What Revver can do better

This post is about a week late to the party. I've had my head buried in Wallstrip, and have neglected my much more important duty to blather on endlessly about gootube.

Here goes...

Revver. What the hell is Revver going to do? That question has been tossed around the blogosphere a lot, and I guess it makes sense. Youtube always had the traffic... Revver appeared to be going after the monetization.



Now that google has Youtube, they have the traffic and (presumably) the means to monetize it. So Revver's screwed, right?

Wrong.

If you really look at what Revver is doing, you'll see that while they may be the first video hosting site to get serious about making money, they're not really about the monetization model. They're about the content providers who are serious about making money.



It's not just their advertising strategy that appeals to the serious content provider, it's most everything about their service. They offer format flexibility (flash or quicktime), they have an open API, their player is larger than the standard web video, and (this one's REALLY important to us content producers) THE FLASH VIDEO LOOKS GOOD.

I chose Revver as a platform for Wallstrip in large part because of the quality of the image. The monetization model was a nice bonus, but I made the decision because of quality and flexibility. Now of course, the image quality isn't close to having a quicktime or even .wmv video progressively download from your site, but when you look at comparable products, Revver is an excellent choice.

While image quality is a great part of revver now, it's not a sustainable competitive advantage - Google can improve Youtube's flash video quality overnight. So what is revver doing right that they can keep doing right regardless of what Youtube does?

BE EVERYWHERE.

Revver just launched their redesigned servicec (Revver One), and with it they are launching several key features to make them a platform not for social networking, but for broad distribution on the web - "along the way" distribution.

One is the widget that we modified for Wallstrip... I blogged about it on Monday. Basically this allows you to create your own channel and syndicate it around the web. We are using it for one program, but you could add a whole lineup to your widget, just like a television channel. Youtube was the first to this feature (revolutionary, I called it at that time) but now Revver does it better. Youtube's embeddable playlist is not a widget, it's a full size player. And it's very clunky. Revver's ui is extremely elegant.

The second thing I love is that they are solidly deferential when it comes to branding. You'll notice that the Revver video at Wallstrip.com is skinned with our logo, not Revver's. Within a couple of months, the default player will have no logo on it. They're also actively promoting their API as a tool for you to create your own sharing site using Revver's background technology. So if you wanted to create a site like, say, sillyfaces.com, you could build it essentially out of the box from Revver, without anyone knowing it was a Revver site. Their developers will even help you do it.

Pretty cool.

Revver appeals to me the same way that Final Cut Pro, or the first Mini DV cameras did. It empowers the creative producer to distribute high quality work with almost no resources. That's a disruptive technology in my book.

technorati tags: usergenerated, video, platform, syndication, youtube, google, revver, sharing