Zipping Into the Video-Sharing Market
It’s taken awhile but Canadian companies are suddenly scrambling to get into the video-sharing market. (Maybe they’ve heard about Google spending $1.6-billion to buy a little start-up called YouTube!)Last week, it was Alliance Atlantis’ BlogTV.com; this week’s it’s Ottawa-based Zip.ca, which operates an online DVD rental service (aka Canada’s version of NetFlix). Zip has rolled out a service that allows its 320,000 members to upload video clips. “Today’s user-gen clip culture is an important part of how Canadians entertain themselves,” said Rick Anderson, Zip’s president and CEO. The company is also offering the ability to watch free videos from various channels and premium videos from TotalVid, a video download store.
What I want to know is what took Canadian companies so long to get into the game? It’s not like video-sharing services quietly emerged on the scene while no one was looking. Is this just a sign of the lack of Canadian initiative when it comes to aggressively playing the Web services/Web 2.0 game?
Technorati Tags: Google, Video
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POSTED IN: General Tech
2 opinions for Zipping Into the Video-Sharing Market
Sean
Dec 13, 2006 at 3:13 am
Interesting question about why it took so long. Would be more interesting to ask: How long did it take to develop? In-house or out of the box? Integration issues? Level of dedicated resources?
And compare all that to the quantity and skill of the resources available to an average Canadian customer. More to the point, it raises the question as the level of investment that Canadian companies have available. “Narrow” markets (which is how many view the online Canadian marketplace), generally receive narrow resources.
David Coleman
Dec 14, 2006 at 12:45 am
Mark
As we were talking about today, I think its both Canadians not jumping onto the web 2.0 bandwagon along with a serious lack of venture cap initiatives. Canadians just do not see the road to success like Americans do. Instead we have to find our way through a hazy environment, sometimes even heading down south to take advantage of the better conditions over there.
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