The online video marketplace continues to get more crowded. Today, marcellus announced the full release of their VOD online video service aimed at the low end to mid end of the market.
Marcellus, which is privately funded has raised about $150,000 to date. The company was initially conceived as an enterprise, on-premise video platform in 2006 but founder and CEO Preetam Mukherjee says the company “Realized pretty quick that it was BAD idea.” In mid 2007 they switched gears and began development of the current platform, launching the basic service last August. Since then, Mukherjee tells us they have had “a steady stream of paid customers almost every week.” The company has 8 employees working out of Union City CA and a development office in Gurgaon, India.
The platform itself is very simple and turnkey. For as little as $25 per month publishers can upload and manage an unlimited number of videos encoded in H.264 at up to 1,000Kbps quality. Billing is based on bandwidth usage and service level (length of videos allowed, priority encoding) and the entry level $25/mo plan includes 10GB of bandwidth and 1GB of storage. At the high end, users can sign up for 1.5TB of bandwidth, 250GB of storage and a dedicated encoding instance for $949/mo.
In about five minutes I was able to upload and customize the player below and playback at 1,000 Kbps seems flawless (the original clip bitrate was lower which is why the quality is what it is). Marcellus uses Amazon EC2 for content delivery, a simple solution that allows them to provide dedicated encoding to the premium service tier.
Above: Check out CNBC’s Steve Jobs coverage, those guys are great! Hooray, fair use.
Marcellus has a crowded field to compete with but the offering is simple, intuitive and reasonably priced. “There is no secret sauce to what we’re doing” Mukherjee said “We’ve been able to weave together a really good blend of functionality, scale, efficiency, and cost into a service that seems to be making tremendous sense for our customers.”
Ben- thanks for the write up!
-p
I don’t get it. Paying enterprise are bad ideas while small to mid end customers who anyway can intergate a YouTube widget for free and not worry about storage cost or bandwidth consumed are gonna be their target? Tell me Ben, what did you see in your attempted use of marcellus that was better or additional to any other free VOD service? Perhaps l am missing something.
YouTube is a great service don’t get me wrong, but what they do is very different and so far as I know they have no ambitions to get into the white label player business.
A few of the key benefits you get with marcellus or any other white label service:
- White label player w/ no corporate branding
- Complete control over your content and where it is displayed and control over metadata and where it can be seen. YouTube is in the search business as much as anything else and their business relies on making user content available where they want and monetizing the traffic to it with advertising.
- Ability to make the content private on your own terms.
- Ability to monetize the content on your own terms.
- Ability to syndicate the content on your terms.
And for many companies these are benefits worth paying for.
Tks for taking the effort to detail things out ben.
I am not so sure. For most small to mid size companies, input cost is more important than most other factors. Free works best! Plus companies in this category:
- don’t really care or see YouTube as much of a corporate identity grabbing away their thunder on a video player
- wouldn’t do half a good a job in procuring ads as google + YouTube already has. Plus with annotations coming in, most of my small bi a video serving + monetizing needs are addressed.
Harris:
1) You’re right, for some people, the branding/identity component + the ability to make their player match the look and feel of their website..is not so important. Which is fine.
2) White label providers like Marcellus don’t actually procure the ads. We provide the option to serve your own advertising, or serve ads via ad networks like Google, ScanScout, Adap.TV, etc. Either way, the ads are self-served, and in our case you don’t share any of the revenues with us(I believe premium publishers at YouTube, who’re the only ones allowed to serve ads, also have to do a rev share with YouTube).
Here’s the thing though: we actually advise our customers that they need to have a YouTube strategy as well, in addition to publishing content on their own website. Done right, your content YouTube will bring you the eyeballs/traffic to your website. And then you have high quality branded content on your own website, running your own ads, providing an experience that You Tube can’t.
Cheers.
preetam
Good Site on Cloud Computing and SaaS – We are periodically looking for good blog articles
related to Rackspace Cloud. Also we are looking for contributors to add value to our blog.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks