Seesmic with Halley Suitt

Halley Suitt, formerly of Top 10, now founder of Zindicate, introduced me to Seesmic.. Seesmic, founded by Loic Le Meur, currently in private beta, might be described as Twitter meets YouTube.

Halley did a quick video with me to show how it works. She used the camera and microphone built into her laptop to shoot the video. She pressed submit, and within seconds it was published on the web site. The videos are searchable, and you can follow the video postings of your friends. These are very short videos that are fun, informative, whacky, and interesting.

Seesmic - the Twitter of video? The videos are a lot like Twitter in that people use video to communicate with each other. The videos almost become a running conversation. Short, quick bursts that are funny and sometimes informative.

Can UGC video be interesting? Halley showed me several of her videos on a whole range of topics. Halley is incredibly talented, inquisitive, and funny, so I would watch any video from her. Loic Le Meur, founder of Seesmic, is also an incredibly entertaining guy, and produces great video too. After watching their videos I was hooked. But, will the public at large produce compelling video? I don't know, but I am going to keep an eye on it. I have signed up for the private beta and look forward to trying it.

Porn and Spam? I asked Halley how Seesmic filters out porn and spam. Perhaps because Seesmic is in a private limited beta there isn't any porrn or spam to be found. Once Seesmic opens up to the public they need to be sure they have strong filters. The video goes up so fast, almost instantly, that I can't imagine they process it through any filters. Loic, any comment?

Business model? I am looking forward to using Seesmic. It is free. But, I wonder what the longer term business model will be. It is incredibly difficult to target advertising to random UGC video. YouTube hasn't done it, and I am skeptical that the economics of ad revenues to costs will work out. Maybe a new revenue model will emerge.

What do you think? Do you use YouTube or Twitter? Would you click on ads, or watch video ads pre-roll or post roll? What business models will emerge?

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Comments

[Chris Dodge]

Yea, I agree that they will have to be careful about Pornography and other inflammatory content. Back when I was doing VideoShare (in 1999) we had to filter all video submissions through an Admin tool, and we got lots of Porn and other difficult material (some right out illegal). But if they choose to filter, then they loose the immediacy.

However, I can see the economics working out better here than for YouTube. If the content is very short - say 20 or 30 seconds - that's like a 10MB file @ 300kb/sec encoding quality. Maybe - at good quantity discount - that's about a 1/10th of a cent to serve up per viewing.

If they can get $10CPM, that works out to about a penny per view, minus any middleman fees. So that works out operationally speaking.

On the other hand, this type of offering is very, very easy to replicate. There's no reason why there will not be a lot of competitors quickly, if it appears they have some business traction.

[Edwin Khodabakchian]

Seesmic sounds indeed very interesting: great team, very organic and user centric development process and an interesting vision. Although it might look like twitter today, I think that Loic's vision is to build a platform for "TV show 2.0": take an interesting topic. Create a 20 minute professional level content around it and then let people around the world comment and have conversation on it. Filter the best comment and publish a 30 minute content, weaving in advertisement and sponsors along the way. Loic and his team have I think all the ingredients needed to make this a huge homerun!

[rhhfla]

Perhaps the revenue model could be a limited number of sponsored videos sent out daily to all users. If the commercials were the AFLAC duck type and similarly entertaining stuff the click through rate might not be bad.

Similarly, for a fee it would be a quick way to test market new commercials before airing them on national TV

[Sean West]

This is an inteteresting new application.

As videos explode across the internet it is good to find someone else interested in quality.

Losing the immediacy is like losing the privilege of driving through town without stop lights. Had to happen sometime.

Thank you