Viddsee is more than Vimeo for short films. It’s an online home for Asia’s filmmakers

Online video is the new frontier of the digital content world. Major players such as Netflix and Amazon have carved a pretty big slice of the market for themselves. But there is still plenty left for others looking to get their own piece. Singapore-based Viddsee has chosen to stake its claim on a very particular piece of ground; the startup is an online video distributor for original short films from Asia, or featuring an Asian angle.

Viddsee was founded two years ago in Singapore by two engineers-cum-filmmakers. Derek Tan and Ho Jia Jian are National University of Singapore (NUS) graduates, in electrical and mechanical engineering respectively. But what brought them together was their love of film. “I had been making films since high school, so it’s been a long while,” Tan tells Tech in Asia.

Tan’s background in engineering and film first landed him at Singaporean telco Starhub, where he developed the company’s internet TV platform. After his stint there, Tan spent a short time at Silicon Valley image app startup Cooliris, before returning to Singapore to start Viddsee. “As filmmakers, the films we made were being distributed physically, at film festivals,” Tan says. “But we said, we’re digital guys, we’re building digital methods of distributing content. So we experimented with putting our content online.”

An Asian film showcase

YouTube was the natural first step, offering ubiquity, reach, and ease of use. Best of all worlds, right? Not quite, as it turns out. “We started realizing that YouTube is all about consistency,” Tan says. “As a YouTuber, you have to be making and uploading content and engaging your audience constantly [if you want to keep your numbers up].” For filmmakers releasing a short film every six months, or every year, that’s far from an ideal situation. Alternative video website Vimeo was better for their kind of content, but it’s primarily US-centric.

See: 10 startups in Asia to watch on Techlist

“What we were wondering was, where is that outlet for high quality Asian stories?” Tan explains. Along with Ho, who left his job at Starhub for this, Tan started Viddsee as a video hosting service built on user-generated content, but with a twist. The content would be curated by Viddsee and it would consist only of high quality films from independent filmmakers. “We kind of evolved into professionally generated content,” Tan says. The site currently includes films from Southeast Asia, South Korea, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and even Israel.

Creating some buzz

At first glance, Viddsee seems pretty similar to sites like YouTube and Vimeo. You can browse through the different videos on offer and choose from a variety of genres and channels. Viddsee shares two new films every day, selected by the team from a range of submissions. Users can stream the films online or download them to their mobile device – a useful feature in territories where bandwidth and data aren’t abundant. The service can be accessed either via the website or the recently launched iOS app. An Android app is also in the works.

Viddsee Buzz is built like a content website, which helps highlight films from the catalog.

But the company goes a step further in presenting its content. There’s Viddsee Buzz, a separate, blog-like section, which highlights films from its catalog. A short post with a Buzzfeed-y, catchy headline summarizes the film and reels the viewer in, and then presents the video at the bottom. “We give the viewers context to a film,” Tan says. “They come in and they spend less than a minute checking out what the film [is about] and then jump to watching it.”

The feature was launched in February last year, and Viddsee saw a huge jump in traffic as a result. It now boasts 2 million monthly unique users, according to Tan. As the team saw an influx of users from a multitude of Asian territories, it started exploring localization options. Last month, Viddsee launched a page in Chinese and is exploring the possibility of other languages as well.

It’s about the content, not where you find it