Azureus soaks up $12M and launches Zudeo, but not simple

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.

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