Megavideo: Does It “Beat” YouTube?

Megavideo, a new online video sharing site based out of Hong Kong, has YouTube in its sights. In a video on its homepage, the company claims to best YouTube for ten reasons:

1. Video publishers can earn money through a rewards program
2. Publishers can also earn money through AdBrite in-video advertisements
3. Users can move the playback position to anywhere in the video
4. The website supports twenty languages
5. The video player can be customized to match the designs of websites where you want to embed
6. There is no maximum playtime for video uploads
7. Video conversion takes no more than 30 minutes
8. Videos can be uploaded in batch
9. Original video files can be downloaded
10. Megavideo loves you more than YouTube

Since users can also move the playback position to anywhere within a video on YouTube, and the last given reason is pure filler, only eight of these advantages seem to be justifiable.

The site is notable for its lack of banner advertisements. The company appears to be aiming to generate revenue by charging people for premium features. Premium members must pay at least $10 per month, but they can upload videos up to 5GB in size and their uploads get prioritized before regular members. Also, only premium members can download videos from the site (as opposed to streaming) and earn revenue from advertisements and the Megavideo rewards program.

Megavideo is provided by the same company that created Megaupload.

Watch Megavideo’s self-proclaimed ten reasons for preferring their service to YouTube below:

Pay Per Call Company VoiceStar Acquired by Marchex

Pay per call advertising service VoiceStar has been acquired by local advertising company Marchex.

Terms of the deal are as follows:

Marchex total anticipated investment to acquire VoiceStar will be $28 million, consisting of approximately $20 million in transaction consideration and $8 million in company investment. Specifically, transaction consideration consists of approximately $12.9 million in cash consideration and Marchex will issue approximately $7.1 million in restricted stock that is subject to vesting over two-and-one-half years from closing to certain employees of VoiceStar; and company investment consists of $8 million relating to products, infrastructure, human resources and other items through 2008. The acquisition is expected to close by October 1, 2007.

VoiceStar helps track how effective your newspaper and online advertising campaigns are at generating calls to your business. To do this, they sell advertisers a block of phone numbers ($10/month/number) to be placed in news papers or on websites. Each number is unique to an advertising campaign and can be linked through a softswitch to your existing phone lines.

For instance, the number from a newspaper campaign can be routed to a specific department or only accept calls during business hours. VoiceStar then tracks calls from these numbers as they are routed through their softswitch to your phone line. They can then compile data on the return on investment from each of these campaigns distinguished by phone number.

VoiceStars primary clients are advertising networks, who use the service to help individual advertisers. As of this past February, they claimed 400 clients with 20,000 individual advertisers working through those clients.

Other competitors include Ingenio and eStara. Google has also dabbled in click to call.

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