AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Veoh aims to be one-stop shop for Net TV viewers - USA Today

Dmitry Shapiro wanted to start a website that promised to be the CBS, NBC and ABC of the Internet, a one-stop shop for TV programming on the Web.
Shapiro wasn’t the first to come up with such a lofty concept. At the time of his brainstorm, 2005, many others had similar notions. Shapiro’s Veoh competes with YouTube, (GOOG) Fancast, (CMCSA) Joost, Blip.TV and at least 250 other video websites, according to researcher the Yankee Group.

But former Disney (DIS) CEO Michael Eisner thought Shapiro was onto something. So did two former top Viacom (VIAB) executives, Jonathan Dolgen and Tom Freston. They’ve all invested in Veoh, which has quietly become the top independent U.S. video site on the Internet, attracting 2.1 million visitors a month, according to Nielsen Online.

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“Companies like AOL, (TWX) Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG) have all defined a space,” says Eisner, who now runs the Tornante investment firm. Google-owned YouTube aside, he says, “I think Veoh has the potential to define the space. They want to marry the Internet to the TV set, and that’s the real deal.”

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