GigaOM » one to watch

Check Out Quick.tv’s Pre-Launch Web Video Editing Tools (Beta Invites)

Liz Gannes — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:00:37 +0000

We recently connected over Twitter with a startup called Quick.tv, which has a neat-looking web-based editor for adding interactive overlays. Users can make clickable moving hotspots, tickerize RSS feeds and measure viewer response.

Where I really think tools like Quick.tv’s and those from competitors like Veeple could shine is if they were compatible with existing video players. However, as specialized white-label video offerings they could be excellent for customers looking to do small video-as-marketing deployments. Though that’s not as flashy as the ad-supported stuff, it’s a particularly fast-growing contingent of our sector. We recently moderated a general-interest video panel at the Web 2.0 Expo where nearly everyone in the audience said they were working on deploying video in order to market their companies and organizations. (Though you might not know it from reading our site, the world’s not all about UGC and full TV episodes!)

Quick.tv might do well to partner up with startups like Zunavision, Euclid Media, and Innovid, who enable ads to adapt to the context of a video — for instance an overlay could stay glued to the side of a moving vehicle or bend around the angle of the corner of a wall. Perhaps those folks could benefit from a sleek and simple web-based interface like Quick.tv’s.

Tyne, UK-based Quick.tv employs six and has raised £1.23 million ($1.8 million) in seed funding. We have a bunch of invites to its beta — just use the code NewTeeVee. If you’re interested, it might be a good idea to get in now, as the eventual product release won’t be free.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

One to Watch: Aylus Mobile Video

Liz Gannes — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 07:00:18 +0000

Aylus Networks is not a name familiar to consumers, but that’s fine — Aylus is looking to sell media-sharing and live-streaming services direct to mobile operators.

The Westford, Mass.-based startup has $25 million in funding from Matrix Partners and North Bridge Partners and is in trials with major operators in both the U.S. and Europe, but it has so far managed to stay off the business press radar as well. If these trials turn into deals, that could quickly change.

Aylus’ design improves on peer-to-peer type mobile video solutions that risk overwhelming mobile bandwidth constraints. What it does differently is run everything through a client-server-client architecture that conforms with upcoming GSM multimedia standards. So as mobile video production and sharing grow in popularity, Aylus will be able to keep up with demand.

The company’s two current applications are photo- and video-sharing and live video streaming for Symbian and Windows Mobile. Under development is a mobile-to-landline video service. Aylus is packaging its platform for applications like news reporting, repairmen, and first responders, where a worker in the field could use mobile video to better explain a local situation and seek expertise from afar. Aylus sells either infrastructure or a hosted service.

Competition could come from the mobile operators themselves — AT&T has already experimented with video sharing, but that uses a P2P-like architecture. There are also existing live mobile video startups that go straight to consumers such as Qik and Flixwagon, which Aylus says it can beat by making video-streaming real-time. Aylus’ careful attention to what carriers want and need could make it a winner.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

One to Watch: ivi TV Brings TV to PC

Liz Gannes — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:15:50 +0000

Here’s a fresh, not-yet-covered startup we found out about recently: ivi TV. From what we understand, Seattle-based ivi, founded in 2007, is building a video player that will stream encrypted P2P broadcast TV signals to PCs. The company wants to sign up traditional broadcasters, but will also include channels from independent content producers. This sounds quite a bit like RayV (our profile); it also has elements in common with the linear TidalTV as well as HD live-streaming efforts from startups like Kulabyte and Conviva.

The self-funded ivi already has an active blog and Twitter account, though it has only a sign-up form on its sparse web site. We’re told it plans to launch this summer.

Disclosure: We heard about ivi because they were in touch with our ad sales team, but as you know our policy is to always write about any under-the-radar video startups we can find.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Conviva Raises $20M for Live Video

Liz Gannes — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:00:14 +0000

Tuning into live online video is often an exercise in frustration. So even though Conviva is being somewhat secretive about what it’s doing, I’m inclined to give the startup — which simply says it’s building a live video platform — a pass for the time being, in the hopes it will some day prevent me from tearing my hair out.

Conviva is announcing today it has raised $20 million in second round funding. The investment came from UV Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Foundation Capital, and brings Conviva’s total funding to $29 million since being founded in November 2006.

In an interview last week, Conviva CEO and President Carlos Ramón would not disclose much about the platform he is building, but said the company already has customers signed. He was happy to talk about the market need, however:

“The first generation of video delivery just doesn’t work,” he said. “It’s like playing Russian roulette. That’s just not the way you run a business, and that’s not the way you monetize content.”

Ramón said the company’s platform would enable content owners to create a “virtual living room” — whatever that means! Conviva has a demo on its site of a car race that users can watch from multiple camera angles simultaneously and chat about in-window.

Conviva has an engineering- and PhD-heavy team of 55 focused on building out its live platform, and along with the investment is touting its board of directors, which includes Ramón, formerly of Akamai; Hui Zhang, its chief scientist and co-founder and a professor at Carnegie Mellon; Ion Stoica, its CTO and co-founder and a professor at UC Berkeley; Mike Ramsay, of NEA and formerly TiVo; Forest Baskett, of NEA and formerly Silicon Graphics; Peter Sonsini, of NEA and formerly VMware; and Adam Grosser of Foundation Capital and formerly Excite@Home.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

One to Watch: VideoSurf

Liz Gannes — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:30:38 +0000

Not a week goes by when Google CEO Eric Schmidt doesn’t wring his hands in public about the problems of monetizing online video. Could it be that algorithms and contextual ad targeting will do the trick, just like they did for web pages? That would be rather convenient, but it hasn’t seemed likely so far.

But on that note, we’ve been looking into a stealthy Bay Area computer vision startup focused on video search called VideoSurf, whose landing page promises it “will soon be able to help you find and discover all the videos you want to watch.”

Peering inside videos is hard stuff, and these guys seem to have been at it for two years with barely a public peep. We’re not sure what’s taking so long. We reached a spokesperson to ask for comment and she said the company would start talking “in the coming months, but not at this point.” According to our sources, the company is funded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the founders of Current TV.

VideoSurf’s co-founder and CEO, Lior Delgo, was also co-founder and CEO of FareChase, the travel search company Yahoo bought in 2004. Co-founder and CTO Eitan Sharon is an expert in computer vision coming from the academic sector. His specialties include techniques like multiscale image segmentation, which is supposed to speed up the process of matching the relevant parts of one video still to another.

VideoSurf, which was formerly known as Rexee, is also apparently loaded with computer vision research experts, an assertion LinkedIn reveals to be true.

But consumer-facing video search engines have turned out to be less of a draw than one might expect. It seems that many in the space are now looking at white-label licensing and video fingerprinting as more promising business models than advertising (see our recent story on Divvio, for instance).

VideoSurf, according to our sources, is said to be trying to develop the equivalent of AdSense for video, where it would place contextually relevant ads based on deep knowledge of what is going on in a video. There’s also plenty of people trying to do that, but our sources promise the ones at VideoSurf are smarter. We shall see!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

One to Watch: Nokeena

Liz Gannes — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:11:36 +0000

Nokeena Networks, a stealthy startup working on video delivery, let some details of its existence slip yesterday for a profile of the venture capital firm that incubated it. We’ve asked around and gotten some more details on what the company does.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nokeena has raised a total of $8.7 million in a seed round and Series A round led by Clearstone Venture Partners (where it was incubated) and Trinity Ventures. Angel investors include B.V. Jagadeesh, Raj Singh and Rajeev Motwani.

The company is looking to sell a hardware appliance with its video processing and network optimization software, targeting CDNs, media companies and online video portals as customers. Its current web site is basically a want ad for people with a “background in networking, storage systems and video processing.” It is supposed to launch sometime circa April 2009.

Nokeena was founded by Prabakar Sundarrajan, previously CTO of NetScaler, and Rajan Raghavan. The company arose from a conversation between Clearstone’s Sumant Mandal and Sundarrajan, according to a story in The Deal. “We got to brainstorming on the next big problem to be solved,” said Sundarrajan. “The light bulb went off on the oncoming tsunami of high-quality Web video. That was the genesis of Nokeena.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

One to Watch: Onecast

Liz Gannes — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:58:49 +0000

We’re tracking a stealth startup called Onecast and/or 1cast that was apparently founded and funded by Craig McCaw, based on a tip from a commenter whom we have reason to believe may work for the company. The main guy at Onecast seems to be a fellow named Anthony Bontrager of Kirkland, Wash., though if we’re reading the LinkedIn tea leaves right, the company may also be partly based in San Francisco.

The company is apparently similar to RedLasso — the legally troubled startup that allows bloggers to search for and embed snippets of television — but according to our commenter, unlike RedLasso, Onecast already has deals with “the leading news programmers both here in the US and the UK.”

We learned from Bontrager’s Bebo profile that the company is “backed by telecom pioneer Craig McCaw.” And there’s more info about that in a conference bio, which calls McCaw the founder of Onecast and notes that Bontrager’s previous company, Broadstream Communications, “secure[d] the largest library of IP-content rights from companies such as NBC-Universal, Disney/ABC, ESPN, Starz, Discovery, Fox, Turner Networks and others.” Broadstream was an IPTV network services company sold to Avail Media in 2006.

1cast is not to be confused with the now-shuttered, bubble-era Seattle-based sports site. We don’t think it’s the same thing as this Onecast, but that company’s landing page’s wording is quite similar, so maybe we’re wrong.

We also got a few more tidbits about Onecast’s potential plans from an online survey the company conducted, which includes questions such as:

- Would you like to see new services that blend the multi-tasking environment with video viewing?

- How likely would you be to interact with an ad if it was relevant or of interest to you?

- Would you be willing to share certain viewing preference information with television programmers or content producers if it meant a more relevant viewing experience?

So what will Onecast be? We shall see. If you have any more clues, let us know. This concludes your online stalking report for the day!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

One to Watch: MediaMerx

Liz Gannes — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:57:27 +0000

All broadband was not created equal, as we all well know. But this fact was painfully illustrated to Tejpaul Bhatia when he was working for ESPN, where he was part of a team tasked with taking the ESPN 360 video platform around the world and matching it with local content and business models. Four weeks before the product was supposed to go live in Brazil, the deal fell apart, according to Bhatia, because “the video looked terrible.” Even on fiber-to-the-home connections, he said, “[W]e would go to play the video and it would freeze, and play really poorly. But when we talked to the CDN and said can we get closer to the edge, the prices started skyrocketing.”

With the failed project weighing on his mind, a mutual connection introduced Bhatia to Michael Rourk Hallinan, a captain in the Marine Corps who had worked on deploying wireless networks in the Middle East.

“He was managing a direct connection from Falluja to the Pentagon,” said Bhatia. “[Hallinan] said, ‘If we can do it real time from a city we just destroyed, you have to be able to do it in Brazil.’”

So now, a bit over a year after Bhatia left ESPN, he and Hallinan have launched MediaMerx, a platform for bringing entertainment over the Internet to emerging markets. The New York City-based startup has raised ~~$330,000~~ $440,000 from angel investors. (Update: The company tells us it recently added another $110,000.)

MediaMerx has signed just one customer so far, an ISP in Africa, and has some test deployments in South America. The company charges a monthly licensing fee based on the size of the ISP’s subscriber base. It’s also trying to build a library of premium content to distribute — even though local content will perhaps make more sense. In the meantime, MediaMerx is using Tilzy.tv and a few other independent video sites to kick-start its offering.

So what’s the technology solution to different definitions of broadband? MediaMerx CTO Vikash Mishra explained that rather than using satellite data access, as is common in the developing world, MediaMerx has its ISP customers pull down content based on local demand, and its end-user video players access versions of the media files that are nearest to the consumer.

Will it work? We shall see. For now the company has four people and a small amount of funding, but to meet its ambitions it will need more than technological innovation.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.