Animoto, a new Web application that let users to create their own MTV-style videos from images or music they choose, is announcing a venture capital fund from Amazon. Although the sum of funding is not disclosed in their blog, but this funding mean that they’re just begun to fulfill their promise to collaborate, as Animoto was able to scale its service to meet the exponential growth with the help of Amazon Web Services.

As Brad Jefferson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Animoto said, “Before AWS (Amazon Web Services), we simply could not have launched Animoto.com and our professional video rendering platform at our current scale without massive CapEx and a lot of VC funding. The viral spike in Animoto video creations we experienced this week would have been disastrous without AWS.”

In fact, Animoto was founded in August 2007, headquartered in New York, and currently has 160,000 registered users. Upon sign-up, users are given the ability to create a 30-second videos, i.e. Animoto Shorts for free, but the videos are not downlaodable. However, to extend a longer length videos, they simply required to pay a premium rate that costs $3 each video and it includes the ability to download the video to their desktop computers. Videos created can be embedded onto any blogs, social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, or Websites such as YouTube, or shareable through emails. To create a video, it appears to have become an easy job for novice users, as they only need to follow three steps, that are 1) Get your images, 2) Get music, and 3) Finalize with details. Normally, to complete a video, users are require to wait for 8 minutes to half an hour, depending on the length of the video to be created. But bear in mind, the best browser to do the job is Safari browser.

Animoto is changing the way it competes, simple steps to create videos or slideshows, and the images browsing and uploading process is also simple. In the meantime, Animoto also support direct image retrieval from Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug, Picasa, and Photobucket. And for the music soundtrack selection, users can mix any of their MP3s to their videos. MP4 format will be expected on its way soon.

Nevertheless, users are recommended to pay an annual fee of $30 in order to get an All-Access Pass. This All-Access Pass will allow users to produce an unlimited number of full-length videos for one year. Additionally, they also can download any of their videos, whether they’re Video Shorts or Full-Length videos to their computers.

TheFilter, a UK-based music recommendation startup that I profiled in last August is entering its private beta phase. On its landing page, they now have a new logo, and three demo Flash slides appeared show that it is not only served as a music tracking engine, but rather a startup dedicated to recommend good musics, movies, videos, Web videos for their users.

“We’ve all sat there at the computer with muscle fatigue in our thumbs and faced with so much information without focus,” said Peter Gabriel, an investor and partner in TheFilter. “Getting the good stuff without the grief, that is the dream. And I’m not talking just about music, I mean everything. Not just a disc jockey, but a life jockey.”

As reported by Los Angeles Times, TheFilter is slated to be launched in May to the public. I’ll write another review on its public version by then. Stay tuned.

Eleven months had passed since MySpace China launched in last year, and now they have a new Chinese partner, i.e. Youku, one of the China’s popular video sharing platforms. According to Youku (in Mandarin), both companies have form alliance and agreed to build a jointly video portal called MySpaceYouku.

MySpaceYouku will primarily feature the Chinese video clips, coupled with the technical support and resources, i.e. videos provided by Youku.

Hulu, a video platform that I profiled on last October has officially launched to the public. It can be viewed as a move by Hulu’s owners, i.e. News corp. and NBC Universal to regain control over the Internet video sector. Despite the fact that a huge popularity of YouTube on the Web, Hulu has a big potential to improve and further conquer the market, as several favorite shows or movies such as The Simpsons, The Office, Saturday Night Live, House, The Big Lebowski or Ice Age can be found on the site.

However, neither content nor brand names, are enough to gain global market share. As Hulu still remained a close system and only available to the U.S. users, it will not gain any attention of the users outside of the U.S. In this scenario, users will always support the video platform that they are allowed to access and they’re comfortable with. Even this site has the most attractive selections and variety of titles, this is not ensure that they will have the competitive offerings.

via [AP]

Yahoo! Video, created in year 2006 has a new relaunched version. According to Yahoo! Video blog, more features have been added to the site for the sake of the users, i.e. bigger file size that one can upload, supports a 16:9 cinematastic player, and a “myweb” section has been provided. However, there are things that I think that they should improve, such as to private the videos uploaded which temporarily Yahoo! Video not allowed, for some users that want to share their videos with peers only, this is a needed version. Also, video type and format should include the RMVB file type, I see that this video file type is gaining ground as more and more quality movie are available in this type, and when compare to MPEG 1 or 2, this type of video file appeared to be much smaller, about one-third of the size.

One of the features that sound very interesting is what Yahoo! called an “experimental release,” an ability to see other people watching the same video, assume that their Webcams are also linked to the service. This is what I don’t understand at this moment, but carefully evaluate Yahoo! Video, I found that in order for users to embed their favorite videos to other sites or blogs, the “Embed Code” will only be appeared after the video finished playing.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Revver has been acquired by LiveUniverse. Revver, one of the video platforms pioneering the revenue sharing among the creator, Revver itself and the sharer, which is on the basis of 40-20-40 has no longer operated the company under the funds of venture capitalists, but would rather operated under the flagship of LiveUniverse. It is reported that Revver sold to LiveUniverse for less than $5 million, but expected to operate independently as part of LiveUniverse, a Los-Angeles startup with about 25 employees and being run by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan.

This move means no other video sites that managed to gain ground on YouTube, claimed to an over 30% market share in online video, though Revver was once appeared as a serious contender to be the next YouTube, as reported by comScore.

via [wsj]

Joost has finally unveiled its official site for the China people. A bit surprise that the domain of Joost’s Chinese version is not carry any Joost or Tom’s letter (Joost partnered with Tom.com in developing and marketing the Joost Chinese site), but a new domain name called My100Fun.com. The general thinking is that a lot of startups that come to China building a sister site likely to use another domain name for the site, with number included in the domain name. An example is a startup mulu100, owned by edgeio.com, a classified advertising platform that shut down last year.

My100Fun inherited the same home page design as Joost, featuring some of the most popular English shows on the landing page. However, not that many Chinese shows can be found on this site. if we consider this My100Fun will help Joost to open the China market, it only showed that it is not completely ready yet.

By the way, you also can find the Joost advertisement (as shown in the below) on Tom’s Skype Website.

via [cnBeta]

For users looking for alternative with which to replace Google or YouTube when searching for the Unix or Linux videos, UnixTube seemed to be a fantastic site that fulfill these type of needs. Although the videos appeared on this site are mostly fetched from YouTube, UnixTube presented a golden platform for users when they want to share their favorite Unix/Linux related videos with their friends. Unlike any other video platform, an user do not need to tag the videos in order to make those video more searchable, you come to this site, you’ll roughly know that you could only find Unix/Linux videos here. At this moment, there are not many videos, less than 100 that mostly uploaded by an user called FreeWorm.

However, thus far, this site has not lived up to its full potential as Unix/Linux have both not as popular as Windows or Mac in the end-user market. Users can treat all the videos on UnixTube as tutorial videos, topics such as Fedora installation, run Linux, Zimbra and Samba integration can be found on this site, particularly useful for the Unix/Linux beginners.

via [Digg]