In some news from Monday, Veoh's revamped service, which has been in beta testing for the past few weeks, has recently launched, featuring a video player that will allow consumers download and view content from other sites, as well as a new home page with personalized recommendations, listings for featured broadcasters whose content is available through Veoh and a popular categories option, with the downloadable service part of extensions aimed at facilitating longer videos.
The service also allows users to group videos together and embed that series in various places.
The new service will allow download-to-own and rental in addition to streamed videos, all on a larger player. This all ties into Veoh's plans to expand its online syndication business by allowing users to syndicate to iTunes, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Google. The distribution system, designed to set up modes of profitability for user video, is part of Veoh's Pro program.
And Dr. Pepper is one of the site's first major advertisers.
Pete Cashmore at Mashable calls the site "a vast improvement," pointing to the improved graphics and what they feel is likely to prove an advanced recommendation engine." He concludes that "these changes are enough to shake off the 'just another video site' moniker."
The piece over at TVOver points out that" further differentiating Veoh in the marketplace is its ability to distribute video content of any length at DVD-quality. Unlike other video distribution sites that offer "video snacking" of short, grainy clips, Veoh allows its publishers to upload videos of any length or file size for distribution. Due to its peer-to-peer network design, Veoh is able to distribute large files without rapidly scaling server costs."
Geoff Duncan considers this Veoh's positioning to be "a virtual cable company," "a universal repository for all online video" by being the one-stop way to syndicate to so many popular video-sharing sites.
When I first wrote about the new Veoh system back in December, I pointed to a Business 2.0 profile of the compnay from last March that praised Veoh in particular for its sophisticated recommendation engine that could target particular shows and advertising.
Back in December, I wrote, "The focus on revamping video content comes alongside discussions of a conglomerate partnership to create a YouTube competitor for official content and a recently revamped Yahoo! video search site that has provoked debate about what is most important about video content and video sites in the first place. A distinctive look and feel? The best tools and accessibility? What are companies like Veoh trying to provide above all else?"
Veoh has launched a variety of interesting new projects in the past year as well, including its partnership with Us Weekly and cross-content promotions with a variety of linear networks, including TNT.
Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek said, "The company said its new reporting tools allows Veoh publishers to monitor the performance of their videos across major sites."
Meanwhile, other online video competitors continue to step up their service. Last month, we wrote about the new round of funding for Brightcove and News Corp.'s investment in ROO, as well as Metacafe's Producer Rewards Program and YouTube plans to pay content owners.
