Dimitry Shapiro brings an unlikely gadget into meetings these days: a TV remote control.
As chief executive of Veoh Networks, an Internet video company based in San Diego, Shapiro uses the remote to navigate the company's new software program, VeohTV, on his laptop. The software acts like a Web browser but displays only Internet video, presenting full-length television shows and popular clips from the Web's largest video sites, like NBC.com and YouTube. It lists those videos in a program guide and plays them in a small window or across the entire screen.
The product, now in a private testing phase, will be available to the public later this year. It has the potential to be a popular and practical way to watch online video. But like a long line of other innovative high-tech tools, VeohTV could also threaten and alienate traditional media companies and even cause some of Veoh's Internet rivals to consider legal remedies.
For the last two years, Veoh Networks has operated a video-hosting Web site, Veoh.com. The site works much the way YouTube does, with a few notable exceptions. The company does not impose any time limits on the length of videos and does not use digital fingerprinting technology to filter out copyrighted material. That has led to some rights holders to complain that Veoh has fallen behind in protecting intellectual property.
Nevertheless, Veoh.com has been growing fast: It draws about 15 million visitors a month, up from 4.5 million in January. Veoh Networks is a private company and does not release financial data. YouTube, by contrast, gets more than 100 million visitors and serves up more than 3 billion video clips a month, according to several market research firms.
"It's impossible to compete with YouTube as a video sharing site now," said Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research. "Veoh is a good example of a company that decided to go off in a new direction."
That direction is VeohTV. To support the new effort, the company raised about US$26 million this summer from investors, including Time Warner; Goldman Sachs; Spark Capital, a venture capital firm in Boston; and the former Disney chairman Michael Eisner, who joined the Veoh board and counsels Shapiro, a 38-year-old, Russian-born engineer. The company introduced VeohTV as a beta product last month, making it available for testing to a group of invited users.
I found VeohTV to be easy to use. Once the software is downloaded to a computer, it offers an easy-to-navigate directory of 114 video channels, including listings for CBS, NBC, Fox and YouTube. On the NBC channel, there are dozens of episodes of Heroes, 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. On the Fox channel, there are several full-length episodes of the dramas Bones and 24.
Those shows are free and available for streaming on the NBC and Fox sites. The VeohTV player, Shapiro said, is just giving them a new audience.
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"There are full-length episodes at Fox.com, but many customers don't know how to find them," he said. "The Web browser is fine for short clips. But if you just want to sit back and watch video on the Web, this is what you will want to use."
Major media companies, however, are more interested in protecting their copyrighted programs. Veoh does not ask for permission to play material from other Web sites, though Shapiro says he wants to strike advertising-sharing deals with content owners to ensure that shows appear in high-quality video. But Veoh does not think that it needs consent because VeohTV is doing nothing more than playing what is already online, including any commercials shown during the programs.
The networks may disagree. By only offering video, VeohTV omits all the other advertisements on the network sites. For example, people who watched an episode of Heroes on NBC.com last week also saw for 40 minutes a banner ad for McDonald's on the same page. VeohTV users watching the same episode would not see the banner.
Rick Cotton, the executive vice president and general counsel of NBC Universal, said that streaming full-length television episodes drives traffic to other parts of NBC's site and exposes users to the ads on it. And the right to play those shows is valuable, he said, pointing to the still-unnamed venture between NBC Universal and the News Corp to create an online repository of their TV shows and movies. Sites like MySpace, AOL and MSN have already entered into commercial agreements to display the venture's content.
"This material has value," Cotton said. "The notion of taking it and generating traffic with it needs to be negotiated and needs to be done with the agreement of content owners." That's why NBC and the other major studios are keeping close tabs on VeohTV's business model.
For some video content, VeohTV can act as a digital video recorder, turning a video stream - meant to be viewed on the Web - into a downloaded file on a user's hard drive. VeohTV users can record a YouTube video, for example, even though YouTube, owned by Google, says its terms of service specify that videos uploaded to the site will only be streamed.
Other software, like the recently released RealPlayer 11, by RealNetworks, can turn streaming video into downloads as well. But according to Ricardo Reyes, a YouTube spokesman, VeohTV steers users away from its ads while violating YouTube's contract with its users. Reyes says the company is watching Veoh carefully. In response, Shapiro says his software provides an easier way to do something that is already technically possible on YouTube.
Shapiro and his backers are aware their product will disrupt current business models. So have many technological innovations in the past, he argued, and Veoh hopes to build a large audience while courting large media companies. That creates an apparent contradiction that will be hard to resolve. Veoh maintains that it does not need permission to list and play other companies' videos inside VeohTV. But it also wants to play nice.
"We are going to try to be friendly to content owners," said Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital who serves on the Veoh board. "We are going to try to be the white-hat company."
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