Business Week.com’s Dan Carlin has this piece today about DailyMotion, a French video sharing site that has designs to become the YouTube of Europe. DailyMotion predates YouTube and also captures a bigger market share in France — the site focuses on local content and has features, such as direct uploading from webcams, that YouTube doesn’t offer yet.
DailyMotion has also found a clever way to gain exposure as well as access to copyrighted content. It has a deal with top French TV station TF1 under which DailyMotion has created a special user-generated video site called Wat TV. Starting November 17, TF1 will play the best clips from Wat.TV each day and DailyMotion gains the rights to TF1 clips.
Despite the rise of country/language specific video sharing sites, DailyMotion, which is available in six European languages (note that if you access the site from the U.S., the default language is English) hopes to expand across Europe.
But Bejbaum [CEO Benjamin Bejbaum) is betting Daily Motion can do just that, despite the emergence of rivals such as Germany’s MyVideo or Israel’s Metacafe, which has raised $20 million from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. The Daily Motion site is now available in six European languages, and the company is opening an office in Berlin later this year. “Our strategy is totally international,” Bejbaum says. “We are closer to French content, but I want to see content from every country.”
One nasty little caveat to Carlin’s relatively glowing piece. Someone named Nob posted the following comment on the article:
The vast majority of Daily Motion’s content is stolen. They have every episode of The Simpsons ever and new episodes of Lost and Prison Break in their entirety. Pure Piracy. These guys are 15 minutes away from a crippling lawsuit.
I took a look at it does appear that DailyMotion offers many full episodes of “The Simpsons,” as well as “South Park.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:27 AM|Comments(0)
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