So Long Veoh, and Thanks

Veoh has finally shut down and is preparing for bankruptcy. We’ve written a lot about Veoh over the years so it’s somewhat sad to see it go, as Ryan Lawler writes over on NewTeeVee it’s an “inglorious end for one of the early web video players.”

In truth this had been coming for a while. Veoh raised a lot of money, and was backed by traditional media executives including Michael Eisner and Tom Freston which kept it running for a while, but like many other early online video sites they failed to adapt quickly enough to stay competitive, going from content-focused YouTube competitor to a behavioral advertising platform, and never really developed a working business model.

Veoh’s greatest contribution to online video space was its preemptive lawsuit against Universal Music Group later joined by DivX. At the time, few in the industry had the resources (or the balls) to take on an established media company. The successful outcome – the court upheld the company’s protection from lawsuit under the DMCA – meant it was far less likely for any other future lawsuit by an established rights holder against an online service provider – and there have been few similar suits since. Had these companies not been willing to put themselves fully into this fight the landscape of the industry would likely look very different today.

And speaking of the industry landscape today, Veoh’s demise is significant in the context of the fall of other high-value content aggregators. I think it’s now fair to say that the CBS audience network model of hyper-syndication across multiple platforms is dead – Veoh joins Joost on the list of partners which failed to monetize their content and they really need to update that partners page.

That’s not to say that syndication is dead, there will continue to be value in distributing content to portals where there is an audience like AOL, Yahoo! and YouTube. But the smart money is on a TV Everywhere platform that allows rights holders to universally control the access, viewing experience and monetization models across all places where the content can be viewed.