Marcos over at Mind Booster Noori alerted me to another video sharing web site, Lulu TV, that is sharing revenue with video owners that upload their video to the site. This is a similar model to efoof and Revver which are trying to do much the same thing. You can read more about efoof here and at Marcos’s Blog. You can read more about Revver here.
Lulu TV has an interesting approach to revenue sharing which diverges from the traditional pay per ad click approach of others. “Shareholders” throw $14.95 per month into the pot. For this $14.95 shareholders get their own vodcast, unlimited upload of 100MB video clips, 2 minute webcam vlogs, and they get a share of the pot based on how many times their videos are viewed. Free account holders get their own vlog and vodcast, unlimited 32MB video clips, 30 second webcam vlogs, but do not receive any revenue sharing. The details can be found here at Lulu TV’s site.
It is unclear exactly how profitable this could be for content owners. One thing is for sure, “shareholders” will start out $14.95 in the hole every month, with hopes of recovering that amount with wildly popular videos. A quick look at the Lulu TV forums does not shed much light yet on how the economics will really work out for content owners.
As with other services that are taking the “share the revenue” approach, I still don’t understand how Lulu TV is going to protect content owners rights, as there appears to be nothing to stop people from downloading YouTube videos and uploading them to Lulu as their own. This problem alone, I am afraid, will eventually doom these types of services.
And like like many other competitors in this space, Lulu’s user interface needs a lot of work and calls into question what is “under the hood” in terms of technical infrastructure to support high traffic and lots of bandwidth.
Tags: free, internet, lulu tv, lulutv, revenue video** Download the Best Videos on the Web for your iPod - Free! **
Well, thanks for the reference, but it is “Marcos”, not “Marcus”
Marcos - Sorry, fixed it.
Living in Germany now, and it got me thinking Marcus.
Hehehe, no problem
Nobody had asked so far actually:) We are running 100% open source software (see. Bob Young) which includes mysql, php, apache on RHEL4 machines. We have racks of the little buggers and can rapidly replicate them and drop more in. Plus the videos are all cached through akamai. So send us your huddled masses, we’ll be happy to take em:)
I interviewed James Mcdermott who works at Lulu.tv about those very copyright and non-creator uploader problems.
Check out his answers on my blog glitterfish.com here.
vile8 -
Thanks for your response, it looks like you are pretty well prepared for growth on the technical side. I will update the post, and good luck to you!
-David
Andy - That is a great interview that you have done, and a great blog, I have added you to my feed reader so I can follow your writing.
-David
David-
Thanks, that means a lot to me since I think your blog rocks.
-Andy