On Friday I had the pleasure of meeting one of the most exciting ventures in the travel and Internet market - and surely to be one of the hottest properties this year!!

I am talking about Arnna Alexander and www.oe.tv - a video sharing website for travellers. While she declares herself a Kiwi, Arnna has spent a large amount of her life growing up in Sweden (her mother is Swedish) and most of the last 5 years in London - although a lot of last year was spent travelling the world with the Pro Triathlon Circuit where she honed her skills in online web streaming (check out www.triathlon.org).

While video sharing sites are not new, www.oe.tv really is something special. It is appeals directly to a target niche market and I believe will grow to be very prolific in this market. Arnna cited an example of one video that she says was posted on both You Tube and OE.TV simultaneously - while it received 7 viewings on You Tube it received 440 viewings in the same period on OE.TV. Clearly, I can see the value to travel businesses that such marketing opportunities afford; and the onto guys are already there - apparently there is a great competition about to be launched involving Stray, New Zealand comedian presenter Mickey Havoc and radio station B FM.

Arnna’s background is TV and film production and this is the side of the business that she clearly relishes; I caught her on her return from a trip to Japan where she had created a series of Travelogues. She took pride in showing me how easy it was to create a video and uploaded (something she had done in a matter of minutes at the airport in Japan using wireless).

That’s one of the big selling pitches of OE.TV it offers slick well oiled technology. In particular online encoding, which means that you can post your video in most formats and the site does the behind the scenes work to convert it for web streaming. All the hosting and streaming are managed out of the US and all the web design has been handled out of Sweden (and a great looking site it is too). The staggering thing is that the whole project has taken less than a year to get off the ground and the actual site has only been live for about 6 weeks - certainly a lot of interest has been generated in such a short time (I was pointed to check it out by 3 people alone).

This might be a startup, but it is by no means a small operation - I met a handful of staff and there is a marketing team based in the UK also. In fact, Arnna plans to spend only the next 6 months in NZ before heading back to London to give things a big push there (back-to-back winters argh!). I did not quite understand the investment structure but Arnna explained that they were in the process of attracting investment - “but only the right investment; (they) don’t need the cash but rather strongly motivated partners to make this a success”.

Arnna describes the venture as My Space meets Lonely Planet. As well as user generated content the team are producing their own series of short 6 minute or so travel stories - many of them involving well known celebrities. In fact, this is where I think OE.TV strategy is very clever. Using her contacts from film and TV Arnna has attracted a host of stars such as ex Shortland Streeters Paul Ellis, Leighton Cardno and Paul Reid. In fact, Arnna was in Japan with Adam Sinclair (the Scottish guy in the Trainspotting sequel). I have watched quite a few of them and some of them are really funny. Check out the Monkeys & Shenanigans series.

From a users point of view the site comes with much of the My Space features, the ability to set up your own profile page, “have friends” who can comment on your page, share photos, travel blogs etc., but very nicely presented. It is already along way ahead of anything You Tube has to offer - and I would seriously promoted it to any traveller to share their videos (whether they be public or private). There are lots of other cool features like the ability to build up travel chapters combined with a blog and a good photo sharing page, which is being enhanced with tagging features.

So, what’s next for OE.TV? Well watch this space as I hope to find out a lot more about the technology and are already promoting to many that they should be active on the site. I will watch and report this with anticipation. There are a series of videos due out soon featuring two well known celebrities, one NZ and one English, traveling around NZ (but we can’t know who yet). Plus, I am really interested in the coming functionality that has users tagging other users videos and images - the application and success of this will be very interesting to us in Web 2.0 geek world.

Good luck Arnna and crew I really look forward to catching up again in a month or so for an update.

Tags: Online video, Web 2.0, You Tube

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.