Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses

I have a few questions that the Vidyard site doesn't seem to address (that I'd need answers to in order to sell it to my boss).<p>1) The "Venti" plan says "unlimited videos". Does that mean that there's no storage quota? If there is no storage quota, how would you make money off of a large customer? Like, we have a decently sizable video library (about 250GB and it grows by about 25GB each year) and it isn't that high trafficked, but I can see a video library like our's becoming a burden on your service.<p>2) Do you support captions for the videos?<p>3) Is there any way to export our data out of the system?<p>4) Is there any API in case we want/need some further customization in front of it?<p>Your service looks excellent, but what makes me so hesitant is that it seems potentially low-to-no-margin and my boss would want to know that we aren't getting into a service that's destined to raise prices or cut us off.

<a href="http://VidCaster.com" rel="nofollow">http://VidCaster.com</a> has been building branded pages for companies for well over a year. We've been using them for <a href="http://hackersandfounders.tv" rel="nofollow">http://hackersandfounders.tv</a> for months, and we've been thrilled.<p>VidCaster's also more than just a wrapper around the YouTube API.<p>They let you import the videos that are already on YouTube and Vimeo, and move them over to VidCaster's streaming service. Crazy good service. Team has been working with online video for years.<p>Also, VidCaster just demoed at 500 Startups last week and already has paying clients like Microsoft, ZenDesk AirBnb, Twilio, etc...<p>What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies. I suppose it's nice to have Arrington as the LP of one of your investors (SV Angel).

Pretty poor journalism, the article is written as if there were no alternatives to youtube for hosting. There are a couple of dozen companies in the video hosting/serving space from Brightcove to Viddler. Wikipedia even has a "List of video hosting services" page.<p>What makes this company different ?

We're using them as well. We like the ability to queue up videos in the player. Has helped conversions. We also found out that the average attention span was just about 20 seconds on a 90 second vid, so we cut it down to 15 seconds. Cool stuff.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Not using them for your embedded videos (and getting the extra views on your site that will launch you higher in search) could be a mistake for many businesses.<p>If you want to prevent click throughs, after the video starts to play, just put up an invisible div over the video, but above the controls, so the user can't click through, but can still controle the video.<p>Once the video ends, pop up whatever you want if you don't want their recommended videos to show.<p>Best of both worlds.

Vimeo recently released Vimeo Pro (<a href="http://vimeo.com/pro" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/pro</a>) which seems to be addressing a similar market.<p>Is Vidyard competing with Vimeo or are you addressing a different need?

What was behind the decision to use Starbucks' size names for your plans? I really like the site and the prices are reasonable, but the thought of signing up for a "Venti" video hosting service doesn't sound appealing to me.

This is why I love Hacker News - although there are other options out there, their feature set (and pricing) pretty much perfectly describes what I was looking for.<p>I don't know whether this will be the eventual solution vs. ZenCoder (or something similar) and S3, but this certainly seems like a potential option.

SproutVideo (<a href="http://www.sproutvideo.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.sproutvideo.com</a>) is already well established and probably their closest competitor as opposed to Vimeo PRO.

As a fellow entrepreneur from sunny Waterloo, Ontario I've had the pleasure of interacting with michaelrlitt and what I can say is that these guys are going to be big. There's obviously a lot of competition in this space and everybody has good technology under their belt. But what sets these guys apart is that they really get sales and marketing and that's exactly the service they're providing. I have no doubt these guys are going to crush it.

Using vidyard on my site and Tumblr blog. Best part is seeing the viewing analytics.

Your pricing says $40 per 100 GB, up to 3 TB, but your Grande plan is only $20, which also includes 100GB. You also make the claim that for most businesses, that 100GB is enough bandwidth - which I assume means businesses that go over probably do so on account of multiple videos.<p>If one video of mine in particular was running over-bandwidth, wouldn't it make more sense for me to buy an additional plan at half the price, rather than pay the bandwidth fee? I know it's potentially inconvenient to do so, but it makes the pricing a little silly. I could also host the same video multiple times, and have a rand() select between them, or select the ones that have been selected the least in order to redistribute bandwidth.<p>It's kind of like on some McDonald's menus, where an Apple Pie is $0.69, or you can buy 2 for $1.39.<p>Edit: I'm going to email your sales with the FYI.

An entire company built around an incremental change to youtube/vimeo/100 other video sites?!<p>Really?

I've just seen the pool-party video which appears after clicking on any of the pictures on the about page (<a href="https://secure.vidyard.com/about_us" rel="nofollow">https://secure.vidyard.com/about_us</a>). It's weird, and the background music reminds me of erotic movies. I understand that you want to come across as young and dynamic, but I'm not sure this is bringing the message across for your target audience.<p>Edit: Downvoters, please explain. I didn't mean to insult, but am offering honest feedback on a perceived weak spot - one which I fear could impair the founders intention to make the right impression on their target audience.

I have been wondering why YouTube have not started something like this.<p>BTW, there is also <a href="http://vidcaster.com" rel="nofollow">http://vidcaster.com</a> which doing the same thing. Vimeo is doing the same thing now.<p>Personally, I think if you have multiple sites, then with Adobe Suite and Amazon CloudFront and a few dollars on odesk you can make excellent "video presentation" site for your business. Maybe there is a market for even more customizable service? Something like heroku for Video/FAQ/Tour part of your site?

Looks like a Compelling offering! Congrats on the techcrunch coverage.<p>A key selling point in platform selection is YouTube's massive traffic, while tons of other platforms may win based on the feature set, at the end of the day, the views are on YouTube.<p>Vidyard seems to be playing the youtube traffic angle well by allowing the videos to remain on YouTube while wrapping the YT API + chrome less layer.<p>GOOD WORK by you! I'll be testing out that 100GB cap soon.

Personally, I find the "Pricing" line of the comparison chart to be misleading. For $199 (a year) you get 50GB of space and 250k views with Vimeo Pro. Under the Free Viyard plan you get 1 video and 101GB of bandwidth. Also, the "Unbranded Player" line of the comparison is checked for Vidyard even though the pricing page says the Free plan uses a branded player.<p>Maybe just get rid of that pricing line in the comparison?

The branding opportunity for online videos here is huge. It looks like YouTube missed a large niche here that Vidyard's going to eat up.

Looks like a great easy-to-use service, but not one that I expect hackers would use. Why wouldn't you just host your video on Amazon S3 and play them back on your website using something like JW FLV Player?<p>That solution would cost about 10-20 cents a month (unless you've got heaps of traffic, in which case you're hopefully making heaps of sales anyway...).

Article says they're using RTMP streaming. Doesn't that mean it won't work on iPhone/iPad because there's no Flash there?

I'm always amazed at people who embed YouTube videos on corporate websites, after agonizing about fonts, colors, etc. to get pixel perfect design everywhere else.<p>At the very least, if you're going to embed youtube, turn off comments on the video :)<p>Vidyard looks like a great solution for a lot of people.

The description "Foo is an X for Y" only works when it doesn't provoke the obvious response: "No, X is the X for Y".

Yet another startup with tons of competitors and no real innovation.