Los Angeles based, Interent Brands (who we covered last when they went public) today bought a bunch more companies:

• FitDay.com a community to log diet and weight loss info
  
• HighDefForums.com a community forum about HDTV stuff;
  
• HighDefDigest.com Blu-ray and HD-DVD Reviews;
  
• AVRev.com Audio Video home theater site
  
• VetInfo.com information for pet health

San Diego based, Divx, best known for the popular mpeg4 licensing business, today announced that they are shutting down their Stage6 video sharing website. This has rightly gotten a good bit of play in the blog technosphere (see Techcrunch, Gizmodo, GigaOM, Webware, Mashable, Etc), as Stage6 was a pretty popular service. I personally used Stage6 all the time as it was a good source of content (both original and piratted), and felt quite superior to your typical Youtube knockoff, both in terms quality and speed.

According to their official blog response the reason for the shutdown was "that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that [they]are not in a position to continue to provide." Of course as Techcrunch and some of the other blogs have dug into, when they passingly mention that "there are a lot of other details involved" what they really mean is that a rediculously stupid power trip originating from the Divx board over how to properly spin off the new company was a huge problem.

As Arrington put it, "throwing the baby out with the bath water" was certainly the case here. Stage6 had impressive funding to branch off and a business model that was actually working. Throwing out the revenue that Stage6 was making, as well the positive consumer impact it had on the Divx brand because they didnt have the resources to devote to it or the stomach to pound through the internal politics is amazingly short cited on their own. Even just considering Stage6 as its own entity its pretty easy to see that they come out of the gates with great traction and a semi niche, both of which any one of the new video sharing sites we see pop up daily would kill to have.

Overall on the business end this whole thing just exemplifies bad leadership and decision making. Plus as a consumer, I have just got to say I'll be sad to see Stage6 go.

Last week Santa Monica based Wonderhowto.com announced that the received an undisclosed investment from General Catalyst Partners.  The site is basically an aggregation service for "how-to" type videos.  Apparently self-help 2.0 sites are all the rage right now, as TechCrunch just covered yesterday First30Days (not socal based) which similarly focuses on positive self help articles during "the first 30 days of a major life change".  And while the two companies don't exactly overlap, being funded at the same time, does imply that the venture community is recognizing the value in sites that focus on the self help niche.

Beverly Hills based, Break.com is a video sharing social site that targets 18-30 male demographic. They basically focus on funny, crazy, stupid guy humor. As a hypertargeted Youtube clone, they have been doing well for themselves, steadily climbing to traffic upwards of 18 million uniques per month. Today they announced an ad network that extends their strong inventory reach to smaller web publishers.

I just ran across a video based social network company called stickam thats based out of LA.  What I found particularly amusing was the contraversy it caused a few months ago.  Stickam launched in 2006 as basicaly another myspace except it has live web cam functionality.   The streaming video is actually pretty cool, and lends itself to the myspace crowd quite well.  In fact particularly, at launch for the high school kids that weren't leaving Myspace for Facebook, there was a decent chunk that were leaving for Stickam.

Following on the heals of last weeks article about San Diego based Veoh adding NBC and FOX content via Hulu, to become a sort of hyper aggregator of Video Content, Veoh has now also announced that they are adding MTV content (including Comedy Central, Nickelodean, VH1, CMT, Spike TV, as well as MTV proper).  Of course two things are different about this deal then the Veoh/Hulu deal: 1st there was no "official" Hulu deal, so kudus to MTV for trying to work with Veoh to distribute more of their content.  Unfortunately the second difference is that this is only an announcement, none of the official content is live yet :-(

A lot of startups we've been reviewing are new companys that are still looking to break out, and haven't received a lot of mainstream coverage, so we have to do a bit of research first.  Veoh, is a San Diego based video sharing site that I actually use.  Although Veoh has been out for nearly 2 years, they just added video content from Hulu (who we reviewed here) and are beginning to really show their strategy of going beyond Youtube.

Veoh is fast turning into one of the best video site out there because they hyperaggregate official content from the networks as well rely on user generated content (and all the grey areas that that implies).  They have legitimate TV shows from their CBS deal as well as now having semi official shows from Fox and NBC via Hulu. They also are more liberal with taking down unofficial user uploaded content from networks that they don't have agreements with (like the way youtube USED to be), so if your savvy, your likely to find shows from the rest of the networks.  While I'm sure that this strategy is largely unspoken, it's incredibly smart, because it gives the consumers what their looking for until dumb TV lawyers finally begin to wizen up with how they handle Internet distribution.   A great example is that I used to watch 'unofficial' episodes of 24 on Veoh, last year, because it was one of better places to get it on the Internet.  Now I can officially watch 24 via Hulu/Veoh.  I don't care that there are ads now through the official channel, because it was never about not wanting the networks to get paid, I just wanted to watch 24 on the Internet, freely, on my own time.  Its basically a win-win-win, I benefit from getting the content I wanted, Veoh gets another user, and the networks now get the revenue they deserve from making the content.  

Veoh has high level of funding (24M to date from big names like Michael Eisner and Time Warner) giving them great flexibility to work out official deals with content providers, so I'm sure CBS, FOX, and NBC are just the first of even more official content we'll see on Veoh.  Then couple that thought with a track record that shows that Veoh in general gets what consumers want, and you'll see why Veoh is proving that Youtube is not the only new video distribution platform that can shake up the industry.

Website: http://www.veoh.com

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If  your looking at at web 2.0 speed dating site and it seems like Deja Vu, you'd be right, we reviewed Woome exactly one month ago.  So what about SpeedDate?  Well first of all, they are not based in Southern California, however the cofounder of SpeedDate, Simon Tisminezky, is from San Diego so we figured it was relevant enough to profile how SpeedDate compares to local favorite Woome.

Apparently Hulu is what you get when two of the major networks (NBC Universal and News Corp) get 100M to build a next gen Internet TV platform.  Hulu is well situated in the hub of the media industry basing itself in the center of Los Angeles.  Much like Gmail was for a long time, Hulu is currently in private beta, you need an invite to get access to Hulu.  Though again like Gmail if you really want access, invites aren't that hard to come by.

One of the things that impresses me about Hulu, is that its a good show of faith that the entertainment industry is trying to adapt their business model around new channels as opposed to just fight it.  While nobody likes, watching ads, they are an important way to monetize content, and thus one of the primary mechanisms for entertainment types to get paid.  For a while, now there has been this fear that if you allowed people to share content, then you lost control of advertising.  Yet Hulu handles this issue quite well because they allow you to embed the tv shows outside of Hulu's main site, but there still is scheduled advertisement pauses so everyone gets paid, regardless of whether the video is embedded offsite or your watching it on Hulu.com.  That seems fair to me, and as a consumer I can accept that.   Besides the inability to download to my ipod or whatever, they don't restrict where I can share Hulu videos online, and that freedom coming from a major network is a good step.

Of course its not all rosey pictures in the land of Hulu.  First off I hate the name (and a funny anecdote is that it means cease and desist in swahili).  And I really wonder about why the investment dollars were in the 100M range.  It seems the networks could have done something similar on their own site (in fact they sort of already do) for far less money.  Obviously everyone wants to compete with Youtube and Itunes as being sort of a universal place to distribute content, but I still think in some ways this was all overplayed a bit.  

In the end though Hulu is a step in the right direction by the big boys, and its good to see them trying to embrace the direction of technology.  In some ways just getting major organizations like NBC Universal and News Corp to both agree on the vision is pretty amazing.

If you want to see more screenshots of Hulu since its still in private beta: check out this review

While technically a Korean company they are partnered with K2 Network located in Irvine, CA (Orange County) and they are hiring and basing their U.S. activity out of Orange County as well.

While Storyblender isn't live yet, they are already building some early buzz leading up to their December release by their inclusion in the TechCrunch Top 40. What they've demonstrated so far is a service that allows users to collaborate in editing and "blending" their text, audio, video, and image clips online. Once the blending is complete people will be able to share their "blended stories" with their friends in the Story Blender online community.

The Good
It just sounds fun being able to turn a fat kid with a baton...