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September 27, 2007
Seznam Takes Stake in the Czech YouTube - Profit Is the Goal
We have some news from the Czech Republic that Seznam, probably the biggest player on Czech web today, has acquired a stake in video sharing site Stream, according to Pavel Neuman, the editor of BuzzMag.cz.
Neuman covered yesterday's press conference and reports that Stream, which has been dubbed the czech youtube, has some not so subtle differences to the US giant.
After reading Neuman's analysis and coverage of the content of the press conference, we'd say the biggest difference would be the cash burn-rate. The Czech startup has achieved a lot and created something quite valuable for its target market for an incredibly small amount of capital.
For a profile of the acquiring company, Seznam, there is a very good one in Czech Business Weekly, published last year.
But back to Neuman's observations on Stream, a lot of the content is created by its staff, he writes, adding that Stream also managed to convince Petr Ctvrtnicek who is a "popular czech actor, entertainer and mischief-maker" to post his parody series of a communism-era hospital soap opera.
We checked out the clips and even if you don't speak Czech, you can see the quality and the humor. They just need the talented and thrifty folks over at DotSub to create sub-titles and they'd have a huge audience: anyone that has been exposed to Soviet-era TV programming would get the jokes.
Seznam will make some changes to Stream's business and positioning, reports Neuman. It will delivers in-video-ads and will be sharing the revenue with authors/producers and website owners. Also the flash player will get better, along with the support of embedded videos.
Seznam said it will use Stream's videos in it's own sites including Super.cz and Horoskopy.cz. The forecast is that Stream will achieve one milion users a month by the end of 2007, writes Neuman, adding that Seznam qualified that with a statement that the only criterion for measuring Stream's succes is the "profit, not revenue, number of users", or things like that.
Stream's annual budget is €666,666.66, writes Neuman. Stream's CEO Milos Petana (who comes from the TV world) expects to 'burn' about the same amount this year. Petana is partnered with Patrick Zandl, who is the #1 blogger in the CZ domain and an enterpreneur.
Seznam has already made great inroads in identifying and launching local versions of Google's popular applications, according to Buzzmag's editor, with several 'copycat' projects, such as Seznam's freemail (GMail), mapy.cz (GMaps), Sklik (AdWords) and "almost anything Seznam did [in the] last few years".
Mind you, writes Neuman, when it comes to developing basic and popular Internet apps it is hard not to be called a 'copycat'.
Read Buzzmag's report
View Stream
Posted on September 27, 2007 08:07 AM | Posted to | Permalink
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