Magnify.net, a peer-driven online video discovery and broadcast channel for people, groups and businesses, released a series of features that creates a completely new platform for the Web curation of video.
At 10 million page views per month and 15,000 different content channels, Magnify is demonstrating that Web video is on its way to completely eclipsing network television.
Magnify.net turns couch potatoes into content curators by giving them the tools and resources to discover, review, organize and share content-specific video with like-minded individuals — regardless of where it’s hosted. Video can be collected from multiple video networks and aggregated onto one channel.
The company is rolling out a complete customization toolkit that makes it easier to create branded online broadcast channels, discover and integrate Web video, and analyze visitor statistics and activities.
Unlike other sites that are warehouses for vast numbers of video, Magnify.net lets its users tailor their video channel for their own interests and those of their target community. The Magnify platform searches, sorts, and delivers video based on a site’s unique interests — and allows owners to review and approve only the video that meets their content and quality criteria.
User-driven networks are already being deployed by web partners large and small.
- QuePasa, one of the largest Spanish language community sites, recently launched
- QPNN.com, a user-generated news service built entirely on the Magnify.net platform.
- RCUvideos.com is a 300,000 member community of radio controlled air plane flyers.
Magnify.net released the following new technology to support enhanced community curation:
- The “Magnify This” video grabber browser bookmarklet transforms channel admins and visitors into content curation deputies by allowing them to embed a video from any of the most popular video sites into a magnify channel with a single click. This functionality currently works with YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe, Daily Motion, and Blip.tv videos.
- Curation logins are expanded with the new ‘Editor’ login feature, giving multiple users the ability to manage and sort videos.
- Icon Customization gives admins the ability to replace the Magnify.net navigation icons with their own customized jpgs.
- User-controllable thumbnails offer the ability to replace the thumbnails with an alternate graphic image to represent each video.
- Site Admin’s Graphic Image Uploads incite creativity, giving admins more control over the customization of their channels with uploaded custom graphic elements.
- Home page mini player module allows channels to show a pre-selected video when visitors arrive, as well as enables visitors to view other videos directly on the home page.
- “Latest activity” modules display recent members, recent playlists, and recent activity and provide a live feed of uploaded videos, comments, votes, and playlist creation.
- Cross channel playlists are designed for admins who have multiple networks tied together into a network. They can now cross-promote playlists from one network channel to another.
- Enhanced statistics reporting delivers much deeper data on video views, page views, uniques, widget views, and provides the data in a new bar chart form.
- Video counters can display view counts in thumbnail displays for all to see.
Magnify.net is led by Steve Rosenbaum — one of the early innovators in the use of small format video, and user-created video. Rosenbaum created MTV Unfiltered — the first series produced entirely by viewers, and directed the multi-perspective feature Documentary “7 Days in September”. Magnify has been financed by its founders, Venture Capital firm Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, and Active Angels Investors, and a group of private individuals.
Technically Speaking, we have covered them here, as well as our interview with Steve Rosenbaum here.
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