Speedbit building new service to identify viral videos sooner, personalize web video streams
SpeedBit, the folks behind Video Accelerator and Download Accelerator, is developing another service centered around web video. The new offering will potentially help web users find the best web video content suited to their interests and will also identify viral videos before they become huge hits. By identifying viral videos early, Speedbit hopes to promote them to users who may potentially miss out when a video becomes popular very quickly and is soon forgotten.
According to SpeedBit, its technology identified the infamous BBC report of an “indestructible” mobile phone from CES this year when the video only had 797 views. In its first three days online, the video received more than 1 million views.
SpeedBit CEO Ariel Yarnitsky spoke at the DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference in Munich recently about the technology. During the panel discussion, Yarnitsky shared his vision for what the service will bring:
We are overwhelmed with a gigantic ocean of content that we need to find our way across… It’s about finding those very popular videos on YouTube that we like and identifying them early enough. It’s about building our own kind of personal TV guide so we know how to navigate across.
There’s certainly a need for services that will help users cull through the vast amounts of online video. Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron launched something similar with Magma, which charts the top videos across the web and also offers a bit of viral prediction as well. It remains to be seen how SpeedBit’s currently unnamed service differs.
SpeedBit hasn’t announced a release date for the service, but it hints that we can expect it sometime soon.
Based in Haifa, Israel, SpeedBit has been around since 1999. The company hasn’t raised any funding since its launch, when it apparently pulled in $1.5 million from STI Ventures and Yossi Vardi. I’m contacting the company for further verification, and will update when I hear from them.
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About the Author, Devindra Hardawar
Devindra Hardawar is VentureBeat's National Editor and lead mobile writer. He has been writing about technology since 2004, worked in IT support for several years, and studied philosophy at Amherst College. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can reach him at devindra@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @Devindra.
