Miro, formally known as Democracy Player took upon itself an important mission - preventing videoblogging services from monopolizing the market.

While Miro does offer several interesting features for both viewers and producers it lacks two key functionalities which, in my opinion, can determine the outcome of the videoblogging industry.

Revenues

Most video producers rely on videoblogging site to create relationships with advertisers.

In a situation where a videoblogging site becomes dominant in the market almost every producer will use it as it will be able to offer superior revenue share or exposures to their customers.

At this time Miro does not attempt to provide an alternative to the videoblogging sites revenue sharing plan. This in turn means that most producers which relay on commercials to fund their projects will not have a true alternative to the dominant videoblogging site.

Promotion

The second feature video producers seek is a way to promote their content, especially if they are new to the market and try to stand out among the thousands of creators. Today, most videoblogging sites promote content using 3 methods : 1. user generated comments and ranking, 2. editorials promoting content on the blog/main page 3. content discovery mechanism which help viewers discover new movies based on their preference

Miro on its part does offer some content discovery tools however they are inferior to those present in most videoblogging sites. The application lacks user generated recommendations and instead uses a sister site ( videobomb.com) which offers "social bookmarking for videos" but is only partly integrated into Miro. Furthermore, Miro does not offer editorials nor does it uses any content discovery mechanism which will allow its user to "stumble" into relevant new content.

Without these two key abilities, it is doubtful if Miro could prevent a videoblogging site from dominating the market. If Miro is seriously interested in reaching its goal I would suggest changing its current tactic and place a greater emphasis on the tools offered by current videoblogging sites in an attempt to provide an alternative.

Of course Miro can continue and provide its current product which still offers great video player and RSS aggregation.

Technorati Tags: miro, democracy player, guy nesher, vlogging, vloggers

DivX announced they are turning Stage6 into a separate company. This decision will affect Stage6 operation. Let's see how Stage6 fared against its competitors in the past months.

I used Alexa to compare Stage6, Veoh and DailyMotion. These companies aim to provide high quality and well produced original content – unlike the one time hits which YouTube made its fame by.

The comparison showed that while DailyMotion is leading the charts, ranking 51, Veoh is closing the gap with a rank of 130. Stage6 is trailing behind with a score of 18,809. Please refer to the end of the post for an updated ranking of Stage6

I was surprised to see that while Stage6 offers better user experience by providing both higher quality video and the ability to download and share it, the company still trail behind its competitors.

What did go wrong for Stage6?

My first guess was that Stage6 uses a stricter copyright regime than its competitors. As copyright material is a major attraction to online video consumers, lack of it can explain the relatively low Alexa ranking. In order to validate this assumption I checked the number of Stage6 links which appear in Alluc and Tvlinks, two of the biggest link sites for copyright material.

However this reasoning failed once I checked the Alexa score of these sites. They both scored much lower than DailyMotion and Veoh. This means that even if all their links were directed to Stage6, it would still not be able to match the ranks of its competitors – Copyright material is not the sole reason for the difference.

Here are some of the factors that can explain it:

1. The Divx Codec – while providing superior quality with lower file size, DivX is not as wide spread as Flash format. As a result, publishers find it harder to upload movies - Stage6 only accept DivX encoded content and most editing software does not support this codec. Users on the other hand are asked to download the codec in order to view the movies and while this technically happens with flash as well, the majority of users will already have flash pre-installed.

2. Revenue share – Stage6 currently does not offer revenue share for movie producers who use its service. As today Internet video producers relay on the income from these commercials, Stage6 becomes less attractive.

3. Small Community – Among the companies we examined Stage6 is the newest in the field. Adding this to the lack of significant PR doesn't allow the community to grow fast enough. Therefore Stage6 community did not reach a critical mass - which leads directly to churn.

4. Demographics - It seems as though demographics is playing a bigger role than one would expect in the world of Video streaming. 50% of DailyMotion viewers come from France (Dailymotion is a French company). As Dailymotion is the biggest company we examine in this post one has to wonder, did Dailymotion succeeded in carving out a new niche in its home country or were the French viewers always more enthusiastic than the rest of us. If Dailymotion was able to create a market in France, or at least expand it in a magnitude there might be something to say about the marketing of its competitors.

Whether Stage6's main goal is to advance Divx technology, or to become a player in the video sharing market, its number one goal has to be users - viewers and producers alike.

Divx decision to separate Stage6 from its main company may represent an interesting shift in the way Stage6 will operate, the question is – will Divx allow its subsidiary company to stop promoting its codec and start promoting new content.

* Update Several readers noted that the Alexa rank displayed for Stage6 refers to www.stage6.com while Stage6 main address is stage6.divx.com which scores substantially higher in Alexa (227). I’d like to thank my readers for paying attention to this issue, and notifying me about it. How does that affect my previous assumptions?

Without getting into too much technicalities stage6.divx.com is considered a "sub domain" of divx.com. Since Alexa does not track sub domains the result we receive for stage6.divx.com actually represent the cumulative ranking of two sites - divx.com and stage6.com.

How inaccurate is the ranking of stage6.divx.com? Again using Alexa we can see that only 81% of the DivX.com users actually visit stage6. While we cannot determine exactly how this will affect the Stage6 ranking we can estimate that roughly 2 (out of 10) million users reported to have visited Stage6 on July were actually DivX visitors.

While both ranking methods do not yield accurate results, even if we use the more favorable results of stage6.divx.com it is still that Stage6 is trailing behind its competitors. This is another proof that quality alone is not a key consideration of internet video consumers.

Technorati Tags: DivX, dailymotion, stage6, veoh, video sharing, alexa, Guy Nesher, codec

Guy Nehser is an independent web and SEO consultant , anime addict , and a LV70 Druid, who just cleared SSC. He can be reached at nesher.guy@gmail.com