Today Paris and NYC-based Dailymotion, a web video platform that reaches more than 110 million unique visitors per month, announced an update to its Dailymotion Cloud product, which makes its suite of video publishing tools available on a white label basis. Developers and online broadcasters can use Dailymotion Cloud to upload, host and stream video on the web and mobile devices, and generate income through ads. The platform originally launched in 2010 with broadcast and streaming options, and is adding features like monetization, livestreaming, and added security features today. According to Dailymotion Cloud Director Florent Pajani, this puts Dailymotion in the same category as other online video platforms like Brightcove and Ooyala.
Dailymotion, which is the second-largest video portal after YouTube, generates over 1.4 billion video views every month, and has 33 localized versions around the world, with 18 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. alone. This updated white label offering is targeted at everyone from amateur to enterprise-level publishers, including brands, publishers, advertisers, and broadcasters, and supports livestreamed and on-demand videos. It caters to viewers on the web and on mobile devices, with HTML5 and Android-ready playback, and livestreaming available for web and iOS. Publishers can customize the design, from choosing player designs and templates, to API integration for custom designs. Publishers can also view viewership statistics like video consumption, traffic, and bandwidth monitoring. The new platform also has a focus on security, with support for Adobe Flash Access and Microsoft Playready.
Today’s update also allows publishers to add monetization to their videos through in-stream advertising, pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll ads. “Dailymotion Cloud is a natural outpost of what we’ve been doing on the consumer side, in building one of the largest video platforms for consumers,” Dailymotion U.S. Managing Director Roland Hamilton said in an interview. “We’ve created this self-serve model that’s very turnkey that allows people to go in with a no obligation pay-as-you-go model, but also allows folks to tap in to our monetization engine, either through networks that we have partnerships with, or through our direct sales efforts.”
Dailymotion Cloud customers can also sync their personal and cloud accounts to share metadata, titles and descriptions, and sync to Facebook through the Dailymotion Facebook application. Pricing for Dailymotion Cloud is tiered to traffic levels on a publisher’s site. Users don’t have to sign into a contract, it’s all based on usage, and priced per hour of video content streamed. Pricing starts at $0.12 per hour for less than 100,000 hours of monthly video consumed or broadcasted through the service, with volume pricing that drops as low as $0.06 per hour for publishers with over 10 million hours of monthly streaming requirements. Any usage under 10 hours of streaming video consumption per month is free to all users.
Current Dailymotion Cloud customers include Orange, Fiverr and Audi. The company is clearly looking to beef up their publisher tools – France Télécom acquired a 49 percent stake in Dailymotion in January 2011, with the option to buy the other 51 percent by 2013, so they could be looking to build up their publishing partners before that happens. While it may always live in YouTube’s shadow, Dailymotion has impressive traffic numbers, and these new Cloud features, especially the ability to monetize videos, should attract a new crop of publishers.
