Veoh rolled out a new site today, with some dramatic improvements. First up, they've got a new logo and design - much less stale and easier to navigate. Next, they've built a recommendation engine that learns from the videos you like on the site: we haven't had time to test it thoroughly, but it's worth noting that it was developed by Ted Dunning, creator of the recommendation engine behind MusicMatch. In short, Veoh now provides the Last.fm of video.
Veoh is also rolling out a Pro program: Pro users can make money by charging for their clips (pay to rent or pay to own), and Pro publishers can automatically post their clips to YouTube, MySpace Video and Google Video. What's more, Pro clips are automatically made ready for iPods and iTunes. The killer feature here, however, is that Veoh provides a single interface to track video views on Google Video, YouTube, MySpace and Veoh itself - it's really a hub for video publishing.
One last change: Veoh is playing around with ads. Pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, overlays and curtains are all being experimented with, and Dr Pepper has stepped up to be the first major advertiser.
It's easy to be overwhelmed by the number of video offerings these days, and each one is struggling to find a unique angle. Veoh doesn't seem to be among those that are being crushed by YouTube's might: they claim to have grown 37% last month and entered the somewhat unreliable Alexa top 1000. Tellingly, perhaps, Veoh is a site that I'll probably continue to use: these changes are enough to shake off the "just another video site" moniker.
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