Veoh Makes Nice
To get back in the good graces of the vlogging community, Veoh Networks, Inc. CEO, Dmitry Shapiro, issued an open letter to the Yahoo Videoblogging Group last night apologizing for any misunderstandings or possible wrongdoing, and vowed to never let anything like this happen again. As a peace offering, he even offered up Veoh as a Vloggercon 2006 sponsor. I guess Mr. Shakespeare said it best: "All's well that ends well."
Check out the letter below:
Dear Video Bloggers,
Please let me apologize for any confusion and distress Veoh's broadcasting of unclaimed RSS feeds has caused. It was in no way deliberate.
I would like to thank you for your passion, your harsh constructive criticism, and your patience while we continue to strive to make Veoh a service that can dramatically impact the video blogging, and television worlds. For those of you who have expressed support and a desire to work with us, I look forward to meeting you and working together.
As I have stated in previous messages, Veoh's intent has never been to be a place where publisher's rights are violated. It is our intent to provide an open service where content publishers can easily publish their video and deliver it to the world without the restrictions of traditional broadcast mediums. We are the greatest fans of user created video content, and believe that it is this revolution that will change the world that we live in.
In the latest releases we have made the RSS submission process more secure by making it a one step process rather than accepting Unclaimed Feeds and waiting for users to claim them. We believe this will prevent anything like this from happening again.
Since Friday, our entire team has been dealing with the situation, responding to individual requests for removal and working on new features to specifically address concerns raised by the group. We should have been proactively addressing these issues over the last month of our web beta, but unfortunately the pace of startup life got in the way.
As a result of that analysis, we have made a decision to remove any videos published via an RSS feed that have not specifically been claimed by the feed owner. If you have published your feed to Veoh, but have not been able to claim it yet, it has been removed, and we ask you to please republish it. We apologize for the inconvenience, but there was no other way to clean the database.
We are continuing to improve the presentation of RSS published video series; including clear link-back to the originating site, attribution, and other elements requested by many of you who indicated you would like to see Veoh continue to provide an alternate distribution channel for your content. These modifications will be released later this week.
We are forming a video blogging advisory group of 5 to 10 people that will help guide our development efforts, participate in beta testing, and help us be better citizens of the video blogging world. Some of
you have already written us about it and we look forward to meeting with you. If you would like to participate, please email dshapiro at veoh dot com.
Thank you for your understanding, support, passion, and contribution to the revolution. With such passion behind us, we are bound to make a difference.
If you will allow us to be your sponsors at VloggerCon 2006, we would truly be honored to meet all of you.
Sincerely,
Dmitry Shapiro
CEO
Veoh Networks, Inc.