Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Vzaar

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Available in
  
English

Registration
  
Required

Founded
  
September 2007

Website
  
Headquarters
  
London, United Kingdom

Type of business
  
Limited liability company

Type of site
  
Video sharing / Online Video Platform

Slogan(s)
  
The Professional Video Platform

Motto
  
The Professional Video Platform

Profiles

vzaar is an online video hosting service, which launched in 2007. The site supports video streaming, embedding, sharing, and video storage. It was targeted at first to eBay sellers, but the service expanded in 2008 and now provides online video services designed for business and other commercial operations.

Contents

History

The company, based in London, was founded in April 2007 by former eBay employees, providing video for eBay users. The service went live in September 2007.

In September 2012, the company expanded into the US opening both sales and support offices.

The name vzaar is a contraction of "video" and "bazaar".

Service

Vzaar was founded to provide an online video hosting service to ecommerce merchant eBay. By 2008, Vzaar was offering its services to a wider range of businesses, but does not host entertainment videos; the service is focused on serving commercial video only.

Vzaar’s framework is built in Ruby on Rails and is powered by a MySQL Database. The site runs on the Amazon Web Services platform. The company does not do its own encoding and uses a third party to encode videos to H264 MP4. The site supports various video and audio formats and a range of the video features.

Vzaar began as a freemium model for users with restricted access to certain features. Vzaar has moved away from this freemium model towards a business-oriented model with a fully featured, but bandwidth restricted, trial package for users to test the service.

eBay integration

Vzaar uses the eBay API to allow sellers to add videos directly to their listings. Once registered, the process is reported to take only two clicks to embed a video in an auction listing.

In 2008, at the eBay Developer's Conference, Vzaar were awarded the Runner's Up award for Best Design.

In August 2009, eBay announced the launch of their Selling Manager Application storefront. Vzaar were announced as one of the launch applications which means their video service can now be accessed direct from within the My eBay environment.

Notable investor

On the November 23, 2010, it was announced that Oliver Stone had invested in vzaar and become a shareholder. Whilst in London for the release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone acted in (but did not direct) a promotional video for vzaar.

References

Vzaar Wikipedia