What’s On? Channels.com Wants to be Your Online Video Hub

After two years of development, Web video guide Channels.com recently launched, with the goal of being a central hub for viewers and programmers alike. E-Centric recently talked with Sean Doherty, founder and CEO of the Palo Alto, CA-based company, to find out why he thinks his site will help boost the profile of advertiser supported online video.

E-CENTRIC: What makes Channels.com different from sites like YouTube?

DOHERTY: There’s lots of user-generated content sites for video, where professional programmers like NBC or CBS can also put content up. But there’s no way to convert users of those clips to customers for their ad supported Web video. What we’ve done is create an environment where CBS, for example, can put a bunch of free promotional video clips in the same place as links to their ad supported content. If you like a TV show or some piece of broadband content they’ve created, you can sample it and then convert to watching the ad supported content.

E-CENTRIC: You’re not hosting any videos yourself, right? The goal is to drive people back to the advertisers’ sites, correct?

DOHERTY: That’s right. If you go to the site, it kind of looks like there’s a bunch of video hosted there. But we don’t require any uploads. It’s just links back to the place where the content provider chooses to host the video, which might be YouTube or their own Web site or Google….it could be anywhere.

E-CENTRIC: How are you promoting the site?

DOHERTY: We’re doing a number of things. Organic search is the way that most Web video sites draw traffic, so we’ve got a big organic initiative in place. Probably 75 or 80% of our traffic is coming from Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! searches. The other, perhaps more interesting thing we’re doing is a widget called a Channels Badge, which is an embeddable Flash application you can put in a blog or Web page or anywhere you like.

E-CENTRIC: How does that work?

DOHERTY: It’s basically a way of distributing pieces of the guide out to places on the Internet. Let’s say I’m a fan of NBC’s show “Heroes.” I can embed a Channels Badge on my Facebook page that’s got links to all of the “Heroes” videos that have been indexed in the Channels.com guide. People who visit my Facebook page can play the videos from my own page, without having to go to the guide. This is a viral way of extending the guide to tens of thousands or millions of different Web pages around the Internet, kind of a syndication of video promotion.

E-CENTRIC: Another feature is the Bookmarking Wizard. Tell me a little about that.

DOHERTY: We’ve filed a patent for this—it’s really the big piece of technology we’ve developed over the last two years. There are lots of companies out there that allow you to create bookmarks for pieces of video content you find and enjoy as you’re surfing the Web, like del.icio.us has done with social bookmarking. [But those sites only] bookmark videos on the user generated content sites like YouTube and Google and Grouper and Metacafe. What we’ve done is develop this deep linking technology that will bookmark a piece of video content on any site, in any file format, anywhere on the Web, from professional or amateur sites. Using Bookmarking Wizard you can create a deep link to it and include it in the channels guide. You can create a playlist of videos from all over the Web and curate them and present them with a badge or in the guide or in RSS feeds throughout the Channels.com interface.

E-CENTRIC: If someone watches a video on Channels.com, are they required to watch an advertisement?

DOHERTY: There’s no advertising on the Channels.com site now. We’ve got about 350 playlists up there from every major TV broadcast and cable network. These are just pieces of content our own editors have indexed in the Channels guide from around the Web.

E-CENTRIC: Are you required to get permission from everyone whose content you’ve indexed?

DOHTERTY: No. And we’re very rights holder friendly. When we index the content, we don’t put the full episodes in our database. You’ll see links back to the network sites for the full episodes, and [on Channels.com] you’ll see things like teasers and outtakes that would drive a user back to the network’s site. We’ve been working with a lot of these professional content companies for a couple of years as we’ve developed the site, [and talked to them] about their own business goals, where they see Web video going and how they want to make money off of it. To a person, every one said that they’ve dabbled with iTunes type of pay per download [schemes]. But the real way they saw to make money was from people viewing ad supported Web video on their own sites. We’re just trying to drive traffic to those sites by creating a previewing and sampling environment.

E-CENTRIC: How do you see the site evolving?

DOHERTY: The real development will come from the expansion of the Badge Network, and getting it not just on the amateur blogs or Facebook pages but having the actual cable and broadcast networks themselves as a promotional tool to move the video closer to the consumer.