
3. Similar to the Product Portal model, there are synergies from having related video channels cross-linked to each other.
We started developing Video Portals in early 2010 mainly because we did not think anyone had adequately addressed the opportunity.
As for charging setup fees, if anyone thinks they can build a high quality video portal for less than we charge, they are certainly welcome to share examples. As we get efficiencies, we will be passing along those savings to Epik Developers.
At the same time, the number of Video Portals that could ever be reasonably justified is not more than perhaps 10,000. Just as there will probably never be more than 100,000 product portals. The goal is not to sell as many as possible. The goal is to develop as many as makes sense for the consumer.
We look forward to shipping the first video portals later this month and will welcome feedback on this new platform. Too early to say whether it is going to be a slam dunk like product portals, but I am reasonably optimistic here which is why we accepted a few initial orders from intrepid early adopters.
If I thought this was a dog project, I would kill the project. I actually think this project has legs and could be a game-changer for .TV owners who are sitting on a lot of expensive undeveloped land.
Sorry for the long post.