Bebo hosted a little get-together at the Bryant Park Hotel in NYC this morning to announce their new "Open Media" platform. Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world, and is No. 1 in many countries, but it plays second fiddle in the states to MySpace and Facebook (so third fiddle, I suppose)(and a quiet third fiddle, tucked way in the back of the stage behind the cellos).
Now Bebo's trying to go beyond social networking into content hosting with Open Media, in hopes of luring more eyeballs and ad dollars. Basically, Bebo wants content producers (especially video and TV) to upload their content to Bebo, which will provide them with a free space for it, and let them embed whatever ads they want in the video and keep 100% of the profits. It's self-service, so it sounds like the studios can pretty much do what they want with it, and they retain full copyright control.
Free hosting, distribution, and promotion, and the studios keep all the ad money they can attract. Bebo gets the extra traffic that the content attracts, and users get free access to more online content. Sounds like a win-win-win. Launch partners include MTV, CBS, the BBC, and others (these three seem to be the standard launch partners of every new video platform, don't they?)
One thing I like about Bebo's idea is it at least attempts to aggregate content from lots of different companies in one place. Granted, every online video company is trying to do that, but Bebo's actually trying to do it on the studios' terms--ie, there are no terms.
Just from casual surfing around the site, it doesn't look as sleek and cool as Hulu or Joost; more like MySpace TV. But the integration with Bebo's social network--letting users swap videos, post clips to their profile page, and so on--will make it an attractive feature to Bebo users.
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