Veoh

» see veoh.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

veoh was founded in september 2005 by dmitry shapiro, with ted dunning as cofounder and chief scientist. the original product idea was a peer-assisted distribution network for full-length video, basically a way to stream tv-length content over the web before youtube had figured out how to handle anything longer than ten minutes. the company pivoted in march 2006 toward standard user-generated video and direct browser playback, and from that point through about 2009 it grew as the second-place general video site behind youtube.

the funding was real money. veoh raised around $70 million across three rounds from a stack of name-brand investors that included time warner, intel, michael eisner's tornante company, and goldman sachs. by 2008 the site reached approximately 17 million monthly unique visitors and was running uploads from major studios alongside the user content. for a window in 2007 and 2008 it looked like youtube might end up sharing the long-tail video market with veoh the same way myspace and facebook were splitting social at the time. that did not happen.

i was barely aware veoh existed at the time. by 2007 youtube had already eaten the video category in turkey, and the only reason a turkish viewer would have ended up on veoh was a specific link from a forum or blog. when youtube was blocked in turkey between 2008 and 2010 over an ataturk-related video dispute, the workaround everyone used was vimeo or a proxy back to youtube, not veoh. veoh in turkey was a name you encountered in english-language tech press articles about US startups. i never opened an account.

~ the case file ~

~ the end ~

the first death was the bankruptcy filing in february 2010. veoh laid off 25 employees and filed for chapter 7 protection. the immediate cause was a long copyright lawsuit from universal music group that veoh had won on the merits in late 2009 but that had cost the company millions in legal fees over three years. the broader cause was that youtube had pulled away on every metric. youtube had google's infrastructure, google's ad sales, and a content deal with the major studios that veoh could not match. the second-place player in a winner-take-most market does not have a good ending available, and veoh ran out of cash before it could find one.

the company was bought out of bankruptcy in april 2010 by qlipso, an israeli social-video startup. qlipso kept the veoh brand alive as a streaming destination and tried to differentiate around international content. the strategy did not produce growth, and in late 2013 veoh was sold again, this time to fc2 inc., a japanese blog and video host. under fc2 the site was kept running but barely promoted, and it slowly shrank from a public destination to a long-tail archive that mostly served traffic from people landing on old embedded videos.

the final shutdown came on november 11, 2024. fc2 announced that veoh.com would be redirected to fc2 video and that the existing video catalog would be migrated to the parent service. there was no detailed reason given for the timing. the most likely answer is that maintaining a separate codebase and brand for a low-traffic archive site had stopped being worth it, and that fourteen years after the first bankruptcy veoh had finally run out of internal reasons to exist as its own product. nineteen years from launch to actual death is a long tail by streaming-era standards.

~ what carried over ~

the long-video gap. veoh's original differentiator was that it allowed full-length uploads when youtube would not. that gap was eventually closed by youtube itself, then absorbed by netflix and the streaming wave that followed. but for about three years veoh was the place online video people went when they wanted something longer than a clip. that role got distributed across half a dozen platforms after veoh fell off, and no single successor ended up holding it.

the case study of second-place video. veoh sits next to dailymotion, blip.tv, revver, and metacafe in the category of mid-2000s sites that took meaningful funding, drew real audiences, and were eventually compressed by youtube to the point where survival required either a niche pivot or a sale. veoh did both. neither saved it long-term. the lesson that a well-funded second place in a network-effects video market can stay alive for a decade after the loss is decided, and then quietly die with no obituary, is the lesson veoh ended up writing.

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