Set up a camera, let the video run

So a couple days back I met with a company called mDialog who came in to share their video serving platform at the house that Jack built. The pitch is fairly straight forward, it is a proprietary platform designed to stream and share video content across the web as well as streaming it to phones on devices that support it. The system also supports pre and post-roll ads, so it adds up to a play in a space I'm a big fan of: experiences facilitated by brands. Planning a new web series? mDialog provides a platform for delivery and monetisation. Their platform is also looped into Double Click, so you can get your hands on some robust reporting either side.

Now, the above is all well and good. My criticism (which I shared with them) is the solution warrants building a new community and driving traffic to an environment which would otherwise lie dormant. The noise to signal ratio of YouTube is immense, but it comes with an existing community which can, when used correctly, deliver a life of its own.

What I feel would be a more interesting move is to have the ability to put clips on YouTube and then integrate the comments from everywhere that clip gets embedded. mDialog have already made a shrewd move in allowing Disqus-style functionality with comments being displayed everywhere a clip gets embedded, taking that one step further would allow the benefits of a ready made and heavily trafficked site like YouTube with the fantastic back-end tools provided under mDialog.

There was another product they shared which I agreed not to talk about yet, but it was, to my mind, much more exciting. They should be launching it sometime around the end of July, I look forward to talking about it then.

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Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk, with thanks to compfight.