VentureBeat

Web video platforms like Brightcove, Move Networks and Maven have a problem: They have all built business models targeting the handful of content companies willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to push video on their sites. As a result, the platforms are angling for the same big fish in a relatively small pond; each must find ways to outdo the next by investing in new features without adding much to their price.

For Brightcove and its competition, two much smaller companies called Fliqz and Kaltura are here to bring the pain. These start-ups, while lacking the depth of features of their larger counterparts, offer video hosting, content management and streaming capabilities to websites at dramatically lower costs. Fliqz does it with proprietary self-serve software that gets video up and running on a site in around 30 minutes. Kaltura has a few plug-and-play extensions for wikis and blogging platforms, but its integration into regular websites is slightly more elaborate.

Both Fliqz and Kaltura have a few large enterprise customers, but with prices ranging from free to a few thousand dollars a month, they are going after the small and medium-sized websites that Brightcove and its ilk have all but ignored.

Fliqz’s model revolves around its simplicity. You go to its site, select a subscription level that reflects the size of your audience, pay for it and then add a few lines of code. Its substantial ease of use and quick deployment has enabled it to bring in around 17,000 customers, most of whom are using the ad-supported free version that grants them 500 streams a month. Along with relatively large sites including Dogster, Flixster and Autobytel, Fliqz counts religious organizations, dating services, parenting sites and travel agents among its users.

While Kaltura is still relatively simple, its vision is more expansive: For one thing, its technology is open source, so it has the potential to become much more powerful than Fliqz without spending tens of millions of dollars. While this means that anyone could use it for free, Kaltura is counting on revenue from value-added resellers that build features on its platform, and from sites that don’t want to worry about services like hosting and maintenance. For another, Kaltura’s video capabilities come with an impressively simple web-based editing tool, a sort of “video wiki” that lets anyone with permission add content to a video and remix it. With this tool and a recently announced partnership with Wikimedia, Kaltura hopes to add collaborative video to Wikipedia, which could get quite interesting.

More significantly, if Kaltura does manage to attract development, it has the potential to lead the charge to a commoditized market. Though this is already starting to happen, a powerful open source alternative could be serious trouble for the Brightcoves and Mavens of the world. This is an especially large issue for Brightcove, which has raised a hell of a lot of capital but has yet to find an exit, even as it raises yet more money to expand into Japan. Maven, on the other hand, managed to get acquired by Yahoo, so it’s Yahoo’s problem now.

Fliqz, which is based in Emoryville, CA, has raised a total of $7.5 million in two rounds and says it will soon start looking for $10-15 million more. New York’s Kaltura has also raised two rounds. The first was $2.1 million. The size of the second was not disclosed.

Wikia today announced a partnership with collaborative video site Kaltura that will allow the more than a million users of its MediaWiki software to post and collaborate using Kaltura content.

Kaltura, the self-proclaimed “YouTube meets the Wiki” (previous coverage here and here ), has a video extension that lets its users start a collaborative video project by uploading video clips, photos, or audio tracks to its wiki. Users can then edit collaboratively using Kaltura’s browser-based video editor. Users can import their video creations into Kaltura’s library of legally remixable content, which is covered under a Creative Commons license.

MediaWiki’s users will have access not only to Kaltura videos but to the collaborative editing feature as well.

According to Kaltura CTO Shay David, Kaltura is also working towards supporting other publishing platforms, including other wiki software, blogs, and content management enviorments. He said we can expect announcements on this soon.

Kaltura has 20 employees and raised $2 million in venture backing from Avalon Partners. It is based in Tel Aviv and Manhattan.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”

This just in: The winner of the Techcrunch40 event is Mint, the personal finance company (see our coverage here).

Meanwhile, below is the last batch of Techcrunch companies, from Tuesday’s afternoon session. After hitting VentureBeat readers with 40 start-ups over the past two days, we’re going to try our best fast on Web 2.0 for at least a day. Frankly, this latest batch wasn’t that impressive. Here’s the ranking: WooMe, Zivity, mEgo, Wixi, Xtr3D, Metaplace, Flowplay, Broadclip and Kaltura.

WooMe, speedating through live video online — We reviewed the company here. Lots of dating sites exist, but its pushing the envelope somewhat, and making dating extremely cheap. However, other big brands are likely to enter the market if it proves successful.

Zivity , adult network for model photography – This is the adult company VentureBeat first wrote about last month. It’s promise is to let models and photographers of the models get paid for their work, by making members pay a dollar for each vote they make on best models. Eight cents gets split between the model and photographer, and 20 cents goes to Zivity. You get five free votes, and then have to pay if you want more.

mEgo, a character-based user interface — Simply put, a mEgo is a cutesy avatar that can be posted on a social network and used as a content aggregator. Users build a unique character on the mEgo site, connect in other accounts that they want access through it — Flickr or Facebook, for instance — and then post it on their profiles around the internet. Anyone who clicks on the mEgo can then access content from all the sites it’s linked through to. The problem is that there’s a hundred other cross-platform aggregators already present or in the works, bringing the noise level in the space to a dull roar. And the question always remains the same: Why use one over another? With mEgo, at least, there’s an answer: It’s cute, and kitschy. The combination may be enough to win some hearts and minds, if only from the teenaged set.

Wixi — Simple concept: If you’ve got content on your computer that you want to share with someone, but you don’t want to go to the trouble of file transfers, you can drag and drop the files from your desktop to your Wixi site. Whether it’s music, movies or some other sort of content, your friends can then go and enjoy it through the Wixi Universal Flash Player. This brings up some questions on copyright: How long will it be until people use their sites to share their copy of, say, the newest Disney movie? And will it be different enough from competitors like Pando, Docstoc and others, for it to get above the noise? The company is based in France.

Xtr3D, a lot of hand-waving — No, really, it is. Xtr3D is a 3D human-machine interface, which is a fancy way of saying that you can move things on your screen by making specific gestures with your hands. The Nintendo Wii does this with a long motion-sensitive paddle that you move around. Xtr3D, instead, tracks your movements through a camera mounted on the computer screen. During the presentation, the company’s founder used the program to manipulate a Google Earth map, rotating and zooming in and out. While the demonstration was interesting, the program didn’t seem to be as fast at responding to the gestures as it would be to mouse clicks. Additionally, his gestures obviously had to be very clear and slow enough for the computer to recognize. Without taking away from the accomplishment of the company, it seems obvious that the software isn’t mature; we’ll have to wait a bit longer, it seems for a Minority Report-style computer. In fact, it reminds us of a near-identical company, Softkinetic, which we wrote about a year ago, and which we haven’t heard much about since. Xtr3D couldn’t tell us clearly how it was different from Softkinetic (Update: This appears to be our misunderstanding. The company has since explained that Xtr3D uses only software and a single camera, while Softkinetic requires infrared as well. Xtr3D argues this makes it less expensive.) The company is positioning the software as a platform for developers, with an emphasis on gaming.

Metaplace, an open standards virtual world, that lets users mashup games and other activities — It’s a small download, 30k. We reviewed it separately here. Again, it enters a very crowded field, and questions remain about business model.

Flowplay , yet another avatar virtual world – This site lets you build a 3D avatar, and do familiar things such as play games and win points so that you can build out your wardrobe. It renders in Flash. It wants to build a large number of settings for avatars (apartments, lounges), like Doppelganger’s vSide (our coverage), except no downloading. You can connect and chat with friends. The site looks clean, however, we’ve been there, done that. There are way too many avatar-game sites now, and this one doesn’t break the “originality” threshold. We don’t see much here to stop people going to MSN or Miniclip to play games. Flowplay has raised $500K on a bridge note from Ambient Sound Investments.

Broadclip, a system for sharing music online — The presentation consisted of someone coming on stage, saying hello, and turning on a video for everyone to watch. All of which might have been fine, had the presentation been good, or particularly informative. Broadclip’s “MediaCatcher” software aggregates music for its users through a recommendation engine. Once found, the music can be played anytime. MediaCatcher works independently, on a mobile device or through platforms like Facebook. Despite some attractive features, the company didn’t seem unique or impressive; perhaps it was the grandiose claim of being the “Web 3.0″ solution for music. Napoleon complex, anyone?

Kaltura, letting you collaborate with video – This is an also-ran. This company’s slogan is “YouTube meets the Wiki.” Instead of sharing text, you’re sharing video. Take an example of a music band. The band can go to Kaltura, create a Web site, record an introduction video, and then others can upload their own content, and then mix it all up in a big video mashup. We’ve seen scores of iterations of this, and the only thing surprising about Kaltura is that it has 20 employees working for it, and has $2 million in venture backing from Avalon Partners. It is based in Tel Aviv and Manhattan.

(This post was co-written with Chris Morrison.)