MediaCore Gives Small Businesses Their Own YouTube

After running an open source version of their SaaS video publishing platform for a year, MediaCore officially launched to the public yesterday.

Developed by Damien Tanner (creator of Pusher) and Stuart Bowness, MediaCore provides small businesses with the ability to manage what is essentially their own, private version of YouTube. This video streaming site will allow the owners to control the entire experience from end-to-end and allows them to post videos without fear of their content getting lost in shuffle over at YouTube, which has hundreds of millions (if not more) of videos on the site.

The real hook for MediaCore that sets them apart from other video site creators, however, is the interface. MediaCore is all about vanity, which is great for those business owners who may not be the most tech savvy.

Tanner and Bowness have said that their decided to create MediaCore because all of the other video platforms tend to pay little attention to design, and that didn't always work out the best for users. So, they surmised that it may be a good idea to start with design and then build an easy-to-use service from there.

The premise is simple, customers will simply upload their content into the platform's cloud-based framework and the videos will stream through MediaCore's exclusive player, which has the ability to automatically determine which brower the user or viewer is connecting with and then sort out whether the video is being shown in Flash or HTML5 (although the player will use HTML5 whenever possible). This is all part of the design to make the platform as simple for business owners as possible.

But as I said, MediaCore looks good, too, and that is key to keeping consumers on your site and looking at videos. Visitors to a site can browse through video collections using a visual guide, and the platform allows the site's owners to organize their videos by category , or tag, and it will automatically sort content by both relevance and popularity.

Site creators can also add logos and backgrounds and customize the site using CSS. Plus, MediaCore allows you to add your own domain and utilize podcasting, as well as including some other specialized tools. It almost makes creating a full-service video website look easy.

In order to get the platform off the ground, the MediaCore folk are busy trying to close a seed round of angel funding from MetaLab founder and CEO Andrew Wilkinson.

Currently, MediaCore is being offered with a 15-day free trial followed by plans that start at $99 a month and include custom domains, a white label player, custom branding, automated encoding, social video embedding and more. Oh yeah, and every account comes with Android and iOS apps.

So far, just the beta version has drawn in over 1100 companies such as London University, Mentor Graphics, TechVibes, Indiana University and a number of Fortune 500 companies.