To make it easier for small Web publishers to host videos on their sites, Cambridge, MA-based Brightcove will announce today that it is rolling out an “Express Edition” service starting at $99 per month.

The company’s previous lowest-end offering cost several hundred dollars per month. At the new $99 monthly level—which doesn’t require a monthly contract, as previous Brightcove packages did—users can store up to 50 videos on Brightcove’s servers and use up to 40 gigabytes of download bandwidth. (For $199 per month, they can store 200 videos and use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth; $499 per month will get them space for 500 videos and 250 gigabytes of bandwidth.)

“Nearly every sector of industry and society is embracing online video for marketing, education, and communications, so there is a huge opportunity” for a cheaper video hosting service, says Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s senior vice president of marketing. “Based on the research we’ve done and the demand we’ve seen from organizations of all sizes and scope over the past year, we’re confident Brightcove Express will be a success.”

Brightcove argues that free video-sharing sites like YouTube aren’t adequate for serious publishers because they limit videos to 10 minutes or less and don’t allow live streaming or control over advertising.

The Express Edition pricing is part of the new Brightcove 4 video platform being introduced today, just 13 months after the company rolled out its Brightcove 3 service. In recognition of the growing number of devices that consumers use to access video, the platform includes improvements such as support for developers who want to build video-driven iPhone applications.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

I’m not going to do justice to this event. Let’s just get that out there right now. There were some great speakers and panels at yesterday’s Entrepreneur University in Bellevue, WA, organized by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network. But this isn’t about them. This is about the crowd-pleasers that brought an otherwise productive day to a close. That’s right—this is about pornography and Bacon Salt.

Not necessarily in that order, though. About a year ago, I profiled Bacon Salt, a couple of ex-Jobster guys in Seattle who hit upon a recipe for success: make everything taste like bacon. Their strategy of social media promotions—together with their natural charisma and some great-tasting food products (I can vouch for Baconnaise too)—has led to national exposure on ABC News, Oprah, Jay Leno, and the Today Show, not to mention a couple of segments on Jon Stewart (you can watch them here and here) that started it all.

Bacon Salt co-founder Dave Lefkow gave the closing keynote at the NWEN event, telling his company’s story from the beginning. From starting a food company on $5,000 (won from America’s Funniest Home Videos) instead of the $20 million usually expected in the industry, to fundraising and growth, to marketing and profitability, and now to Operation Bacon Salt—airlifting the company’s bacon-flavored condiments to U.S. troops in places like Afghanistan.

Through it all, Lefkow stressed the importance of finding evangelists for his products—including a couple in Virginia who tattooed the Bacon Salt logo on their legs. “These are people we don’t know,” he said. Bacon Salt also started a website in response to some kids who have snorted Bacon Salt…and put video clips on YouTube.

There are a few more updates to the story. He says Bacon Salt is “currently developing the world’s first meat-flavored personal lubricant.” I still don’t know if Bacon Lube is real or a joke, but Lefkow says he has found a company to manufacture it, and we can expect it in 2010. Other new products will include Bacon Pop (popcorn, not soda) and Bacon Ranch (a dressing, I think).

On a more somber note, Lefkow announced a charity event to benefit children with cancer. His four-year-old daughter was recently diagnosed with leukemia. The “Bacathlon,” billed as the world’s first bacon-themed athletic competition (including an eating contest), will be held the night of November 19 at Heaven Nightclub in Pioneer Square.

The last session at the NWEN event, after a few cocktails, was “Entrepreneur Idol”—seven lucky contestants got to pitch the audience and a panel of media judges (including yours truly) on their startup idea in 60 seconds. This is not an easy thing to do. Of course, we judges had the easy job of sitting back and giving our critiques; I hope some of the feedback was actually useful.

If there was one lesson, it was this: porn wins. Danielle Morrill got everyone’s attention by pitching her idea for a live video streaming adult-content service aimed at couples, called StreamHer.com (like Ustream, but for porn). After that, pitches on business productivity, IT consultancies, and mobile apps felt, well, less stimulating.

In the end, our judges’ picks were Firestarter Labs (T.J. Goan), which does software and services to create better presentations; Buzzeromatic.com (Andres Krogh and Matt Steckler), a Web service for granting front-door access to apartments and condos; and yes, StreamHer.com (Danielle Morrill). I’d also like to thank Jim Byers, Michaela Romanova, Nick Reed, and Gaven Kanemori for pitching us on their cool ideas and companies.

I was told afterwards that I was the “Randy” of the Idol judges. Better than Paula Abdul, I suppose.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

ScanScout, a Boston-based provider of in-stream online video ads, said it has completed its $8.5 million Series B round of venture capital with an investment from EDB Investments, a firm that invests on behalf of the government of Singapore. ScanScout is also establishing an office in Singapore as part its expansion into the Asian market. The firm’s previous investors include General Catalyst Partners, Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), First Round Capital, and Baseline Ventures, according to its website.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Delve Networks won the “best presenting company” award from the attendees of the first annual Angel Capital Expo, hosted by Keiretsu Forum Northwest on Tuesday. More than a dozen companies across different fields presented to investors, including Humanity Interactive, Iverson Genetic Diagnostics, and Exro Technologies. Delve Networks started in 2006 (formerly called Pluggd) and makes video hosting and searching software.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

SmartDrive Systems, a San Diego company that uses video recording technology and web-based services to reduce the costs of operating motor vehicle fleets, has raised $12 million in venture capital in a deal that could be worth as much as $25 million, according to a regulatory filing.

The company was founded in 2004 by James Plante, an automotive electronics executive and entrepreneur, who served as SmartDrive’s founding CEO until April 2008, when Greg Drew was named CEO. Drew tells me that Plante continues to serve on SmartDrive’s five-member board of directors, and remains a key investor in the company, which has more than 350 employees worldwide.

Investors in the current round include Oak Investment Partners of Palo Alto, CA, and New Enterprise Associates of Menlo Park, CA, according to Drew. The CEO tells me that SmartDrive, which has now raised more than $22 million in total venture funding since the beginning, intends to use the current round to accelerate the acquisition of new customers.

Drew says that SmartDrive’s strategy remains focused on helping fleet operators mitigate their risk by combining video, audio, GPS, and accelerometer technologies into a SmartRecorder device that is mounted above the windshield of fleet vehicles. “Our focus really is on enterprise accounts that are looking to transform their safety program,” Drew says.

SmartDrive’s customers include ambulance companies, taxi companies, school districts, utilities, waste management companies, and other fleet operators. SmartDrive says its event recorder and related web-based services can help reduce vehicle damage, workers’ compensation costs, and personal injury costs by as much as 50 percent.

SmartDrive’s competitors include San Diego-based DriveCam, which raised $19 million in venture funding in August.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

I’ve been predicting for a while that the marketing agencies and website developers that don’t have deep technical capabilities in search engine optimization will be left by the side of the road. Now we’re seeing it come to pass with Adobe’s $1.8 billion buyout of Omniture. [Adobe Systems announced the acquisition on Sept. 15, and U.S. antitrust regulators recently granted an early termination of their review.]

When Adobe’s chief marketing officer, Ann Lewnes, says marketing is the new finance, she’s not talking Orwellian double-speak. She means the digital age is driving the corporate marketing function to become accountable for spending in a far more rigorous and precise way than the “Mad Men” days of estimating “reach and frequency.” And that’s what Adobe’s Omniture acquisition is really all about.

This merger is intended to develop creative content in a holistic way and to measure the value of that content—whether it is video, web pages, mobile content, or social media content. This deal represents a way to “close the loop” in terms of creating digital content and measuring its impact.

Precisely measuring how people use a website is what we do at San Diego-based Covario. We view this deal as a brilliant strategic move for Adobe—one that could change the rules of the game for digital media, from creation to measurement to monetization. It represents changes in technology that will finally and irreversibly mark the end of an era.

This is what we see coming in the new Adobe media world:

—Video developers and agencies will build Adobe Flash creative content with Omniture tracking codes implanted from the beginning. This will enable them to track online views of that content across the web, and perhaps even begin to …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) has announced its lineup of 12 presenting companies for the Venture Northwest 2009 investment forum, to be held on Oct. 29 at The Nine’s Hotel in Portland, OR. The Seattle-area companies are Calidora Skin Systems, Doxo, Lucid Commerce, and MicroGreen Polymers, while the Portland-area companies are Advanced Inquiry Systems, Cularis, DesignMedix, Elemental Technologies, Giftango, Prolifiq, Second Porch, and Wicked Quick.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Sometimes, you need to keep the diamond and replace the ring. That’s how Cliff Pollan, recruited in March to be president and CEO of Waltham, MA-based VisibleGains, describes the process his company has been through over the last six months.

In this case, the company has kept its core technology, an interactive video engine that lets users plot their own path through a selection of online videos. But it has replaced almost everything else. That includes its old name (PermissionTV), its old CEO (Bob Lentz), and its old business model. The old plan was to build interactive sites for customers with a wealth of video to share, such as Bob Vila, the Boston Pops, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic.

When I last wrote about the company in July 2008, it had just released a development kit intended to allow Web publishers to build their own complex, video-driven sites similar to this one from Intercontinental Hotels, and had recently raised $3 million from BlueCrest Capital Finance, bringing its total funding to some $18 million. But that software kit, and the one-off sites PermissionTV was building as a service for its high-profile clients, just weren’t taking off as intended, Pollan told me in an interview yesterday.

“We were getting wonderful feedback from clients about the experience, but it wasn’t clear that media companies or large consumer brands would get that level of value out of what we were building,” Pollan says. “So we felt after a bunch of research and talking to a lot of people and potential customers that the business-to-business space was the place where interactive video—which you can use to tell a great story—was an appropriate technology.”

In short, while PermissionTV’s interactive videos wowed everyone who saw them, the people who really cared enough to pay for the technology were sales and marketing executives. Hence the overhaul of the company’s technology platform (it’s now an entirely cloud-based, Software as a Service offering) and today’s rebranding of the company as VisibleGains.The name refers to video’s purported ability to increase “conversions,” or the number of visitors to a company’s website who become actual customers.

To fund the relaunch, the company has raised more capital from existing investors Point Judith Capital and Castile Ventures, but it hasn’t said yet how much.

To understand what VisibleGains’ customers can build using the technology, think “Choose Your Own Adventure” meets SalesForce.com. The platform is designed to …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Blackwave, an Acton, MA-based provider of servers that store video content and deliver it to users over the Internet, has raised $3.5 million of a planned $9.1 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The document did not identify the investors in the round, and Blackwave CEO Bob Rizika could not be immediately reached at his office this morning. The company, formerly called Acinion, previously raised at least two rounds of financing from Flybridge Capital Partners, Globespan Capital Partners, and Sigma Partners.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Engineers long ago figured out how to deliver high-definition TV signals via over-the-air broadcast and cable, but the Internet is a different animal. Trying to squeeze that much data through a home or office Internet connection can lead to stutter and long “buffering” delays. For some time now, Akamai has been working on upgrades to its global distribution network that will allow it to deliver clients’ high-definition video streams without interruption—including a partnership with Microsoft last October to adapt HD signals for the company’s Silverlight video format and a deal with Inlet Technologies in July that did the same for the Apple iPhone over AT&T’s 3G network.

Today the company added Adobe’s Flash format to the mix and unveiled a comprehensive “Akamai HD Network” that, according to Akamai, can deliver HD-quality video to broadcast-scale audiences. The key to the network, as we reported in the July iPhone story, is a technique called adaptive bitrate streaming, which allows Akamai to raise or lower the quality of a video stream to match the available bandwidth without any interruption in viewing. Deploying this adaptive technique to its network of 50,000 servers around the world will allow Akamai to transmit smooth video to audiences in 70 countries, the company said. Over the HD network, users can also pause and rewind a video stream, just as they would if they were using a DVR.

“We’re entering a different online world, where many content owners and publishers need to deliver HD-quality video to a much wider online audience, with a higher level of interactivity for consumers,” Akamai president and CEO Paul Sagan said in a statement. “With the Akamai HD Network, we are revolutionizing the way content traverses the Internet with a new approach to bringing an HDTV-like experience online.”

To watch a replay of Akamai’s live webcast today announcing the HD Network go here and choose Flash or Silverlight. Or if you’re browsing from an iPhone, go to iphone.akamai.com/hdnetwork.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Kirkland, WA-based Digeo, a 10-year-old home entertainment company backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has been sold to Arris, a broadband communications firm based in Suwanee, GA, for about $20 million in cash.

Digeo is known for its high-definition digital video recorder, called Moxi. The acquisition gives Arris expertise, intellectual property, and talent in video networking and multimedia services delivery. Arris will gain about 75 Digeo employees (mostly engineers) in Kirkland, which will raise its R&D costs by about $3 million per quarter, the company said.

“Arris delivers the market position necessary to take the Moxi vision to the next level,” said Digeo’s CEO, Greg Gudorf, in a statement. “I am extremely pleased that the Digeo team will continue to drive the evolution of the Moxi platform.”

But observers point out that the purchase price means a substantial loss on the investment for Allen. PaidContent reports Digeo’s total funding was more than $110 million. In an interview with TechFlash, Gudorf said fewer than 10 Digeo employees would lose their jobs in the acquisition, and that he will stay with Arris during the transition. The news of Digeo’s layoffs was first reported by the Seattle Times.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The last official week of summer brought a slew of Northwest deals, to go along with today’s heat wave. Two of the year’s biggest financings happened in tech and life sciences, along with a big acquisition in healthcare, while a host of smaller deals went down in software, digital media, and advertising—and one company inched closer to an IPO.

—Seattle-based Integrative Diagnostics, Leroy Hood’s early cancer detection company, has raised $7.5 million out of a $30 million equity round, as Luke reported. The investors were not disclosed, but we’ll have more on this story soon.

—Seattle-based Free & Clear, which offers phone-based coaching for company employees battling tobacco addiction, obesity, and stress, was acquired by Inverness Medical Innovations (NYSE: IMA) of Waltham, MA, for $100 million in cash plus up to $30 million in follow-on payments, as Wade reported. Free & Clear was backed by Polaris Venture Partners, Three Arch Partners, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. Inverness offers medical diagnostic tests and other disease management services for consumers.

—Portland, OR-based Ensequence raised $20 million, led by Clay Mathile, the CEO of CYMI Technologies (and former owner of Iams, the pet food company sold to Proctor & Gamble for $2.3 billion in 1999). It’s one of the Northwest’s largest tech financings of the year. Ensequence was founded in 2000 and is a leader in the interactive TV business, which lets viewers do things like call up additional information on the screen. There is some question as to whether the firm is moving its headquarters to New York, where its new CEO, Peter Low, is based.

—In the biggest life sciences venture financing of the year, Seattle-based Calypso Medical raised $50 million led by Skyline Ventures and Frazier Healthcare Ventures, with Bay City Capital and InterWest Partners also participating, as Luke reported. The funds will be used to expand Calypso’s worldwide rollout of its radiation pinpointing product, which helps radiation oncologists and technicians better treat prostate cancer. Luke also reported on the story behind the deal here.

—Seattle-based Getty Images, the creator and distributor of photos and other digital media, has made a $4 million strategic investment in Daylife, a New York media and content services company, according to the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog. The two companies have also formed …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

A report today that Google is in talks to acquire Cambridge, MA-based video hosting company Brightcove met with curt no-comment reactions from both companies, and has been flatly contradicted by one analyst.

The report, which surfaced on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, came from Mark Glaser, a San Francisco-based freelance technology writer who is also executive editor of Media Shift, a PBS-hosted blog on digital media. Glaser wrote: “Source with knowledge of deal tells me video service Brightcove in talks with Google about buyout in $500m to $700m range.”

But Dan Rayburn, an analyst at market research firm Frost & Sullivan who follows the online video industry, reported on his Business of Video blog later in the afternoon that Glaser’s report was wrong. “I received a call from one of the parties involved in the Google/Brightcove rumor who would not talk on record but confirmed with me that the rumor that Google is buying Brightcove is in fact false,” Rayburn wrote. “I won’t say which side, Google or Brightcove the employee is from, but it’s someone I trust.”

No further details of the alleged talks between Google and Brightcove appear to have surfaced, and the companies themselves haven’t confirmed or denied the rumor. “We aren’t commenting on the rumors,” Kristin Cronin, a spokesperson for Brightcove, told Xconomy. “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” said Andrew Pederson of Google’s corporate communications office.

If Google were to acquire Brightcove, it would be a spooky repeat of recent history—because last year, a Silicon Valley-based search giant really did take over a video hosting company based in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Alas, Yahoo’s February 2008 acquisition of Maven for $160 million didn’t go well: Yahoo closed down Maven’s hosting service in June, and has dispersed former Maven employees to other divisions of the company.

Brightcove’s investors would likely welcome an exit scenario of the type Glaser described. The company has raised $91 million in venture capital to date from a group that includes Accel Partners, AllianceBernstein, Allen & Company, America Online, General Catalyst Partners, the Hearst Corporation, IAC/Interactive Corp., Maverick, Transcosmos, and the New York Times Company. A notional $700 million purchase would bring investors a return of almost 8x.

But the 160-employee company has had plenty of work to keep it preoccupied. It rolled out a simplified version of its video hosting platform last October and announced a major partnership with Adobe in April. When I talked with CEO Jeremy Allaire last fall, he said the company’s revenues grew by a factor of 5 in 2007 and a factor of 3 in 2008 and that he expected Brightcove to reach financial independence in 2009. And the company has now reached that goal, as Rayburn reported in June; it’s cash-flow positive and expects revenues of $80 million this year.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Getty Images, the creator and distributor of online photos, videos, and other digital media, announced today it has made a strategic investment in Daylife, a media and content services company based in New York City. The two companies have also formed a partnership to create products that let customers more easily incorporate visual content on their websites. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but All Things Digital, citing a regulatory filing, reports Getty invested $4 million in Daylife.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Xconomy Seattle’s editor Greg Huang got this idea going last month when he conducted an informal and wholly anecdotal survey about the startup culture in the woodsy Pacific Northwest. His premise was that you can tell a lot about a company’s corporate culture from its chief executive.

Within a couple of weeks, Xconomy’s founder and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi followed suit with a survey of corporate culture in Boston’s startup community (and based on Bob’s endorsement, may I just take this opportunity to say this is terrific idea!)

To make this a trifecta of corporate culture insights, I followed the examples set in Seattle and Boston by contacting some San Diego CEOs to ask them to describe the corporate culture at their companies in a single word. In a variation on a theme—what I like to think of as a fugue in our continuing coverage of technology innovation—I chose San Diego CEOs whose business is focused on digital television and video. It is an industry that has been subject to fast and furious changes, which will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

In another twist, I asked each CEO if they think there are enough TV-and-video technology companies in San Diego to constitute a cluster or even a mini-cluster of innovation. Technology clusters, defined by Harvard University’s Michael Porter as geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, and associated research institutions, have become a touchstone for promoting prosperity as well as advancing innovation in specific fields.

Packet Video (San Diego)

CEO: James C. Brailean
Culture: “Innovative.”
Comments: Brailean responded to my journalistic lob with a volley of innovations that Packet Video has introduced since 1998, when he says the software developer for wireless media was the first to demonstrate video on a handset. “PV has been out in front of several of the key trends in mobile multimedia over the last decade.”

“We do have a significant cluster,” Brailean says. “It may not seem like it, since we are focused on different aspects of digital video. However, we all have compression, transmission, and managing digital video at our core…The move to digital video was driven by …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Verivue, the Westford, MA-based maker of multimedia distribution switches for cable and telecom operators, has raised $20.1 million in an equity offering, according to regulatory forms filed yesterday. PE Hub, citing a Venture Wire report, says new investor Sigma Partners took the lead in the round. Verivue raised a $40 million Series B round in March of this year, on the heels of a $25 million Series A round in 2007.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

What’s it like in the world of corporate venture capital these days? For Jeff Schrock, it’s pretty stable and good. Probably more stable than at many boutique venture firms, which are under increased pressure to raise funds and get quick returns.

Schrock is a Seattle-based tech investor with Intel Capital. In a previous life, he co-founded Seattle startup Activate—which was bought by CMGI in 1999 and then Loudeye Technologies in 2001—before becoming an executive at Yahoo and then RealNetworks. He was most recently an investor with Monster Venture Partners, until he joined Intel Capital in late 2008. Schrock is a board member of San Francisco-based Transpera and Seattle-based LearnLive Technologies, and chairman of EVO Media, the Seattle makers of the DevHub publishing platform, which recently became “ramen profitable,” as Schrock puts it.

A quick snapshot of Schrock’s current firm: Intel Capital has invested about $4 billion in some 400 companies, including a $1 billion investment in Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR). It has approximately 70 investors globally, about half in the U.S. and half international. The investment team is organized into eight sectors (including consumer Internet, digital home, and mobility) across 20 or so different geographies. Although Schrock is based in Seattle, his investment focus is not tied to the Northwest. But it’s where he has the most experience and contacts, so he has a unique perspective on the region.

In an e-mail interview, I asked Schrock about his new gig at Intel Capital, his specific investment themes, and the trends he’s seeing in consumer technologies and startups. Here’s a transcript of our interview:

Xconomy: Can you talk about your current role and responsibilities at Intel Capital, and how it fits into the arc of your career as an entrepreneur and investor?

Jeff Schrock: My job is to make profitable investments in companies which move computing and Intel forward. I am on one of our consumer investment teams—so it feels very familiar as much of my career has been in the consumer Internet. (Previously, I was an executive with both RealNetworks and Yahoo!) It is different, however, being on the other side of the table. I spent a good chunk of my early career as an entrepreneur asking, receiving, and sometimes begging for venture capital. I can empathize with the startups and entrepreneurs I have the pleasure of working with. But it’s still early in my investing career, so we’ll see if this makes me a better investor or not.

X: What is special about Intel Capital, and how does it differ from most VC firms?

JS: There are a number of things unique to Intel Capital. First, it is truly a global organization. It’s very easy to collaborate across sectors and geographies. This brings advantages to us, as investors, but also to our portfolio companies who can tap into a wealth of expertise and relationships. Secondly, because of the heritage as a manufacturing company, Intel Capital is very well organized. The decision-making process is quite transparent and structured. As an outsider who’s primarily worked in software companies, this was a welcome surprise. Lastly, Intel Capital is not a fund. Unlike our colleagues in boutique VC …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Francisco-based Vidly, which helps users to share videos over social media services such as Twitter, announced yesterday that it has raised $500,000 in funding from renowned angel investor Ron Conway and other investors. The startup, launched in 2008 in Cambridge, MA, through the Y Combinator startup training program, recently changed its name from TwitVid.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Zooppa and Fisher Communications (NASDAQ: FSCI) announced today they have teamed up to host a user-generated video competition for Seattle-area neighborhoods. Community members will submit short videos to Zooppa.com, a user-generated advertising site, and Zooppa will post the videos on KOMO’s new network of 43 neighborhood websites.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It’s not often in the startup world that you get to build the same company twice, with better technology the second time around. But that’s the basic story behind Extreme Reach, a Needham, MA, company that launched this January with a vision of helping video advertisers and their agencies distribute their ads to cable networks, TV stations, and Web publishers.

The principals at Extreme Reach—CEO John Roland, chief operating officer Tim Conley, chief technology officer Dan Brackett, and vice president of sales Patrick Hanavan—all worked together at FastChannel Network for seven years, until they sold the company to Irving, TX-based DG Systems in 2006. FastChannel helped to pioneer the digital video advertising distribution business, and made $30 million a year at it, Roland told me last week. But at the time, the task required 200 employees, a $15 million centralized data center, and dedicated video servers at 1,200 cable and TV stations across the country.

Extreme Reach, by contrast, has 17 employees and no data center—it stores and serves video ads using cloud-based storage and processing at Amazon and Nirvanix. The startup’s 10,000 clients don’t need any specialized hardware, either.

Roland says when he and his group of fellow FastChannel alums saw what was becoming possible thanks to cloud computing technology and declining bandwidth costs, they couldn’t resist the temptation to build FastChannel over again—but to “completely change the model of how we do it.” They knew they’d be up against their old company, which is now known as DG FastChannel, but Roland says they felt they’d have the advantage, since DG now relies on a satellite-based distribution system and dedicated hardware.

Extreme Reach’s cloud strategy puts it “two generations ahead” technologically, Roland says. Thanks to Amazon and Nirvanix, “I’m able to expand to massive amounts of bandwidth and storage whenever the business demands, and if I don’t have the volume I can go down—so I don’t have any cap-ex [capital expenditure] requirements,” he boasts. “It’s a 100 percent software model, and I can do it for about 20 percent of the cost of …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: