Veodia offers high-end broadcasting, and Me.TV joins parade

Veodia is the latest company pushing improvements in video, for bloggers or others wanting to broadcast high-end content.

Separately, another company, called Me.TV which isn’t doing anything extremely new but worth mentioning, joins the parade of video companies.

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First, Veodia. The Palo Alto, Calif. company lets you tape top-grade video, and publish it via blogs, or as podcasts to iPod or Apple TV, for example. It lets you archive it all. Another advantage is that it keeps everything online. No storage. By contrast, if you use YouTube, you capture video on your Webcam, save it on your computer, and then you upload it. Fine for a short file. But Veodia puts hours — 24 hours or more — right online and makes it ready to stream immediately. It’s professional quality, and much better than the Flash video you see on YouTube. You can sign up now for a free beta version.

It’s best used with a high-end TV camera, because it shows high-quality video, or H.264/MPEG-4, which is about the same quality as real TV. You can use a camcorder too, or webcam. You plug the camera into your computer, register and Veodia gives you a plug-in to your browser. A simple dashboard lets you hit a start button, and you’re off. Veodia takes care of the rest — handling framerate, bitrate, etc — details you don’t want to worry about. It provides reports too, i.e., how many people watched, what platform they watched from, and other info you may have asked for. Click on image at left to see an example; if you’re not using RSS, you can see it embedded below too.

It has partnered with WebEx to offer the service to WebEx users. Webex’s own service is different because it is designed for multiple people interacting, over relatively low quality video.

The round was led by Steven Berger, chairman of Turnitin and iParadigms (bio here), along with five other angels. Chief executive Guillaume Cohen tells us he turned down venture capital money, so this is the latest example of angel investors encroaching traditional VC turf. Cohen saw a market for this product, after working for France Telecom spin-out Envivio, and seeing the large number of dollars being spent by customers for these tools — and for products that didn’t well at that.

Veodia will be free to individuals, but will charge for extra services, such as helping you sell live broadcasts — for things like tutorials, webinars or concerts. That service, planned for September launch, helps you generate virtual tickets and will take care of billing. For businesses, Veodia will charge a monthly subscription for things like online storage, and streaming capacity based on minutes a month.

The only question is how many people will end up really wanting such high-end stuff. The masses appear to be gravitating to quick, short videos, of the sort at YouTube and Kyte. And large companies like Brightcove are already trying to serve bigger businesses.

Finally, a mention of Me.TV, another new video site produced by Los Angeles-based Demand Media. It’s a social network, letting people register .tv domain names ($25/yr), and then giving them a way to feature their videos. Me.TV provides a template to choose from, and you can add blog posts, and videos from elsewhere on the Web too. It will take a cut of any revenue from advertising. This seems quite elaborate, given all the other ways you can produce video, and video sites for free. However, if you don’t want to hassle, and are keen to share video, or in Hollywood trying to keep up with the Jones’, this may be worth it. The model is somewhat like Ning‘s for social networks, though Ning doesn’t make you pay for a domain. Techcrunch reviewed it here. Demo video below (click on link; we’re not embedding video, because RSS readers won’t be able to see).

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