NY-based Magnify.net has announced three new search partners for their video search product. The partners include NY-based 5min, ViewDo and Expert Village. 5min provides how-to videos and they will now be included in the video search available to Magnify.net publishers. Magnify.net self reports 35,000 publishers in their network.

It will be interesting to see if Magnify follows a Blinkx strategy with regards to partnerships. In fact, maybe there’s value in both companies working together as Blinkx appears to have a strong video search network. 

Check out our look at the NYC online video market which includes 5min and Magnify.net.

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NY-based Magnify.net has announced the launch of their new MVP video player today. The MVP player (multi-view player) allows site publishers to bring together content created by their community with other Internet shared videos into one player. The player (example displayed below) can be set to a variety of sizes and themes.

Magnify’s MVP player includes a 50/50 split on ads displayed. One interesting note regarding the ads — site publishers can select to serve pre- or post-roll ads in the videos that originate on their network. The video ads are served by DoubleClick’s DART service.

The new Magnify player seems a bit similar to Kyte’s player in terms of customization and options. Kyte offers chat within the video player along with more media options (e.g. images, live video, etc.) while the injected ad on Magnify’s player allows Web publishers to generate additional revenue from ads that are served below the video channel.

Magnify self-reports over 5 million videos added to the social networks they serve each month. Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

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Earlier this week, NY-based KickApps announced their partnership with Userplane for chat and IM. Today, Userplane and another NY-based startup have announced a similar partnership. Magnify.net has integrated the Userplane Webchat2 and Userplane Webmessenger2 services.

Magnify.net is a white-label social networking provider that the company describes as, "online video discovery and broadcast platform for websites". The tool allows site owners to add custom video channels to enhance the overall user experience and keep users on the site longer, thereby allowing for more chances to monetize the user.

Both the Userplane Webchat and Userplane Webmessenger tools will carry advertising and publishers can also use a buyout option to remove or control the ads within the widgets.

Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage and the nextNYers interview with CEO Steve Rosenbaum below.

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On Monday at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, after the demos concluded, three popular NY venture capital partners took the stage to critique the demos they just watched from a venture capitalist perspective. While they were certainly a bit nice in front of the crowd, I thought you might be interested in their feedback.

The demos came from Adotube, Magnify.net, Vusion, ekkoTV and BestTV.

The VC stars were: Chris Fralic from First Round Capital, Daniel Schultz from DFJ Gotham and a third who didn’t share his name.

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Last night at the NY Video 2.0 meeting, Magnify.net presented their new Magnify Publisher tool. We wrote about the Magnify Publisher when it launched last week. I did notice that embedded videos are now using a customized Magnify.net player with Magnify branding. This wasn’t in the initial launch version last week.

Magnify Publisher offers a variety of video hosts to search from and you can filter to specific providers. Image search currently works with Flickr and more image providers are coming soon. There’s also the ability to upload a video (it’s stored on Magnify’s servers) or record a video directly using a webcam.

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Blog commenting replacement system Disqus is announcing a partnership today with Seesmic today. Not sure exactly what to call Seesmic these days - it’s partially a video message board and partially a video blog commenting system. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Adam Ostrow first reported on Disqus adding video comments last week.

This deal helps Seesmic more than Disqus. Both companies are currently valley darlings but Disqus seems to have started the slow crawl to mainstream adoption. Seesmic is still in the "figuring out who I am" stage — which is ok for a new company like Seesmic is. I would have held off on this partnership a few months until Seesmic gains a bit more traction and user adoption. Also, video blog commenting seems about 18 months ahead of its time.

Disqus currently self-reports 13,000 sites actively using their blog comment replacement and Seesmic reports over 300 sites using the video commenting plugin. Check out my commentary on Disqus where I do a deep dive into the pros and cons of using their blog commenting replacement service.

What’s interesting is that Seesmic investor Techcrunch launched the video commenting system a couple of weeks ago and so far it’s been barely used. And when users have posted videos, most nearly all of them have me wanting my time back. A video comment must have emotion and offer something text can’t. Otherwise just post the text and let me read and/or scan and move on. Just because you have a webcam, doesn’t mean you should create video comments instead of text comments.

Here’s an (extreme) example of a comment that just wasted 30 seconds of my time (this is from the "Wired" post on TC this morning):

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NY-based Magnify.net is launching a new tool today named Magnify Publisher. It’s an add-on for blogging platforms — the first installations are available for Wordpress and Movable Type.

Magnify Publisher offers a variety of video hosts to search from and you can filter to specific providers. Image search currently works with Flickr and more image providers are coming soon. There’s also the ability to upload a video (it’s stored on Magnify’s servers) or record a video directly using a webcam.

I spoke with Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum who suggested that Magnify Publisher will allow bloggers to add more multimedia content to their posts. As we walked through the demo, it’s clear that if you are looking for images or videos to add to a post, Magnify Publisher makes it very easy — much easier than searching on a service, copying the embed or saving out the image and uploading or embedding. Rosenbaum also notes that by using the tool, it can help to add more video content to a site on a regular basis.

On a side note, Rosenbaum is very passionate about the NY tech community and believes we will see big growth this year.

Magnify.net currently hosts more than 36,000 video channels and launched their 3.0 version in March 2008.

Magnify.net has launched a new widget based on the new YouTube API today at the April NY Tech gathering named VidyUp. I’ve embedded the video demo below. The idea is to bring in sites who aren’t interested in the full Magnify suite but rather want an entry ramp to get videos from site visitors onto their site.

You install the widget, users can then upload videos into YouTube and they appear on your site. It’s pretty slick and I am guessing we will see more of these type of widgets coming from developers using the YouTube API in the near future.

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NY-based Magnify.net has launched v3.0 of their software today including a new enterprise model and more social tools. Magnify.net is now able to import social content from services including: Twitter, Flickr and Mogulus. Magnify.net lets you create a themed video channel by importing videos from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, Veoh and other online video services. Magnify.net picked up $1 million in additional funding last month. The company is now referring to their service as an "Online Social TV Network".

Similar to NY-based white label social networking provider KickApps, Magnify.net now offers three pricing plans: free, pro and enterprise. Free allows you to share in the revenue generated from your pageviews, pro allows you to "buy" the inventory and display your own advertising and enterprise is for their larges customers including The Weather Channel.

Check out all of our Magnify.net coverage.

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NY-based white-label video social networking provider (phew!) Magnify.net is announcing the launch of their open source graphics development program. The idea is simple — if you create templates and graphics to use on Magnify.net, you can now share them and let others use them as well.

Called the Graphic Share Library (GSL), any member of the Magnify.net community can create, share, and use elements that have been ‘open-sourced’ by other members of the community. As part of the launch, Magnify.net has added 75 element Graphics Bonus Pack and an entirely new set of templates and graphics elements that include a series of themed channel graphics for sports, food, politics, adventure sports, gambling, and newspaper sites.

I have to admit, I don’t know how well this program will work. It’s a great idea in concept but if I spend hours/days/weeks creating a template, why would I want 10 other jabronies to use it as well? It would just water down my brand image. What I do think could work well is if Magnify.net partnered with some top Web designers to provide some templates and then allow those designers to offer other templates for a fee - could be a new stream of revenue for Magnify.net and a new base of marketers (the designers) similar to Wordpress. They could also sign on these designers to make icon and button packs - another way to promote the product and have fans of the designer flock to Magnify.net

Magnify.net also claims to deliver more than 12 million page views per month and serving over 25,000 content publishers and they are the fastest growing video platform.

Check out the nextNYers interview with CEO Steve Rosenbaum:

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