Webware

Blip.tv, a video site that shares advertising revenue with show producers on all the clips it hosts, announced on Tuesday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round that was led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company also announced that it has grown 250 percent in the past year, serving more than 51 million video views last month alone.

"Our goal is to make online shows sustainable by providing services of scale to independent creators and Web studios," said Blip.tv CEO and co-founder Mike Hudack. "Web show creators should be able to focus on creating great content while we take care of infrastructure, distribution, and advertising on their behalf. With Bain Capital's support, we know that we'll be able to grow our offerings for producers while providing value for distribution partners in the form of excellent episodic programming."

Blip.tv is competing in a tough market. The company is fighting for attention and users with services like YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo. And although each company has enjoyed success, none of them have been able to find an easy way to become profitable. Just last week, Vimeo launched a new service called Vimeo Plus, a paid solution with additional features for $59.95 per year. YouTube is trying professional content and advertising to increase its revenue.

For its part, Blip.tv has decided to raise more money and maintain its 50-50 revenue split with users. And although each has merit, there's no indication that any single solution will make these companies profitable as their popularity rises and costs skyrocket.

Corrected October 20 at 11:55 a.m. PDT. Details below.

Vimeo, the popular site that lets users upload videos and share them with friends, announced today that it has officially launched Vimeo Plus, a paid service that will offer users more features for $59.95 per year.

Vimeo Plus ups the user's storage limit from 500MB per week to 2GB per week and features no banner ads. Vimeo Plus users will also be able to customize any part of the player, which will allow them to remove the playbar or decide what happens at the end of the video.

But perhaps the most controversial announcement surrounding Vimeo Plus is the company's decision to scale back the number of high-definition videos allowed in its free version. Free account users will only be allowed to upload one HD video per week, while Vimeo Plus users can upload an unlimited number of HD videos. But there's another catch: embedded HD videos can only be played 1,000 times before they're reverted back to standard definition. Alternately, the user can pay more to keep the video in HD through the company's online store.

"First of all, you'll only be able to upload one HD video per week," a Vimeo representative said in a blog post detailing the new limitations being imposed on users with free accounts. "You will also be limited to creating one group, one channel, and three albums. It really does pain us to impose these limits, because we want you all to be happy, productive Vimeans, but we feel that if you're going to be a power user, you should help us keep Vimeo working by purchasing a Plus account."

Vimeo's decision to scale back some of its offerings on free accounts shouldn't come as a surprise. The company is operating in a highly-competitive market against companies like YouTube, Blip, Viddler, and countless others that are trying to find the best way to monetize their expanding communities.

Vimeo claims it needed to charge its users because its advertising revenue wasn't covering the cost of hosting so many videos. Now it needs to hope its user base will understand and use the paid service.

This story initially misstated the limits imposed by Vimeo. It is only embedded HD videos that can only be played 1,000 times before they're reverted back to standard definition.

Yesterday, as the Republican presidential debate took place via YouTube, the Democratic National Committee quietly launched a rather notable Web 2.0 initiative itself. FlipperTV is a new service from the Democratic Party site that offers a growing library of video clips of the Republican candidates on the campaign trail. Users are encouraged to take the video and "use the footage as they wish." Wink wink.

(Credit: CNET Networks/Democratic National Committee)

In an era when home-brewed YouTube videos are more entertaining than 90 percent of network television, the DNC's strategy seems obvious. Why pay high-priced advertising companies to create mudslinging attack ads (that could blow up in its face) when you have millions of supporters with the technology to make their own videos and take responsibility for the content. The site even suggests that we "hold these candidates accountable for their comments and actions." ... Read more

HeySpread is a new service from the folks at Particles (creators of HeyWatch and HeyCast) that lets users upload a single video to multiple video-hosting providers. Just pick the video you want to upload from your hard drive, and HeySpread will pull up a listing of various video hosts. All you need is log-in information for each of them, and the file will automatically get sent out to each, assuming you've got the correct credentials.

HeySpread works with YouTube, Google, and MySpace Video, along with DailyMotion, Blip.TV, and four others. In my testing with five of the nine available video services, only one upload appeared to have failed (Yahoo Video), and the rest went up without a hitch.

This is a very helpful service for people who would like to upload things in one place, or those with slow Internet connections. Since you're basically just uploading it to HeySpread to take care of, you can avoid having to double, triple, or quadruple up on upload time to multiple services. The one missing piece is an editor for some of the more advanced options--like privacy settings, video descriptions, and additional links--on these video-hosting services. Of course, in most cases you can go in later on and add them by hand.

Just enter in your video hosting log-ins in nine of the supported sites, and your video will automatically be uploaded to each.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Searchles, the social network that launched last June, has rolled out a new feature called Searchles TV, which lets you combine multiple clips from multiple services to share elsewhere in an embeddable player. Similar to SplashCast (see previous coverage), you can jog back and forth between clips without leaving the player. Searchles works with videos from YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Grouper and Blip.tv, and plans to add more partners in the future.

What's neat about Searchles TV is that embedded players will reflect any changes you make to the master feed. SplashCast does this too, and it works really well if you want to showcase different content without having to change the embed code on a blog or Web site. This can be especially helpful in a site like MySpace, where making changes to the code can get a little tedious.

Here's a Searchles TV spot I created in about two minutes.