Fred Destin

Like all punters in the market I have been reading the great hypey coverage of the destination sites, YouTube and MySpaceVideo and so on (like this good Mashable example) …  Given that no one is really charging for content or doing any serious in-video ads, I was wondering what the cash-flow of someone like VideoEgg must look like these days.  I love the concept of building "the Network" and Brightcove and VideoEgg are the most promiment flag carriers in this category.  [BTW here is a funny video of Jeremy Allaire where Rodrigo asks him what he knows about Flash…]

A few months back if you had asked me what my favourite type of video company was I would have answered VideoEgg.  But now I am not so sure.  I see that they now power video for Bebo, which means they get to deliver a video on EVERY page of Bebo (and with 25m users and the kind of average page views these sites get, you are talking maybe a couple of … billion videos per month ?).  The PR says the service is free, so I imagine that they take a slice of the advertising revenue?  How’s $1 net CPM pre-split (to be generous) on page ads going to allow these guys to make any money?  And how do you ever embed in-video ad in a Bebo homepage ?

UPDATE: As I finish writing this I decide to check Michael Birch‘s blog just in case, here is what I find:

Bebo TV Channels	2 hours ago
	What’s a TV without Channels? Well now we have thm. There is also a new TV tab at the top of the page, plus many more enhancements to the Bebo TV feature. Watch this space, more to come…

A quick login later and I find myself in front of JAUGCVS (that’s Just Another UGC Video Site to you).  It’s all converging, scarily fast.  BeboTV = YouTube. 
Now I am even more worried for VideoEgg as I doubt that Bebo pays license fees.