AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Magnify Wants to Turn Video Channels Into Social Networks. Good Luck. - Tech Crunch

Does everything need to be a social network? Apparently it does. Magnify.net, a video-hosting and sharing platform that raised $1 million in February, is adding social networking features to its video channels.

Magnify lets Web publishers assemble videos from across the Web—YouTube, AOL, Veoh—and show it in the embeddable Magnify player. Websites use Magnify to create video channels associated with their content or the interests of their audience members. Now those viewers can create profiles within each channel and “friend” others with similar interests. They can also track and subscribe to the activity streams of other members, so they will know when their new “friends” rate, tag, share, or comment on a video. With this release, Magnify is also integrating with Twitter, Mogulus, and Flickr. Magnify splits ad revenues 50/50 with the sites. It is offering Pro and Enterprise versions as well.

Creating social networks around videos is going to be tough. For one thing, Magnify is requiring people to create a different profile for each video channel instead of letting them create one profile that works on any Magnify channel. Making people create multiple profiles is a bad idea and might make this whole effort a non-starter. It would be better to leverage its existing network of video channels across different sites.

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