SA's Online Video Battle

My first post was inspired by me finding the much publicised FNB advert pleading with our President, Thabo Mbeki, to take some action against our perceived high levels of crime.
I found the leaked advert on a new video at www.MyVideo.co.za who claim to be South Africa's first online video sharing service. I was impressed, it seemed to be very YouTubish, easy to navigate, delivered the video stream rather efficiently and actually had some fun content.

I have since discovered another South African video sharing website www.zoopy.com. This one has a very 'cool' user interface and incorporates a Flickr type photo sharing service. It has some fun local and international content and appears to have great potential. I am looking forward to becoming a regular viewer.
The only problem? A great interface and concept is pretty useless if you can't actually view anything. Still being in beta we will cut them some slack, but I assume they are going to have to sort out the bandwidth required to deliver this type of content.


Now, I have heard that YouTube is developing a localised version of it's service at www.youtube.co.za.
No doubt they are going to become a powerful player. Watch this space!


Now for the reality check.

Their international counterparts simply had to be the first to set up a site, get some fun and preferrably controversial content uploaded and ensure that they had enough capital to afford the relatively high bandwidth costs. (Mainly as a result of the high usage) The populace flocked to them and the big boys paid billions for the right to get access to their users before a competitor did.
I am not sure how this is going to work in SA. Firstly hosting and streaming the content is going to cost a fair whack? Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the users are going to struggle to afford to spend any reasonable amount of time viewing video content. Tiny broadband bandwidth caps, high connection costs and a relatively small broadband market penetration mean a very small local audience. Dialup is no way to try and view online video and corporate firewalls will quickly close access to these sites so those avenues are not going to provide any more viewers.

All power to them, if they keep up and running long enough perhaps things will change. I look forward to the day.