Founder Dmitry Shapiro is now back as CEO and he is pouring the company’s remaining energy into a new product launched six weeks ago called Video Compass (read our review). Since launch, it has been downloaded 800,000 times, and is currently being downloaded at a rate of 25,000 a day. Video Compass may amount to a Hail Mary pass to try to save the company. It is an attempt to spread video search across the Web by bringing you search results when you don’t even know you are looking for videos.
The way it does this is through a browser add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer that is triggered whenever you do a search on a growing list of sites, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and even YouTube. In the past few days, it just added Twitter Search, MySpace, Hulu, DailyMotion, and Metacafe. Up next will be Flickr, Photobucket, and Facebook.
If you click on any of the thumbnails, a semi-transparent player opens up and lets you watch it in-situ, without necessarily going to Veoh.com. When you are done, you close the window and you are back at where you left off.
I’ve been testing Video Compass for the past few days, and the video results pretty decent. I find them to be a bit redundant on other video sites such as YouTube, but they can sometimes offer better results on narrower video sites. For instance, try searching for “Moldova” on Hulu and you get one result, whereas the Veoh Video Compass bar turns up plenty of protest videos. And do a search on Twitter and it adds a whole different dimension to your search. Even searches on Google bring up more video results than occur naturally. And you can always turn it off if it starts to annoy you.
I’ve been testing Video Compass for the past few days, and the video results pretty decent. I find them to be a bit redundant on other video sites such as YouTube, but they can sometimes offer better results on narrower video sites. For instance, try searching for “Moldova” on Hulu and you get one result, whereas the Veoh Video Compass bar turns up plenty of protest videos. And do a search on Twitter and it adds a whole different dimension to your search. Even searches on Google bring up more video results than occur naturally. And you can always turn it off if it starts to annoy you."
As we grow with video on the web, it will be devices like this that help us get to a main stream place. What exactly it will is to be determined but one cannot deny the vastly growing trend, and thanks to ideas like this, the growth rate is at an exponential snowball rate. Here at H2P, we are very excited to use video more and more with our designs and development.
