Online Video Q1 2009 - Venture Capitalists on the record - Page 2

Venture capitalist: Peter Lee, partner, Baroda Ventures,

Baroda online video investment: OVGuide.com 

Peter Lee said that the way OVGuide.com's model mirrors the progression of search and directories on the Internet is one of the defining factors that drew investment from his company. He said online video search operated in a Yahoo! manner at first, where an editorial staff could compile a directory of online video content relatively easily, as the total amount of video available was still small. With the current explosion in both the amount of video and websites that host video, a more automated approach became necessary, much as Google's spiders began to rule search as the text-based Internet exploded.

"OVGuide's model of combing human editorial response and automated search capabilities is powerful because video varies in quality, and algorithms can't identify quality," Lee said. "The sheer number of videos online demands some sort of automated search function, and combining that with editorial insight like OVGuide.com has great value."

Lee said he is interested in ideas around monetizing video for future investment. He said the market is at the stage where original thinking around personalization and recommendation might lead to the solution that truly monetizes the flood of online video. He's interested in how models like Stumbleupon and Digg, which currently rely mostly on human recommendation, can be applied to video and made into hybrid models with automated components. He said analytics firms could make attractive acquisition targets for large advertising and marketing agencies for their ability to provide behavioral and social information around video consumption. 

Venture capitalist: Chris Moore, partner, Redpoint Ventures

Redpoint online video investments: Auditude, adap.tv, Vuze (also previous investor in TiVo, Netflix)

Chris Moore said he views online video as the dominant new media type for the web, and said it presents a tremendous profit opportunity as offline video dollars move to IP. He thinks most of the money will eventually be around professional, long-form content, and it's part of the reason he views Auditude as a company with a lot of upside.

He said Auditude's management team is a seasoned group that understands the needs and constraints of all the stakeholders in the online video content industry.

"They've developed a group of technologies that solve a major problem for content owners," Moore said. "The Auditude platform has very fast ‘fingerprinting' and indexing capabilities to match content distributed over the Web, then it couples that with an ad management and insertion platform that helps monetize unauthorized posts of the content owner's videos."

Moore said Auditude also serves as a trusted third party between content owners and distributors that enables content owners to trust their content won't end up in places they didn't intend it to.

Moore said the monetization problem of online video remains the most compelling opportunity for companies going forward. He said he sees billions of dollars of potential in viable solutions for optimal ad formats around online video and models to improve discovery of online video.