Today I spoke Jon Myers, VP of Strategy at PodDater. PodDater was created to leverage the new video-enabled iPods.
PodDater is the world’s first dating/social networking site that brings together the growing popularity of the online dating space and the enormous success of the iPod. Visitors to PodDater can come to our community, become a member, identify potential matches and then download them to their iPods. All for free.
According to Jon, they expect the service to be popular with the 20-something on-the-go market. Me? I think it’s going to be guys looking at women’s videos at their desktop.
Revenue will come from various advertising models that are not fully baked yet. Ads in videos, as interstitials between videos and on the website are in the works.
I can see this morphing into the video version of Hot-or-Not. But why stop there. How about a pay-to-access adult section? Pre-recorded webcam girls sessions made available on the iPod could be a nice revenue stream and further diversify PodDater past advertising-only revenue.
Once they have the video, they can reformat for desktop playback, mobile phone screens or whatever video playback devices come down the road in the future.
I was surprised that the PodDater crew was not aware that Match.com hosted user-created videos, and terminated the service. This lack of awareness, developing a service in a vacuum, often leads to trouble.
Video is expensive and bandwidth-intensive. And once the video is in iTunes, how much space will each video take up? This could be a real issue if your search criteria and synch setting are too liberal. I forgot to ask if they were going to enforce any particular video size. Downloading via BitTorrent will alleviate the bandwidth issues somewhat.
The obligatory Web 2.0 tagging feature is in full effect. Nice to see this. Hopefully they will allow people to tag each other, like with Consumating.
It’s cool to be able to look at profiles, there is definitely a market for this. Last night I had a group of 7 people crowded around me as I showed off photos on my iPod Nano. Much easier than carrying around pictures in your wallet. I would do the same thing with video.
The problem is the disjoint between sitting on a train on your way to work looking at video profiles and communicating with the people you find appealing.
Perhaps if you could flag a video, then when you get back to desktop machine, you can figure out who you want to email, go back to the site, find the persons profile page and contact them. If you have a mobile phone with email capabilities (who doesn’t?), you can initiate the contact right then and there. Seems like too many steps to me. I’d rather look at the videos on my big monitor.
Before I tried to upload my video I was taken to a page that says I need to prep my video before uploading it to PodDater. There is a link to a file, in my case a Mac program, named DGM2GMAC.dmg.
No description of what the program does, no way am I going to install that on my machine without knowing exactly what it’s going to do to my system.
In the Terms & Conditions I found this:
You assign to Us, with full title guarantee, all copyright in Your profile and your photographs and your videos posted, at any time, in connection with Your use of the Service. You waive absolutely any and all moral rights to be identified as author of Your profile and owner of Your photograph, video and any similar rights in any jurisdiction in the world.
PodDater basically owns your profile and can take responsibility for it. Basically you post your video and lose control of it.
In my mind, the obvious end game is to sell to a social networking site. Why not a dating site? Good question. Once they achieve traction, the company valuation will be more than most dating sites could afford.
It will be interesting to see how people take to the service once they get the kinks worked out.
[tags: hotornot, poddater]
