We thought pretty highly of the online video mashup site Omnisio at this year’s Y Combinator Demo Day, and liked it even more after it launched back in March. Apparently, so did Google. Its YouTube property purchased Ominisio today as a way to expand how users interact with the videos they create online, according to the YouTube Blog.
Terms of the deal were not announced, though TechCrunch is hearing it was an all cash deal in the $15 million range. We contacted Omnisio co-founder and chief executive Ryan Junee, but he could not disclose anything about the deal at this time.
Omnisio works by allowing users to submit videos URLs from around the web. It then loads that video and allows you to do things such as crop it down to a certain length and merge it with other clips from around the web. This functionality previously worked with videos from YouTube, Google Video and Blip.tv, though it’s not clear that if with this new YouTube partnership companies like Blip.tv will be pushed out of the equation.
Not that it should matter all that much as YouTube is by far the dominant source of online videos. Hence all the lawsuits.
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Omnisio also allows you to easily leave comments on videos that show up on the video itself during playback. This should work well alongside YouTube’s newer video annotations feature.
Update: Chris Sacca, an angel investor in Omnisio (and former Google employee) has a bit more on his blog.
Below find an example video from Omnisio:
http://www.omnisio.com/bin/Embed.swf?embedID=b64AM0xNSr3y6ladbiFy2wVentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Learn More