The oddly-named 1dawg is the latest of hundreds of hopefuls to ride the online video wave. 1dawg’s differentiating factor is that it provides a free video conversion service to a variety of mobile devices. It’s a seemingly minor thing to do, but in the current era mobile devices often use incompatible media formats – and so this really does scratch a decent itch for consumers. As 1dawg’s Adam Fichman explained in an email sent round to media folks:
“Each portable media device, like an iPod or PSP, accepts a very limited number of file extensions, if even more than just one […] What our company does is provide the means for a video in an incompatible format to be available for whatever media device the user wants to transfer it to.”
The devices supported currently include video iPod, Sony Playstation Portable, Creative Zen, Zune, Video Cell Phone and a basic Windows/Mac/Linux compatible file format. A few of those use MPEG-4, so mobile devices are not quite as incompatible as it first appears.
Other than the file conversions, 1dawg is your typical video sharing site – very similar to YouTube. I doubt the file conversions alone will be enough to get the network effects going – it’s more a ‘feature’ than a business, as web 2.0 critics are wont to say. Still, it’s a neat value add for the site and one I’d like to see YouTube and others employ.
Note that there are plenty of file conversion services around, but not many are part of an online video service. If you know of other sites that already offer a file conversion feature, tell us in the comments.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)