Robert Millis and Will Coghlan, hosts of the popular podcast Political Lunch, revealed their solution to the question “can online video pay?” at SXSWi Saturday.
The Dynamo player is a project the duo has been working on, and which had been shown to only a handful of people before SXSW. It is a video streaming service based off micropayments, giving a 70 percent share to the producers (whoever makes and uploads the video), and 30 percent for the distributors (the Dynamo team). Millis and Coghlan hope this allows people who are producing high quality video online to be payed for their troubles.
The Dynamo player is unique, its creators say, in the fact that it’s the only video payment system that allows for embedding videos anywhere. Furthermore, content creators set their own prices and the previously mentioned distribution model is a flat-rate across the board. Millis and Coghlan say they don’t care if you get five viewers or five million, it’s a 70 -30 cut.
This isn’t the first online video payment system. In fact, a large portion of the panel was dedicated to discussing the pros and cons of Dynamo’s competitors. While it might seem like they would take this time to dog on their new competitors, they seemed generally gratious and gave a fair handed pro and con analysis. Furthermore, they said the Dynamo player needs to coexist with other publishing avenues that can pay, such as mycontent.com, Amazon create space, and YouTube’s new video rental service. They also pointed to Blip.tv as as a way to generate revenue through advertising.
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Getting paid for uploading a video is an interesting concept. The Dynamo’s model for paying “producers” seems feasible now, but I wonder how effective this could be and how it will affect its competitors and their models. I’m interested to what kind of outcome this idea will produce in regards to its popularity.
I’m sure people will hear more about this Dynamo player in the future, but I also wonder what kind of feedback it will generate and what kind of videos will be posted (since the player is based on “high-quality” videos, which are probably different from most of the content uploaded on YouTube). The concept sounds interesting and I’m looking forward to hearing more about it in the future.