Online video startups pitched venture capitalists this afternoon at the Web Video Summit being held today and tomorrow in San Jose. Up first was Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum who pitched VantagePoint Venture Partners' Duncan Davidson, Interwest Partners' Tom Rosch and Venrock's Eric Copeland.

I've summed up Rosenbaum's original pitch and some of the question and answer period dialogue. Some are quotes and others are my best attempt at paraphrasing:

Magnify.net - Bridging the gap between small percentage of content creators and large majority of content consumers. Adding 300 channels per day. One client is Upper Deck, the baseball card company. In sum, Magnify.net creates contextual search solution for people that want to build highly personal verticals. Rosenbaum mentioned YouTube three times, but indicated he isn't afraid of them because he things Magnify.net is different.

VPVP: How do you become big? You have 200k page views a day versus 100 million per day on YouTube?
The definition of big is changing. The 80/20 rule is changing it.

VPVP: You can already create channels on YouTube so how do you get big?
Can't brand channels on YouTube. There is no opportunity for revenue share. Entrepreneurs we work with don't want to send traffic to YouTube.

InterWest: Expense side. How do pay for hosting?
9 out of 10 videos are being served from other servers.

Venrock: For you to get big, you need to serve these micro-sites?
Mistake is to believe that in the end the big media companies will own the bulk of the landscape. I watch the behavior of customers and they don't go back to big media companies.

Interwest: What about mainstream publishers or new publishers. Will they plug into you to run their service?
None of the YouTube competitors worked. They want to let us do it.

For more on the Web Video Summit, see:
JD Lasica
Web Video Summit

Tags: magnify+net, webvideosummit, webvideosummit2007, magnify.net, vc, venture capital