14 DAY TRIAL // The online video market is continually evolving and, despite its growing audience, event the biggest companies are still trying to figure out how to actually make money from this. Not that that's stopping anyone and the latest battlefield seems to be the UK. After a failed attempt by the major broadcasters in the country to create their version of Hulu, and after Hulu's own delayed attempt to enter the market, an upstart, SeeSaw, has swooped in to steal the glory.
It's not exactly coming out of the blue, it recycles parts of the aborted Project Kangaroo, the joint-venture mentioned above, which, despite support from all major TV broadcasters, or rather, precisely because of that, failed to come to fruition. Government regulators didn't like the idea of all these competing companies coming together very much and the project was eventually scrapped.
Out of its ashes rose SeeSaw, a new online video hub, which has just launched publicly in the UK. SeeSaw's parent company Arqiva brought the technology that was to power Kangaroo and used it to launch its very one online-TV site after less than a month of private beta testing. The site and the technology are on par and seem to be getting positive reviews so far. The snazzy interface takes quite a few cues from Hulu, which is pretty much the standard in professional and TV-oriented video sites, and people shouldn't have too many gripes with it.
Content-wise, it's also doing pretty well, has plenty of videos from BBC Worldwide, Channel 4 and Five. It adds up to a decent collection of videos, so there shouldn't be too many problems on this front either. The site only features video ads, pre-roll but also mid-roll ads, which apparently tend to be on the longer side but are similar to what everyone else is doing.
SeeSaw seems to check mark in all the right places but this is absolutely no guarantee of its success, because it suffers from the same problem as most aggregators, all the content is already available elsewhere. BBC has the iPlayer, Channel 4 has 4 on Demand and there is also Demand Five. All the Channel 4 content is available on YouTube as well, so SeeSaw has to compete on the user experience alone, not an easy thing to pull off. And with Hulu, finally, coming to the UK sometime this year, it's going to be an uphill battle.
