Articles
Social Network Platforms in Brazil: The Videolog Case
Paula Martini · Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) · 24/4/2008 16:37 · 32 votes
Nine months before YouTube's launching, another online videos service was being born: Videolog.tv, a Brazilian website that was built on an open business model. Mostly used by people connected to local young urban cultures, like skaters, filmmakers and Parkour practitioners, Videolog is now increasing the bet it has always placed on community issues.
Actually, they do prefer to be taken as a social network website instead of a video publishing platform: the recently launched 3.0 website version allows the creation of groups and building of video sharing communities: "Videlog speaks to less people [250,000 registered users], but is very specific regarding their niches," says Videolog's executive director Edson Mackeenzy. "Now I can finally say we're a social platform, we don't fit in YouTube's market segment anymore."
When publishing their works on the website, users can select one from a few Creative Commons licenses, with CC Attribution-Noncommercial being the default option. There's no room for a full copyright licensing choice, for example.
Regarding a copyright infringement policy, the executive director says: "We're totally focused on displaying people's original expression. While for YouTube the proportion between the volume of community videos and TV extracts is 1 to 9, through an indoctrination policy we got to achieve a 95% of community videos. And our team also remove inappropriate content as we're notified." The Videolog team is composed of seventeen employees, but the community is so active that some of them could also be counted in that number -- as one can see in this user-produced Videolog institutional video here.
Community, interoperability, business
Last January, it was announced at the Campus Party Brasil 2008 that Videolog's APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) were being opened, so that anyone could use their remote resources in order to build widgets and applications.
From then on, some users, in partnership with the team, developed and released applications that integrate Videolog with Twitter and Flickr. Soon, they’ve announced, the team will also be launching a Wordpress plugin for publishing videos directly from a blog's admin interface.
Mackeenzy says he cannot imagine Videolog working in another business model but an open one: "We adopted that philosophy from the very beginning and, in four years, we grew up in 400%. I don't believe that we could grow in such a rate if we chose a non-collaborative model, a model that didn't value our users' talent."
Though it seems like – while investors are generally still attached to the traditional business model – this is not an easy choice: "Every proposal we received didn't cope with our open model, so that we're the only enterprise still run by its own investment, among all Brazilian start-up companies in the technology field. And I guess this won't change until the day we find someone that does understand and believes that sustainable businesses are positive, someone that thinks the way we do."
In the meanwhile, they keep moving their 30 million pageviews per month business through partnerships with companies. The biggest Brazilian Internet portal, UOL, provides Videolog with storage, transference and servers. Paramount Pictures has got an exclusive channel for publishing contents like movie trailers – besides all rights being reserved in that section, one shall stress that, there, the frame aspect ratio should be at least 1.78:1 (widescreen), not the standard 4:3 used for mpeg videos, which ends up distorting the trailer image.
But, for users' videos, one of the main Videolog 3.0 highlights is the image quality improvement. Even high definition videos can be published by people choosing a VideologPRO account. Mackeenzy ratifies: "When a video is in HD, for example, we keep it just the way it was. Videolog doesn't distort or cloud images, like other platforms do."
Actually, they do prefer to be taken as a social network website instead of a video publishing platform: the recently launched 3.0 website version allows the creation of groups and building of video sharing communities: "Videlog speaks to less people [250,000 registered users], but is very specific regarding their niches," says Videolog's executive director Edson Mackeenzy. "Now I can finally say we're a social platform, we don't fit in YouTube's market segment anymore."
When publishing their works on the website, users can select one from a few Creative Commons licenses, with CC Attribution-Noncommercial being the default option. There's no room for a full copyright licensing choice, for example.
Regarding a copyright infringement policy, the executive director says: "We're totally focused on displaying people's original expression. While for YouTube the proportion between the volume of community videos and TV extracts is 1 to 9, through an indoctrination policy we got to achieve a 95% of community videos. And our team also remove inappropriate content as we're notified." The Videolog team is composed of seventeen employees, but the community is so active that some of them could also be counted in that number -- as one can see in this user-produced Videolog institutional video here.
Community, interoperability, business
Last January, it was announced at the Campus Party Brasil 2008 that Videolog's APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) were being opened, so that anyone could use their remote resources in order to build widgets and applications.
From then on, some users, in partnership with the team, developed and released applications that integrate Videolog with Twitter and Flickr. Soon, they’ve announced, the team will also be launching a Wordpress plugin for publishing videos directly from a blog's admin interface.
Mackeenzy says he cannot imagine Videolog working in another business model but an open one: "We adopted that philosophy from the very beginning and, in four years, we grew up in 400%. I don't believe that we could grow in such a rate if we chose a non-collaborative model, a model that didn't value our users' talent."
Though it seems like – while investors are generally still attached to the traditional business model – this is not an easy choice: "Every proposal we received didn't cope with our open model, so that we're the only enterprise still run by its own investment, among all Brazilian start-up companies in the technology field. And I guess this won't change until the day we find someone that does understand and believes that sustainable businesses are positive, someone that thinks the way we do."
In the meanwhile, they keep moving their 30 million pageviews per month business through partnerships with companies. The biggest Brazilian Internet portal, UOL, provides Videolog with storage, transference and servers. Paramount Pictures has got an exclusive channel for publishing contents like movie trailers – besides all rights being reserved in that section, one shall stress that, there, the frame aspect ratio should be at least 1.78:1 (widescreen), not the standard 4:3 used for mpeg videos, which ends up distorting the trailer image.
But, for users' videos, one of the main Videolog 3.0 highlights is the image quality improvement. Even high definition videos can be published by people choosing a VideologPRO account. Mackeenzy ratifies: "When a video is in HD, for example, we keep it just the way it was. Videolog doesn't distort or cloud images, like other platforms do."
tags: Rio de Janeiro Brazil culture social-network open-business creative-commons videolog brazil local-context-global-commons video internet campus-party api start-up paramount
extracted from:Creative Commons
Some rights reserved