Kyte Enters the Race
Posted on March 7, 2008
Posted by Mike Berkley
Via our good friend and former Director of Content, Marshall Kirkpatrick at RRW, and via TechCrunch, Kyte.tv announced today that they are broadening their sights beyond user-generated content (UGC) to serve music artists and media companies. Gee, that sounds a little familiar.
Look… for every 5 content producers there are 95 content consumers. The entrenched UGC video services, like YouTube, have those 5 content producers locked up. No matter how compelling the differentiation of services like Kyte or SplashCast, it is still very difficult to chip away at YouTube’s lock on a relatively small market of consumer producers.
But what SplashCast now offers media companies and brands, the ability to deeply engage the difficult to reach teen and young adult demographic where they live (social networks), is very compelling and valuable. We hear this everyday from clients and have been blown away by the interest from consumer / lifestyle brands and large media companies.
SplashCast made the shift in positioning from UGC to “social marketing applications” a while back, and we’ve gotten a lot of business being a first mover. Kyte is just now making a similar shift, and I expect they will also get a bit of traction.
This is a big opportunity; it is a land grab. I expect Kyte will be a regular competitor with us on a number of deals moving forward. I welcome them.
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4 Responses to “Kyte Enters the Race”
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[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptVia our good friend and former Director of Content, Marshall Kirkpatrick at RRW, and via TechCrunch, Kyte.tv announced today that they are broadening their sights beyond user-generated content (UGC) to serve music artists and media … […]
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptVia our good friend and former Director of Content, Marshall Kirkpatrick at RRW, and via TechCrunch, Kyte.tv announced today that they are broadening their sights beyond user-generated content (UGC) to serve music artists and media … […]
Their live streaming video from a phone is definitely swanky, but there’s no way my phone bill can support that! It’s truly amazing how much money European investors are spending on Kyte.
The issue with Kyte is that it’s too complicated for its own good. Expanding outside of the player with widgets so that a user can setup a webpage and optionally have some major controls outside of the player would be a step in the right direction.
There’s a reason why Youtube is #1 - it’s simple to do the basic functions.
Hi Mike - Great post… I agree with most of your points. Just to clarify, we first started offering branded channels to media partners in May of 2007 with CBS. The significance of our recent news is the following:
- We are building a massive distribution ecosystem with our strategic investment partners including Telefonica, NTT DoCoMo, Nokia and now TeliaSonera. With Holzbrinck and now Disney (via Steamboat) we obviously have major opportunities on the media side.
- While we’ve had branded channels in the past, this new release allows partners to deploy super-widgets including commerce integration and live mobile and webcam streaming. We currently are working with artists from all 4 major labels to deploy premium players. Also, standalone Facebook Apps can be deployed in about 2 minutes. 50 Cent has already launched his.
Ultimately I think that Splashcast and Kyte have very different offerings. What we offer is a highly scalable social communications media platform.
Thanks,
Gannon