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 The wraps have come off WonderHowTo.com, the latest online instructional video startup to make the scene, with the company also announcing an undisclosed Series A round led by General Catalyst Partners.Given the number of competitors already crowding this niche, the immediate question for WonderHowTo is what makes it different. First, it's worth noting the background of co-founder and CEO Stephen Chao, who has a background in television, rather than a Web pedigree (the descriptions of the company's leadership are predictably whimsical -- once this seemed fresh and cheeky; now, not so much). Chao is the former president of Fox Television, where his greatest claim to fame (or infamy) was helping launch "Cops" and creating "America's Most Wanted"; he also was president of USA Cable, where he greenlighted the hit show "Monk." But what distinguishes WonderHowTo from DIYNetwork, VideoJug, 5min.com, Expert Village and the many other instructional video players crowding this niche? I hope it's not merely the company's "content and community-centric approach," as George Bell, special venture partner with General Catalyst (and former chairman and CEO of Excite@home), highlighted in the company's press announcement. The leading players in the field all offer loads of content, mostly produced by users but also beginning to incorporate professional material, and all offer the usual social networking tools aimed at fostering a sense of community -- or at least loyalty to the site. No, WonderHowTo's game is to serve as a platform for instructional video content from around the Web, pointing to pieces from VideoJug, 5min, targeted sites such as WineLibrary.com and other rivals, rather than hosting the videos itself. The company says that will help contain production costs. Aggregating video also helps publishers boost traffic and viewership, which in principle should make it easier to monetize content, it claims. "We are Web site and platform agnostic: meaning, we embrace all content providers whose videos display a bona fide intent to instruct ... on any topic, in this big, increasingly wonderful world," WonderHowTo says on its site. The company says it offers content from more than 500 sites ranging across 36 vertical categories and 403 subcategories. WonderHowTo emphasizes that it uses both people and software to choose its content, and it has launched with a large library of more than 90,000 videos. And here it makes a bold claim about the superiority of its technology in helping people find exactly what they're looking for: "In head-to-head tests, WonderHowTo's human-powered indexing and ranking mechanism consistently provides how-to video search results of significantly better quality and accuracy than existing general purpose Web search engines." If that's true, we'd love to get more detail on the nature of those tests and their methodology. Clearly, like several of its rivals WonderHowTo wants to segment its offerings as narrowly as possible to make things easier for advertisers, which obviously want to serve up the most relevant spots to viewers. And here it's done something smart. The company has enlisted Scripps Networks LLC to handle ad sales. Scripps owns DIY Network, which has by far the most users of any how-to video provider. The media company is also providing WonderHowTo with lots of content. "Scripps Networks is already a leading Web content publisher in this space and WonderHowTo dovetails perfectly with our distribution strategy of continuing to make our videos even more widely and easily accessible to do-it-yourself enthusiasts," said Doug Hurst, senior vice president and general manager of nonlinear distribution for Scripps, in a statement. WonderHowTo looks good (I haven't had a chance to give it a thorough test-drive, so I can't comment on its functionality), but any technical edge isn't immediately apparent. Because it shows content from other sites, users appear to be restricted to the video players provided by the original publishers. Still, there is value in aggregating content in a niche that lacks a dominant player, and certainly General Catalyst knows this area well, having backed video plays such as BrightCove, Maven Networks and Visible Measures (which just raised some more dough this week). So WonderHowTo bears watching. - Alain Sherter See Jan. 30 press release from WonderHowTo.com via Yahoo! See Jan. 11 post from Tech Confidential See Jan. 28 story from Tech Confidential
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