Brid Video, LLC recently announced that its new website Brid.tv was up and running. The Belgrade, Serbia-based company seeks to leverage cloud and HTML5 video technology while giving its users access to an SEO-friendly platform and making watching videos a more social experience.

Setting up an account with Brid.tv is easy; it’s free of charge and all you have to do is supply an email and password and respond to an email verifying registration. At this point, you can add a website for Brid.tv to link to or add videos. Users can then setup monetization for their videos and Google (News – Alert) Analytics reporting.

Brid.tv supports many of the standard formats and protocols for video files and streaming. MP4, webM and FLV files can be uploaded and run on the site. Adobe (News – Alert) RTMP, Apple HLS and HDS streaming protocols are also supported.

On the surface, it would appear that Brid.tv is nothing more than another attempt to duplicate sites like YouTube or Vimeo (News – Alert), but it has significant features that set it apart from those sites.

A technology that Brid has trademarked under the name VEEPS, allows users to videoconference with each other through a plugin while watching and sharing videos. It’s designed to make watching videos a more social experience.

Several features in Brid.tv allow webmasters to treat their video pages like a business. They can add skins to their video page as a way of providing branding. Brid.tv has some ready-made skins as well as an option that will create a customized skin. All users have to do is enter the URL of their site and Brid.tv will design a new professional skin free of charge. There is support for advertising with DoubleClick for Publishers and the VAST and VPAID standards from IAB.

It may not be fair to ask if Brid.tv will become the next YouTube (News – Alert), since it’s not trying to be the same thing. For people who just want to put up videos from their latest vacation and not make any money in the process, YouTube and Vimeo will suffice. For others who want their hosted video page to function as part of a business, Brid.tv has a lot to offer.

There are two questions that remain to be answered: Will enough businesses jump on board with Brid.tv to make it more than a startup? And how does Brid.tv make money when it is offering so much for free?