Veokami: A new way to watch concert videos online

There are many hardcore fans who record videos, either through handheld Flip cameras or even on their mobile phones, who later upload those videos to YouTube. But if you’re looking for a specific show, or perhaps a moment in that show, navigating through dozens or more grainy videos to find it isn’t a great experience. Veokami hopes to solve that problem with a new platform for finding and piecing together videos from concerts that provide multiple camera angles.

Aggregating user-submitted videos

For bands and show promoters who want to leverage those videos to engage with their audiences and show fans what it’s like to be at one of their concerts, Veokami offers tools for finding, adding and automatically sorting through and formatting different moments of an event. The platform crawls YouTube looking for videos of a specific event, or users can submit videos that they’ve found. Veokami then arranges the clips based on when they took place during the event, as well as a number of factors, such as audio and video quality.

The end result is an event video page that includes clips from many different videos and camera angles, allowing viewers to skip around and see a show from multiple perspectives. The platform syncs up audio tracks, which lets the viewer watch a continuous stream of user-contributed content by automatically switching between videos whenever one of them ends. Viewers can also flip through various videos in a timeline view.

For an example of how it works, check out this page for Morgan Page’s show at the Avalon in Hollywood, which was part of his “In the Air” tour.

Getting fans pumped before the show

While artists could just go back and create video pages for past events, Veokami can also be used as a promotional tool for events that are upcoming. To make maximum use of the technology, Veokami founder and CEO Brett Welch said artists and show producers should let fans know that not only can they record video at the show, but that it’s encouraged.

“When you tell people before the gig, they record more and they upload more,” Welch said.

As a result of that messaging, Welch said the Veokami team found bout five times as many videos for the Hollywood show as it normally sees for events from similar artists. That volume of content enabled Veokami to surface some pretty high-quality video, and to ensure a continuous stream of the entire show. The goal is to have more breadth — that is, more overall coverage of the show — than depth, or number of videos to choose from for any given moment.

The result is a deeper engagement with fans, who no longer have to search for moments from a show and therefore end up watching longer. Welch said that in the startup’s early tests, viewers tend to stick around for 25 minutes or more per event page, and typically click through about 3.5 different camera angles per sitting. Fans can also share particular moments from an event with their friends, through connections with Facebook and Twitter.

Expanding tools for and artists and super-fans

While today Veokami is now doing much of the curation for videos itself, the goal is to extend its platform so that artists, promoters and — most importantly — fans will be able to build these pages themselves. That could end up being a very powerful promotional tool for artists as they look to show listeners what it’s like to be at one of their shows. Next up, Veokami will be used for a concert by rock band Switchfoot in Phoenix this Friday. That band has more than 165,000 followers on Twitter and 1.5 million Facebook fans.

Veokami has three full-time employees (and one intern) and is currently based in Mountain View, Calif. and is part of the third batch of 500 Startups Accelerator program. In addition to some seed money from 500 Startups, it’s also received a small bit of funding from Tenacity Worx.

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