Azureus, a Palo Alto company that delivers a popular application to distribute video files, launched a new service named Zudeo, which it apparently hopes will become the next YouTube for high-quality video.
It has raised $12 million in a second round of capital, led by Redpoint Ventures, which also included Greycroft Partners and previous investors Jarl Mohn, chairman of CNET Networks, BV Capital, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
At Zudeo, users can upload, download and comment on videos in a manner similar to other video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Revver. However, we tried it, and it wasn’t as simple as those other sites. We downloading the software, a minor hassle. At Zudeo, you then have to click on a browsing tab to view content, and once we got there, we couldn’t play the content, for whatever reason. The problem may be on our end. (Update: Indeed, Nag suggests in comment that we may have misunderstood the purpose; we’re apparently not supposed to view the content, which is befuddling). YouTube succeeded because it was so simple. Perhaps Azureus will make this easier for regular users in future. The other question is why they are taking $12 million to, among other things, develop an embedded video player. We’re not certain how much Azureus has raised in total, but it is a lot given how many players are out there already. BitTorrent, the largest file-sharing distributor, just raised $20M. We’ll follow Azureus as it develops. Azureus does have a different strategy from some of the others, targeting publishers of high-end video. Meantime, we’d like to hear from readers what they think.
More details about Azureus here.
14 Comments
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Startups.in/India said:
Unless I’m missing something here Zudeo is not exactly “YouTube”, in that it doesn’t allow users to “play” the content but is only a central resource to “share - upload/download” and “review” the content.
Beats me why they don’t let users at least “preview” the content before downloading if they have bandwidth concerns. -
dan robertson said:
bittorrent and azureus may need the capital for advances to the film studios.
bittorrent just announced a series of deals with the studios and it’s likely the studios asked for large upfront payments in advance…
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Ideawhip said:
I’ve tried this and its no where close to being easy enough to use to gain wide spread use. I was expecting to be able to have a small delay and then watch the video play Youtube style. Instead I had to download it and wait for my Media Player or Quicktime to open up and then play it. Yes the quality was definitely a lot better and even big files download pretty quickly, but unless they make an integrated player its going to be a tough sell.
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John said:
Hi, Just a quick correction. The link to azureus above is incorrect. The company website is http://www.getazureus.com or http://www.zudeo.com, but *NOT* http://www.azureus.com
Regards,
John -
john c said:
New Media Age are announcing that the BBC has tied up a content deal with Azureus
http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/30901/BBC+to+put+key+shows+on+file-sharing+network.html“BBC Worldwide is to make many of its key shows available on a legal file-sharing network after agreeing a deal with US network Azureus, the developer of the BitTorrent software.
The announcement is the first time BBC Worldwide has agreed such a deal, with shows including ‘Little Britain’, ‘Red Dwarf’, ‘Doctor Who and ‘Monty Python’ available as high-quality downloads from Azureus’ new video sharing site Zudeo.
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