23 Launches Their Video Platform – 100+ Partners Already Signed Up

In Internet the video revolution has been just around the corner as long as I can remember and I don’t think it has ever arrived. The reasons are many. Whether its video’s hard-to-index nature when it comes to seeing what the content really says in comparison to text, or the fact that it takes quite a bit of bandwidth. Or because an interesting video is just so much harder to produce that an interesting blog post. That said, it has come a long way of which the most recent example is 23 Video, a video platform by a Danish startup 23 (see our previous story here).

The company attempts to set a new standard in the online video space. 23 wants to take online video from embedding from central services to creating a whole video sites where organizations can engage with consumers in their own brand universe. In the process they want to make building a video sites easy and inexpensive with their new turnkey solution. The big vision is to enable the company to communicate visually where  they currently communicate by text.

Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, co-founder of 23 and a Danish serial entrepreneur says that we are collectively just starting to scratch the organizational potential for using video and that organizations are reinventing how they communicate by shifting from text-centric websites to video sites.

23 promises that they can help you make sites like TED.com, where your organization uses its own design, own domain name, own video player and own relationship to your users, and make it all very easy to set up. I tried it out and it really was as easy as they promise. It took less than a minute to set up a full-fledged beautiful site.

Further, they promise that the new product cuts up to 90% off the current pricing models and sets a new standard at 675 dollars a month, including 1 Terabyte of traffic per month (approx 165,000 minutes of video each month). Extra traffic is 250 dollars per Terabyte. The company launches with 100+ partners in more than 10 countries and an open partner program, which in itself is a very strong indicator of the promise. They especially look into providing the product to agencies who could offer it to their customers. You can see the partner list here.

The platform has all the usual goodies and a quite intuitive CMS.

Here’s the full spec that 23 offers

– Full analytics giving you feedback on plays, engagement play through percentage.
– Template/design modules to make designing easy
– Distribution of your videos via Facebook, Twitter, podcasting and Youtube
– Videos play anywhere on any device from mobile phone, iPad and Apple TV
– Global distribution making your videosite quickly accessible around the globe
– Open Upload allowing to easily let users upload videos to your video site
– Controlling access to the video. For example making it accessible only on the intranet, for a select group of users, people who have paid for access
– Full api allowing easy integration with other systems

23 itself is a quite an old company, but clearly well aged. It was founded in 2003 by two Danish serial entrepreneurs, Steffen Tiedemann Christensen and Madsen-Mygdall, who is also behind Reboot, the legendary web conference that takes place in Copenhagen. Madsen-Mygdall also serves at the chairman of the board of Podio and of Social Square (see our story here). 23 has been looking for the right fit with the market ever since its birth, but has now finally nailed it according to its new CEO, Tine Thygesen. Before taking the helf at 23, Thygesen was the Managing Director at Venture Cup Denmark.

Just by looking at 23’s already extensive partner list it seems that their turnkey solution does what is promises. To get a better idea, you can go and try it out for free at 23video.com