Zipidee buys rare video site TotalVid.com
Zipidee, an online marketplace for specialty videos and other content, has purchased competing rare video company TotalVid.com from Landmark Communications for an undisclosed amount.
Video is hot these days, with lots of noise. This move continues Zipidee’s strategy of carving out a niche for itself: as a marketplace for rare content (our coverage).
TotalVid’s 5,500 or so videos — typically older video, first offered as VHS videocassettes — include how-to, action sports, travel, anime, martial arts and some 50 other categories. You can rent videos for $1.99 and up, and view them for a seven day rental period.
Combined with Zipidee’s 5,000 or so largely instructional titles, Zipidee now claims more than 10,000 video titles in more than 100 categories, mostly through exclusive licensing arrangements. You won’t find most titles on iTunes or Amazon. The company licenses content from more than 600 content sellers, from independent producers to large media companies.
Users can upload their own videos to Zipidee, for sale, but the videos are higher quality than your typical user-generated site. Sellers on Zipidee can set their own prices and distribution models via download, subscription, or rental. Zipidee offers DRM software so a seller could, for example, choose to let a buyer rent a video for a specified amount of time.
Zipidee says it gets more than 300,000 visitors per month.
Zipidee is a young company. It launched in October, when Zipidee announced it had raised an unspecified amount of funding (our coverage) from Individuals’ Venture Fund, Novus Ventures and Khalda Development.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.