Howcast is a startup company founded by ex-Googlers Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman. All three worked on Google Video and YouTube before creating Howcast. The site launched on February 6th, 2008 along with an announcement of an $8 million series A funding led by Tudor Investment Group. Howcast provides instructional how-to videos on everything from How To Paint A Wall to How To Pretend You’re A Real New Yorker.

One might wonder why someone would try to create a site based solely on how-to guides when thousands of such videos can be found on YouTube. What sets apart Howcast from the competition (which includes Instructables, Expert Village and 5min in addition to other people YouTube) is the quality of the videos. The majority of the videos on the site so far are actually produced by Howcast’s own studio. Once users register they can suggest new topics and even write up and edit instructions for those topics.

The site also includes a wiki section. I find this especially helpful for instructions that are easier to visualize in my head than to watch in a video (such as How To Do A Kickflip). The wiki section is where users can submit their write ups. If Howcast chooses to make a video out of a certain wiki, they either shoot it in their own studio in New York or pay film students to shoot the footage then Howcast voices it over and makes it pretty.

Revenue is driven by embedded ads in the instructional videos. These ads are much more effective in my opinion. When I watch a video online, I don’t want to wait 15, 30 or 60 seconds to start the video. Placing a small ad at the bottom of the video grabs the user’s attention without being too annoying. It’s similar to driving a car: for some reason it feels more efficient to be moving slowly than to be stuck at a red light before driving off quickly.

Howcast looks promising. It offers a broad range of topics with the potential user involvement of a wiki with the entertainment of online video.

What are some your favorite Howcast how-tos? Do you think Howcast seems like a service you would want to use?