RSSBest Buy Stakes in Social Video Site
By Ed Oswald | Published October 30, 2007, 4:17 PM
US Retailer Best Buy said Tuesday that it would launch an online service where its customers could store and share home movies and videos on the Internet through a partnership with Mydeo.
Best Buy also takes a minority stake in the company, and it is making the move due to rising demand for such services. The service is branded with the retailer's name and offers various plans depending on the user's need.
The cheapest plan retails for $6.97 per month and allows up to 100 minutes of video hosting and a 30-minute time limit on the lengths of any one video, and 5,000 views of videos. Higher plans give the user more storage time and the capability to upload longer videos.
The largest plan aimed more at businesses gives 5000 minutes of video hosting, 90 minute video lengths, and up to 100,000 views. That plan retails for $148.00 per month.
Out of demands for services with more privacy and no ads, consumers can choose who can view their videos, and no ads appear on pages where the videos are streamed.
"Many customers, particularly families with children, don't want their personal memories available for anyone to see in the public domain nor do they want to share them in a cluttered environment that includes advertising," Best Buy vice president Kevin Winneroski said.
???
Video hosting?
You mean like Youtube, Stage6, or any host of other FREE video hosting sites?
Yeah...Apple destroyed the video biz.
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Lame Project yes... but they do have the brand name-- having convinced the clueless masses they're a top notch store--
stranger & lamer products have succeeded...
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"clueless masses" - I love it. I see those half dead zombie sheep everywhere, I even point them out to my wife.
On the other hand, if you know how to properly talk to Best Buy employees and come in prepared when you buy a big ticket item, you can get items for slightly over cost.
I've exploited combinations of store sales with instant rebates, those coupons they mail to Reward Zone customers, and competing store newspaper coupons, all at the same time.
I eneded up getting the tiny $349.00 Garmin Nuvi 200 for $115 bucks by the time I left with all the crap I brought in.
It's not that I'm cheap, I just don't like giving it away when I can clearly outsmart these people. Ask the BB employee that posts here, they doo anything to make a sale even if they lose money because they can "always" talk you into expensive accessories they make 60-70 points on like a $114 Monster HDMI cable, which is no better than the free one that came with my Samsung upscaling DVD.
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This will be known in the anals of consumerism as Best Buy's Divx...
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Ahhh Divx,
I went into CC during the "funeral" after they officially cancelled Divx and bought like 20 movies at .99 each just for nostalgia sake.
Two of them (true Lies and Deep Impact) are in my movie memorabelia display next to a pair of movies on Betamax which are Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters. Behind those is the Star Wars trio of Laserdiscs.
And yes, this will fail miserably. It's like getting into the mobile phone market or import tuner accessories. Yeah, nobody thought of this before.
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I can almost guarantee you this project will fail miserably within the first year, be a huge embarassment to the company and be canceled leaving much egg on the faces of those execs that pushed for it and approved it at Best Buy's corporate HQ. This is an utterly foolish waste of time, energy and resources on Best Buy's part.
Instead of wasting resources on this type of foolishness they should be investing more in their employees and getting them trained on how to be much better in-store sales people. They should also be spending more on improving the in-store environment and shopping experience for their customers.
Everyone thinks Best Buy is the absolute best in US electronics retailing. Well, they may be the best but if that is the case, US retail is in a very sad state of affrairs.
Best Buy isn't even what I would call a retailer. They are really just a glorified warehouser. There are so many things that they need to be doing to improve their operation, small and large, that the list would go on for miles if I were to write it all down. How can it be that such a big company with so many smart people working for it can miss so many obvious things along the way?
It is sad to see such a big company, with so many resources, be so much less than what it could be if it just did business a little bit smarter and really thought through some of the decisions that it makes.
I just hate it when a company gets so big that it thinks "Well, we have managed to grow this big with our current model, must be doing something right, let's not change a thing". What a shame. That is like building a 50 story building and only finishing the first ten stories and then quitting because the first ten floors look really good relative to all the other buildings around. What an utterly sad waste of so much potential.
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Uhm, this is like the lamest thing I have ever heard of. Why would you pay for something that you can get MORE storage and unlimited views for free???
PLUS It will probably be plastered with best buy ads all over the place.
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hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha they want us to pay for something we can get for free 1000 other places? and if I dont want to share my video in a cluttered environment I just make it orivate on Youtube and embed it into a password protected page on my website FOR FREE!
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SO are you going to see the same vids at the store as you see on the home comp? :)
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You think they'll have two identical websites, one that allows you to have 100 minutes for 6.97/month that you sign up for on the internet from your house and one that allows you 100 minutes for 250.00/month that you sign up for on the internet in the store?
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/smile
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I am thinking this isn't going to be very successful. It is an already crowded market, and there are a lot of them that are free.
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