Video Publishing And Distribution: Veoh (beta) Review

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Veoh, a new self-defined Internet Television Peercasting Network, is readying its archiving and video distribution infrastructure for a public launch in the coming months.

Veoh will be free of charge for both video producers as well as for viewers - anyone will be able to upload content and to use the service at no cost.

In addition, content owners will be able to decide whether or not they will want sell some of their quality clips for a fee. Veoh will act as an intermediator between producers and buyers facilitating financial transactions and content delivery while keeping a small commission on each purchase made.

Photo credit: Matt Williams

To make the system profitable popular video clips will be used as a platform for the delivery of television-like ads which will be initially placed at the beginning and end of such shows.

Veoh positions itself as an additional online video clearinghouse open to all kinds of content while focusing exclusively on originally produced content and imposing strict editorial reviewing criteria for any new material to be published through it.

Here are more of my initial impressions as well as the recording of my good conversation with Dmitry Shapiro CEO of Veoh.

Veoh is working hard to bring its technology to a level of reliability and functionality that can make its tool a competitive and desirable asset.

For now, only early Beta versions of its software have become available (under an invitation only approach) and they still look and feel very rough and unrefined.

I have run a few tests with the Windows Veoh Beta Uploader, but have found more annoyances than things that worked. The interface and interaction design still has a long way to go, and I was not able to upload one of the two test video clips I had prepared.

Also, the organization of content and the structure of the form accepting meta-data information before you can actually upload a clip are confusing and ambiguous. It isn't clear whether the show is intended as the description of a series of videos or just one. In either case some other fields would be needed, and having tried both approaches myself I must say that it really doesn't do justice to the proper categorization and labeling of your video clips.

There is for now no way to delete an uploaded clip or to edit/revise the contents of already uploaded material.

The Veoh functionality and service to view and download video clips is also not yet available.

Even within the Veoh Video Uploader all menu functions are still disabled.

But in my humble impression, and due to its ability of having already closed a partnership with Google Video (video clips uploaded to Veoh can be simultaneously be uploaded and be made part of the Google Video archive as well), Veoh must have enough clout, backing and support to endure the many likely issues any video service like this will face (technical, logistic, ergonomic).

For now what I have been seeing is rather disappointing, even considering the Beta status of this software.

Only the Veoh Uploader is available for now and my test experience with it has not been what I would consider promising. There have been login issues, the upload form is still in a very early stage of organization (fields labeling and selection needs a great deal of improvement), and even the uploading process is nothing I would count on as reliable. The first video I uploaded didn't go beyond 71%. Then it stalled. The second one went straight up without trouble and is now under "pending Review" status.

There is for now no apparent way to edit, delete or re-upload my first video attempt and so while I have an entry within my Veoh account page for that video, it is stuck at 71% of the uploading.

Quite annoying was also the fact that every once in a while I was bumped out by the Veoh service and had to relog in to proceed with my testing.

Without getting into further details, Veoh looks still very young and rough and I am inclined not to draw strong negative conclusions based on this early Beta release.

If you are not a video archive developer looking to see what the competition does and where its weak points are, I would suggest to hold on in sending in your request to be another tester of this new video publishing technology.

Veoh ambition is as much mine as well as the one of hundreds of thousands of talented video communicators around the world. I look forward to see Veoh invest the right dose of premium value in the development of a submission interface that learns the mistakes done by its predecessors and moves on to offer something significantly better, easier and quicker to use.

The user interface is so critical in these new tools that I will not get tired of saying that it is better to delay some complementary functionality at the beginning to give greater resources and support to a qualified interface design and usability team who can make the product "lovable" the first minute it is tried.

We live in times when new potential users have very limited time available, a short attention span, and no desire to be tolerant or supportive of tools that don't work for them in the first 3 minutes of their initial testing. It's either "I love it" or "I'll pass this on. Not for me, yet". So, in mediocrity, there is no hope. And even though this market will keep widening for some time to come offering ample profitable space for many similar players with a different focus, only the ones that work right out of the box while making the user enjoy the process will endure the test of time.

Veoh is free and runs on both PCs and Macs.

For more information on Veoh see the Veoh FAQ.
For assistance and technical support write to: support@veoh.com.

Download Veoh Uploader Beta

Windows (XP or higher)
VeohUploaderSetup.exe (1.7 MB)

Mac (OS X 10.3.9 or higher)
VeohUploaderSetup.dmg (1.5 MB)

N.B.: You must have an invitation code to run Veoh Uploader. To request one send an e-mail to invitation@veoh.com.

*****
Audio streaming record and text transcript of my good conversation with Dmitry Shapiro CEO of Veoh.

Text transcript
(by Jessica Gardner)

RG: Hello everyone here is Robin Good. I am speaking live from Terceira from the archipelago of the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic. And I have a free live line with San Diego, California if I am correct where Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of Veoh, a new company, creating television 2.0. He's about to tell us the whole story on this front. Dmitry, are you there?

DS: I am. Thank you, thanks for having me, my pleasure.

RG: Good morning to you, Dmitry, and tell us a little bit about yourself. You have already a good and fascinating career behind you and you are launching yourself into a new, fascinating area. Before diving into the future of television and the internet, let's hear a little bit about yourself and where you're coming from and what you've done so far in the world of the internet.

DS: Sure, sure, absolutely, I'll appreciate it. Well, just prior to founding Veoh Networks I founded a company in April of 2000 called Aconix Systems, it's another company based in San Diego, California. And, what Aconix does is, it makes a gateway product that it sells to corporations all around the world that allows those corporations to secure and manage their employees use of two types of technologies. One type is instant messaging, all the various types of instant messaging technologies that are prevalent, in use today. And the second series of technologies that Aconix gateway manages are peer-to-peer technologies. So, everything from fast-tracking the tele-base networks e-docking and peer-based networks and all the various clients that run on-top of those types of networks. Aconix provides software and hardware solutions to just over a million licensed users through-out the world to be able to stay secure in that. And, prior to that I was in charge of technology for a large dot-com called collegeclub.com. It was the largest community, online community, of college students, over three million members. And prior to that, I was in charge of web development for Fujitsu Telecommunications which is a very large Japanese telecommunications company. So, I spent really the last ten years working on the web in various capacities; everything from enterprise software to consumer software to consulting, etc. And obviously we're very excited about getting into what we perceive as really being kind of the next booming area of internet technologies, the next democratization of television broadcasting utilizing internet technology.

RG: It seems from the initial press release that you sent out the day before yesterday, and from the little I've learned about you with some search, that your previous experience with Aconix and secure management of P2P network within enterprise may be quite relevant to the new offering you're about to launch. Is that correct?_

DS: Ah, well, yes, we obviously believe that it is very relevant. I mean, our goal is not to spend the majority of our time talking about the technology behind the scenes of the product which is a peer-to-peer technology, a proprietary peer-to-peer technology that we build here in-house using our expertise in P2P, but really to, from a company standpoint, obviously to focus on the consumer and publisher side of it.

Which is what we're really doing is creating a system that allows for full-screen, television grade broadcasting of video cost-effectively and reliably across the internet.

But, yes, behind the scenes we do run a homegrown peer-to-peer client and if you will tracker infrastructure, a lot of people refer to it. It's similar to BitTorrent, but it is homegrown and has some functions in it that are not common in traditional peer-to-peer networks.

RG: So in other words, you have already revealed a good part of what you're offering is in very simple words, an infrastructure to allow content publishers of video as well as consumers of video to access and to distribute this content in a very simple and effective way by leveraging the power of P2P and moving it to the next level.

DS: Yeah, that is absolutely correct.

RG: So I guess everybody here wants to know how you're moving into the next level and whether the key differences, without getting too much into the technical, make it stand out from the present offerings that are P2P-based and which are sprawling everywhere around us in making video more accessible both for the producers and the consumers.

DS: Sure, well, so we believe that video distribution in the sense of being true broadcast video needs to be a respected and legitimate and a managed form of broadcasting.

So unlike traditional peer-to-peer protocols and networks that do their best to create de-centralized systems where they can forego all control and kind of wipe their hands clean of any inappropriate activity that happens in those systems. Unlike those systems, what we've done, is we've built a system that does have a centralized point of control that manages all of the, you know, millions of peers that are out on the network. But it does not wipe itself clean of those kinds of images.

We are taking a very strong stance on not allowing pirated and inappropriate material on our network, and to be able to do that requires a protocol and systems that can talk to each other and that have knowledge of each other and that know who publishes what and to give publishers the capability to pull content back if the content is somehow released on the network inappropriately.

And so all of those things are really kind of an opposite stance from a peer-to-peer standpoint to what we've been seeing over the last few years as producers of peer-to-peer software do their best to try to avoid any type of control and potential liability that comes with those systems.

We obviously believe that if you release those types of disruptive technologies into the wild, you do not put those control points into the technologies. It is no wonder that all of those technologies are used extensively for piracy of intellectual property, whether it be video or audio or software. And our goal is obviously not piracy of any sort but legitimate broadcasting and our focus is strictly on video broadcast and not audio, not software distribution, but simply broadband TV quality video distribution.

RG: Excellent answer, thank you for that. So you're proposing a centralized system in some way that leverages P2P distribution system, but which takes up a proactive approach in controlling, monitoring, and signaling to participants and contributors what is appropriate and what not. Am I understanding this correctly? And if so, what are the key advantages that a company like yours' can benefit out of this new approach?

DS: Yeah, you're exactly right, you understand it correctly. So, let me maybe explain how the system works and I think that will kind of tend towards the various advantages that we feel we're going to bring to the marketplace.

Unlike traditional peer-to-peer systems where anyone can take a piece of content, whether they own it or not, stick it either in a directory or publish it to let's say a bit torrent tracker, and then kind of put it out there anonymously.

We do not have any form of anonymous publishing. When you join our system you register, we verify that your e-mail address is a valid e-mail address. You give us some information, and then you have a unique ID on our system. When you publish a piece of content, that piece of content is not automatically listed in our directory. In fact what happens is the piece of content goes into an editorial queue. That editorial queue is managed by a set of people, our employees as well as a set of volunteers that report to us that make sure that that piece of content is appropriate for our network. And in appropriateness, what we look for are a number of things. We look for encoding, so the content is encoded at a high enough bit-rate and a large enough screen size and it looks good enough on typical equipment and software that our end-users may have, and we publish some encoding specs in our frequently asked question section.

The editors also look to make sure the content is properly described through metadata that is submitted along with the content in the form of filling out a form, very similar to, for example, to being able to list something on EBay.

When you publish something to our system, the process is similar. You fill out a form; you choose a video file to submit along with that form. And so we verify that the form data you submit properly describes your video content. It's properly categorized; it's properly tested, etc. And so once it goes through that editorial process, which should be a very quick process, in fact our goal is a few hours, and no longer than 24 hours, and then the content gets approved.

Then, and only then, is it made available to our users. So what our goal is is to make sure that our database of content that's on our network, we never want people to download content and then message us and say "this is not what I was expecting." And so we've built a lot of tools in the editorial process to make sure that's the case and we've also built a lot of tools kind of in the community infrastructure that wraps that content to make sure that the content is properly indexed, properly categorized and properly described. And we believe that's obviously a very big advantage over traditional peer-to-peer networks. Because if you go to any of the, you know, websites that are doing a lot of this piracy for example, and even when you try to download some of this pirated material, a lot of times what you'll find is that it's not the material that you requested because you start getting, in a sense, video spamming going on. And that's always been a concern of ours, and so the centralized and managed and edited system we believe is the best approach to providing a true television experience which is what we're after.

RG: What I think Dmitry was referring to for those of you who have not spent a lot of time happily downloading pirated stuff from these illegal P2P networks is that you may find a file being labeled as being "Apocalypse Now" by Francis Ford Coppola while inside of it you may find all together different content that is there for the purpose of selling you something or promoting some other product. So in this respect the controls management infrastructure that Veoh and its network of video distribution is describing through Dmitry now is going to avoid those kinds of situations.

But Dmitry, are the people using your tool going to access a website to chose the content they want to look at or are they going to have a software client, a P2P software client on their machines that will allow them to navigate your network and to find what they're looking for?

DS: The answer is actually both. Our system consists of a client, that runs on both PC's and on Macintoshes. At its bottom layer it has P2P software that's hidden from the user's view.

We don't want users to be thinking P2P when they're using our client we want them to be thinking about television. And that client connects to a centralized infrastructure that is a web services based infrastructure. And the client talks to the directory and so inside the client in embedded a browser interface in a sense, that allows you to search for videos and discover videos in many other ways:
a) through recommendations, intelligent recommendations,
b) through finding videos based upon what your friends are viewing, or what other people like you are viewing, et cetera et cetera.

There are many different ways to find videos. And then to very simply be able to request that those videos be delivered to you, either on a one-off basis or a subscription basis, meaning an ongoing basis so you don't have to constantly go in and pull down new video. You can subscribe to shows, and if those shows have numerous episodes, each new episode will be delivered to you automatically.

And again, this is a download based system it's not a streaming system, so videos are actually downloaded to your machine.

Our client manages your disk space, so when you set it up, it asks you how much disk space you would like to allocate to video. And then we make sure we only use that amount of disk space and that content that's already been previously viewed, and you did not specify as needing to be kept for a longer period of time, that content will be deleted in order to make room for downloading additional content that's in your queue.

Having said that, you can also manage your queue, and find and discover new videos using a standard browser, simply logging in with your user name and password and then being able to drive your Veoh queue on your machine that has your Veoh client being able to drive that queue from any machine in the world, including ones from work or kiosks, et cetera.

RG: In an age where internet television is really picking up quite fast and there are all so many offerings it appears to me the ability to directly stream content when desired is effectively a plus.

Why did Veoh decide to go fully for a download approach and not include the opportunity for streaming directly its video content?

DS: Well, we're not precluding ourselves from doing it in the future. I'm kind of describing the system as it is today.

The primary reason for downloading content is because streaming television-grade, and to us television grade is content that is encoded in a way that if you plug your PC into your TV, that you can watch this content on your TV screen and not be aware that your content has come through the web, through the internet, so trying duplicate the television experience, to be able to get that quality of content delivered through a streaming infrastructure becomes very cost prohibitive, and so we did not want to focus on that.

We believe that consumers understand the value of what's known as time-shifted content, so content that is not live, but comes to them at a different point in time, when they're ready to watch it. And so we felt that that was the best place to start focusing.

We have done something interesting and that is we've integrated the ability into our system to automatically take the content you submit to Veoh and also make that content available on Google video. So, your listeners are familiar with Google's video initiatives. They know that Google launched a video uploaded service. And so what we've done is we've integrated with that video upload service and as our publishers publish video to Veoh they can specify if they'd also like Veoh to automatically publish their content to Google. And if they do choose to do that what we do is within the show profile if you will, where you find the show, we provide a preview button. And what that preview button does is basically opens up a browser window to Google directly to that program and they can scrub through that video within the Google system. Google transcodes that video because they too understand that broadcasting high-quality high-encoded video becomes cost prohibitive and really bandwidth resource prohibitive. So, typically the videos that you'll find on Google today are of lower quality than they were when they were submitted.

So, we thing we provide the best of both worlds, where Veoh provides the highest quality video that can be downloaded to your machine and watched when you're connected to the internet or not connected to the internet so for example if you watch it on your laptop you can actually take your laptop on a plane with you or take it to a park and be able to watch that content and we think that's a great value, and at the same time we provide you with a streaming infrastructure where you can go to Google and watch the video there for a preview.

In the future we may integrate our own streaming infrastructure in it but that really has not been planned as of yet.

RG: Thanks, great answers again. And let me ask you now, while representing all the independent producers already salivating at the idea of testing out your new service as soon as it becomes available, could you specify what are there in your own terms video broadcast specifications that you are referring to and what are the typical formats that you would support in uploading the original footage?

DS: Sure, there are some specific specs that I can't recall off the top of my head that are available in our frequently asked questions, but basically what we're doing is on the Macintosh we are supporting the QuickTime player so anything that will play in QuickTime for the Mac and on Windows we're supporting the Windows Media Player.

We are looking at embedding our own player and we'll potentially look at embedding the VLC player, for example, and so all of that is kind of being decided as we're moving forward. But, right now the first release has QuickTime embedded on them, on the Mac and Windows Media Player on the PC. We envision most of the content is going to come to us in MPEG 4 format using various codex. We're big fans of DivX, so DivX will definitely be supported. And I think one of the things we're going to do is as we start seeing what the preferences of users, we're trying to make it, in users I mean publishers that is, we're trying to make the system as publisher-friendly as possible; understanding that publishers want to reach the largest number of consumers and will do their best to encode in formats that are commonly found on end-users consumers' machines.

RG: Well, we know very well that then the issue of the Long Tail and the relevant components that are your recommendation tag in an affinity engines, metadata descriptions, that are already there and the use that you will make of it will determine very much how much the users will be able to find content because we'll know how big is the quantity of content that is emerging and becoming available in the video universe and we know also how much of this is totally irrelevant or pretty much crap, at least for those not interested in that specific topic. So, what are you going to offer in the ability to access, find, discover, and identify exactly what we are looking for in the shortest and easiest way possible?

DS: Sure, I think you've identified perhaps one of the most critical areas that we believe are areas where technologies need to be built to make this important. We believe that there are going to be lots of companies that will solve the issue of transferring files.

As we've mentioned earlier in this call, that you can use already existing peer-to-peer technologies that are unmanaged peer-to-peer technologies to transfer large video files back and forth. But really having an infrastructure that allows users to more easily find the content that they're looking for, whether they know what they're looking for or they don't, we believe that's really where the critical part lies.

I can tell you that our chief scientist is a gentleman by the name of Doctor Ted Dunning, and prior to Veoh, Dr. Dunning was chief scientist behind a large music play called MusicMatch that was recently purchased by Yahoo and now is a part of Yahoo Music. And there Dr. Dunning did a tremendous amount of work in building a recommendation engine that basically discovered various common threads between music genres and music likes and dislikes based upon obviously tremendous amount of data that comes from the usage of that service, the MusicMatch service. And he's really spent his whole life building these types of mathematical models that allow for predictive discovery of people's likes.

So we're going to be building a very comprehensive recommendations engine. We've built already a number of technologies on the community side including tagging and comments and the ability to find shows based upon basically a folks-anomy, browsing through various peoples' profiles and seeing how, what other shows those people like so people that like things that you like, what other things do they like, being able to forward content between groups of friends. So all of those types of community technologies that we find in, for example sites like Flicker, or online community sites like My Space. We've built a lot of those technologies into our system even in the first release.

So recommendations and community technologies to us are the way that people find shows. And of course we have in depth search based upon key words and such. But we really believe that discovering shows is going to be much more potent then kind of searching for them.

RG: Will you be supporting RSS?

DS: We will, we'll be supporting RSS in a number of ways. We'll be supporting RSS by using RSS to allow our publishers to publish to our system by providing us an RSS feed and then we'll read the enclosures, and then we'll also be supporting RSS by providing an RSS feed that publishers use that is hosted on our system that they can then send out to other people and we publish all of the metadata about the videos that are currently available on Veoh from the publisher's individual RSS feeds.

RG: Great! What about the timing of all this? When are we going to see the clients available for download and when can we start poking into the system?

DS: Well we just recently in fact just two days ago released a limited by-invitation-only release of our video up loader, which is an early adopter application geared towards producers that allows them to start uploading their videos into Veoh, get into our editorial queue, get those videos approved, so that when Veoh launches that those videos are front and center and ready to go. So that client runs on Macintosh and on Windows and is available again, it's been a by-invitation-only beta for that, but since we're on that call, I'll make sure I send you an e-mail with an invitation that you can then pass along to your listeners if they're interested and we'll give them access to that up loader application, it's available immediately. In fact, it's being used as we speak by a whole bunch of people.

The client application for being able to view and subscribe hasn't been announced yet. I'll give you a hint, it's going to be launched shortly but I can't give you a specific date yet. I think somewhere from three to five weeks from now.

RG: Great, and what is, Dmitry, going to be Veoh's key business model?_

DS: Well, we have a number of business models that we're looking at. I mean, right now our primary goal is to enable a very effective and viable channel for producers to be able to broadcast to the masses free of charge, without the traditional constrictions of broadcasting large video files and without having to go and resort to these unmanaged peer-to-peer networks where piracy is rampant and you know your content gets mixed in with a lot of inappropriate content. And so that's our goal right now.

To answer your original question of what's our revenue model: we've modeled a number of them.

First of all, we plan on allowing content producers to specify if they allow their content to be consumed for free or for a fee. If they chose to allow it to be consumed for a fee, meaning charge end-users for it, we will take a percentage of that fee for facilitating it.

If they chose to allow it to be broadcast to consumers for free, we've thrown around the idea of being able to inject television commercials into that content and then sharing in the revenues with the publishers.

So we envision the publishers having capabilities of making money on publishing free shows to the masses, so create a show that would be very much like a network television sitcom, for example, broadcast it on our system completely free of charge and then if we can sell advertising around it, then we and the publisher can generate revenues from them. Those are our two primary revenue models.

RG: What like what kind of advertising would you be intruding to these shows? That is not asking what kinds of products and services will you be accepting, for using it but rather what approach will you be using? The same that traditional television has used until now or will you be more leading towards sponsoring the opening and closing of a show? Any idea around that?

DS: Yeah, right now we're looking at going initially, and initially isn't even in the first release, it's in subsequent releases, but what we're thinking of doing is using basically bumper ads, so a commercial in front of the content and a commercial behind the content.

Eventually if there are large shows that are published on the network where they are multi-hour shows we may look at interrupting those shows and injecting other commercials. To be able to do that requires some technology and then really require some cooperation from the broadcasters, because we want to give them the flexibility of choosing where within their show that we should stick a commercial.

We don't want to interrupt in the middle of a key scene and kind of decide that. And so when that time comes we will give them specs on how to put basically markers within their video feed that say "this is a place that I don't mind if you put a commercial within my content."

RG: That sounds very good and very sensitive, I appreciate that because I was being scared by the idea of content being interrupted again in the same fashion of the television approach that we are so badly trying to get away from. But that looks already much better, bumpers in the beginning and in the end and interruption at pre-selected places where the producer can decide which ones they are and maybe an eye for having ads or promotions that may be complementary to the content being broadcast that would make it a killer solution. So, I look forward to that happening in the near future. And, are going to be content publisher able to benefit from some infrastructure facilities that facilitate their ability to sell content, like on-going subscription at lower prices and Paypal instead of use of credit cards, are you looking into those kinds of aspects as well?

DS: Absolutely, we are building a lot of technologies on a lot of fronts. We've got a group of people that are working on the transport side, we've got people that are working on the higher level application side, making these things easier to use. And then of course focusing on how do you facilitate the transactions with the most flexibility that really allows people to enjoy the medium, because that's what we want.

We want people to think of this as being - Television 2.0.. We don't want them to think about this being the web we don't want them to think of this as a, you know, transactional system where you have to sit in front of your computer with a mouse and a keyboard and think "what should I watch next in these short videos?" We want them to lean back and be able to watch these videos either on their large screen PC's or connect it to their TV's.

So, Paypal is definitely one of the things we'll be integrating, credit cards are another, being able to subscribe to shows so you're not billed on a one-off basis will be an option that we will provide to the publishers. We want to enable the publishers to have a tremendous amount of control over how their content is presented and how it is monetized and how it is consumed.

And we believe that when you open up those types of opportunities to content publishers, if you start seeing a tremendous amount of adoption and innovation. We believe there is still a lot of innovation yet to be done in even the formatting of the type of content that we see.

I talk to a lot of people that say "well, video is kind of different than audio. In audio, in music, you download music and you want to keep that music. But, you don't want to keep any video." And I often tell them that the reason they think that is because their used to the traditional forms of video, which is typically television shows, that last thirty minutes to an hour, or motion pictures that last, you know, an hour and a half to two hours and you watch them, and then you've seen them, and you don't want to see them for a while. But we believe that this democratization of video broadcasting will create many new formats.

Videos that you want to keep for extended periods of time and videos that you want to play. For example, you know background videos. My wife loves, we live in southern California and neither one of us surfs, but she loves surfing videos that have music on top of them. And periodically on our plasma TV's that we have in our home we have these surfing videos playing. And they play if not every day every other day and we wouldn't think about getting rid of them. And so we think those types of video formats that you don't find on traditional television or on motion picture theaters, that those will be very prevalent on the new system. And all of that is very exciting. And of course you start looking, well how do you monetize those things?

Because if you got a surfing show that comes to you every single day or every other day and it's a brand new episode then maybe the way to do it is to have a monthly subscription to that show where you pay a nominal price and you're constantly kept up-to-date with the latest content that's made available.

RG: Great, and let me ask you last, what have you defined as being your near-term objectives or better yet, success criteria? What are the criteria you've set out to be met for the coming months to say whether you guys have had the right ideas and it's becoming a killer app that many people are taking up or if there is something to be rethought of? What are the matching points to be reached?

DS: Well, we have a number of those as well. We try to be pretty organized in how we deal with it.

One of the first ones that we've been very pleased with is kind of the response from some of the press that we've recently received that's highlighted our vision and the response to our notify list. So we have a list that people can subscribe to be notified of various releases and the response has been tremendous. Literally thousands of people, everyone from general consumers that say "I'm really looking forward to watching," to lots of independent publishers and all the way to very recognizable motion picture studios and television networks that have contacted us and want to start discussing how to utilize our system to deliver their programming to the end-user. So that's... one measure is kind of the initial response from the marketplace to the vision.

Other measures: obviously capturing the imagination of the content publishers and getting large adoption of this up loader application that we've recently released and starting to see videos that are coming in. And that's also working very well. Again, we released it two days ago and a good amount of video has already been uploaded into our system. We haven't seen any video that is explicitly copyrighted, meaning pirated. Everyone seems to be respecting our wants of not uploading inappropriate content into our system.

Other measures will obviously be the adoption of consumers to this, and really the quality of content that comes to it.

In a sense we're obviously very similar to a television network, where we want to have the best content out there and that content be compelling enough to drive consumers to come and spend their limited amount of time watching content on our network.

And so, all of those things are various metrics that we track in looking at our success. And as we move forward, obviously we are a company, we are venture capital backed, we do have shareholders we need to make sure that are well taken care of, and so we will obviously begin to track revenues as we start getting into those types of situations.

RG: Well, Dmitry, this was extremely interesting and I truly appreciate your availability and patience in describing all this. It is my full desire to be able to soon be testing and reporting about what I found out with your technology, and I would like to thank you for your time today and would like to leave the microphone to you for the closing recommendation to the listeners, your website URL and any other information you would like to leave our gentle listeners with.

From Robin Good in Terceira, Portugal in the middle of the Atlantic it is all with Dmitry Shapiro of Veoh, I leave it to you for the closing remarks. Thank you, Dmitry, again.

DS: Thank you, Robin. It's been my pleasure. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to our rambling, we're obviously very excited about what we're doing and think that this is a very compelling proposition to the world; the ability to broadcast freely, reach large numbers of audience, to create your own television shows et cetera, so we hope your listeners will take a peak and see what we're all about.

You can find us on the web at www.veoh.com and also Robin as I mentioned earlier, I will provide you through e-mail, and maybe you can post it on your website, a link to our early adopter Veoh video up loader application, so if you have listeners that are content publishers or want to be content publishers, they can go in and download this application, it runs on both Mac and PC, and start to create their own television channel and I look forward to seeing all the content that comes in and will also provide my contact information if anyone wants to get in touch with me directly.

I try to make myself very available to the world. I really appreciate your time, thank you very much, and God bless.

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Good Conversation with Dmitry Shapiro CEO of Veoh