Dubbed a “YouTube for business”, Vidyard raises $1.65 million

US-based start-up Vidyard, dubbed a “YouTube for businesses”, has raised $1.65 million from a host of high-profile investors in an effort to grow its platform for enterprise video distribution.

Vidyard, founded in August by Michael Litt and Devon Galloway, was created to solve a pain point for businesses wanting to use YouTube videos as a marketing tool.

Many businesses embed YouTube videos on their sites but visitors can click through the video to YouTube, thus exiting the brand’s site. These videos also include YouTube’s ads and branding.

Vidyard solves this problem by offering a service similar to YouTube, but without the link to a third-party portal. It also makes it easier to manage, measure and monetise videos.

“Alternative ad-free platforms are super expensive and way too complex to use. This is where Vidyard comes into play,” the company says.

“Vidyard allows me to put video on my website. In just minutes, I can customise my player, add additional chapters… and even see how my videos are performing in real time.”

“When you host with Vidyard, you get an ad-free player and there’s no link to take visitors away from your site.”

The company has raised $1.65 million from investors including Softech VC, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, iNovia Capital and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.

Part of Vidyard’s appeal is the technology behind the platform. Vidyard uses RTMP streaming, which means users can jump to the middle of a video without waiting for the buffer to catch up.

Meanwhile, businesses can implement chaptering, which means they can overlay links to additional videos on top of the one being watched.

Vidyard allows business to see how many people watched a video, their attention span, minutes watched, most popular times within a video, where people are located geographically, etc.

It has also launched a number of new features for its platform. The service now redirects a video to specific URL automatically upon completion of playback.

It allows marketers to create a Call To Action “Pop Out”, which creates a form – to capture leads or advertise – that slides out of the video at any point during playback.

Currently, businesses are using Vidyard to manage the success of their content and target their most engaged users.

Consumer brands use it to automatically push video content to their social feeds and analyse the success of each “channel”.

Vidyard has the capability to push video content to a YouTube channel, Facebook wall and Twitter feed.

It can also report on the performance of the YouTube channel directly by pulling analytics into the Vidyard Dashboard. Vidyard also manages video search engine optimisation.