Portland based SplashCast is launching this morning after a long beta period. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a long review late last year after demo’ing the product (and he liked it so much he now works there).
Splashcast is a little hard to describe, but once you get it it makes sense. It’s a Flash media player where the user can make various channels of content - including text, video, pictures, and audio files - and then embed the player containing those channels on a website. It basically incorporates functionality lots of other embeddable products. YouTube videos, photo slides shows like those offered by Slide, podcasts feeds, etc. can all be added as channels and will take up a fraction of the screen real estate required by all of those other services. For already busy websites, the Splashcast player is much easier to stomach than 3-4 widgets from separate companies.
Each channel of content also has a RSS feed, so interested viewers can subscribe to it and not have to come back to your website for access.
Splashcast will host content directly, but the real utility comes from plugging in videos from Youtube, photos from Flickr, etc., so that you can keep your media where you want to and not have to copy it over to Splashcast. You can even add voice overs to any of the show segments as Marshall has done below.
Splashcast originally started as QMind, a creator of enterprise e-learning software, and had raised $1.3 million from angels. They relaunched last summer as Splashcast and are currently working on a series “A” round.
I got pretty excited when I read this - I need something like this for my church websites. Then I went to sign up.
Good grief! Do these people realize how ridiculously tiny and unreadable that Flash-based text is? They need to get away from their 24″ Mac displays and see how this stuff looks in the real world. Unusable. Sigh. And I really wanted to like it…
OK, so my ThinkPad does have a fairly high-density display. It’s a ThinkPad T60p with a 1600×1200 15″ panel. That’s 133 pixels per inch. But so what? There are a lot of notebook computers with high-density displays like this.
There’s no excuse for designing a site that is readable only on a large panel - and that poor quality Flash text is only marginally readable on *any* display.
Hi Mr. Geary, in case that vid wasn’t enough of me - I thought I’d respond in comments.
You’ll be happy to know that the player is reconfigurable to many, many different sizes. Re the text size on the menus, it’s hard to pack this much functionality into a small space without getting a little small for some folks. That’s certainly something we will be looking at after launch.
None the less, I hope you’ll look at the mixed media, the syndication and the many many other good things this software does - sorry our fonts are too small for you. Thanks for pointing it out.
I must say I am EXTREMELY IMPRESSED with SplashCast. I signed up yesterday and created a simple photo based cast from some photos I had in flickr, added some music to it, and had a fantastic flash-based slideshow in minutes and with such ease. Obviously this site offers way more than what I did, but for a quick test, I was sold. With the ability to consolidate photos, videos, rss feeds, podcasts, etc. through one easy tool and be able to republish all of that together as a single channel or multiple channels, this site has a very promising future.
Interesting but I think there are too many players entering the market, seems after gootube services like this are a dime a dozen.
@Alan
Just curious, but have you actually checked out the site and played around with what it can do? I don’t know of any other web app out there that allows you to consolidate all that media into one location and have it available in such a small footprint like this service does.
It’s awesome! It’s about time a skinless media player has come out. The ever evolving internet has made a necessary and important leap forward. Why watch the internet when you can make the internet. I can’t wait to see some things people use this for. It’s a refreshing product that is long overdue.
Am going to give it a try over at veetube
Hey Marshall, so that’s you in the video? Very cool. I didn’t play it yet, I skipped right ahead to the “let’s sign up right NOW” part. I will have to go back and watch it.
Do you feel like sneezing? The Start button is wiggling back and forth on your nose and breaking up a bit (FF2). Hopefully the wiggling is a bug and not on purpose. There’s a lot of fading and sliding and pond ripples in the site too - those are fun for a couple of minutes but they get old fast.
“it’s hard to pack this much functionality into a small space without getting a little small for some folks.” Huh? What small space? My screen has LOTS of space. But most of it is gray because you’re not using it!
Rebuild the user interface using scalable browser text and you’ll have something people can actually read. Flash doesn’t even use subpixel anti-aliasing for its text - the text quality in Flash is really pitiful compared to native Windows, Mac, or Linux text.
Friends don’t let friends build entire websites in Flash.
I think this is one of the better releases since….Mybloglog? It has the potential to be disruptive. I won’t be surprised if Slide.com and the pack follow suit. Since those other sites already have the infrastructure, it shouldn’t be long before we see this sector heat up.
Oh, and I will look at all the other good stuff, don’t worry. Just keep that promise to do something about the text so I won’t regret getting hooked on your service.
I’d been waiting to see this live, and I’m very impressed. What a brilliant way to pass on ALL of your content to as many people as possible. Well done!
I wonder how long YouTube will allow their content to be re-syndicated with these types of services. YT will foot the bandwidth bill, so it’s hard to imagine them willing to allow these 3rd parties to use their hosting infrastructure for free.
Also what will happen when there are pre-roll ads before every YT video. In this SplashCast, if that source is used in their playlist, that pre-roll ad will also be played in the middle of the playlist, which may be wierd from an end-user experience point of view.
i didn’t know this was a business? How is this different then Slide.com when everyone was piling on them.
Anyone else thinking that voice-overs + channels of public domain content = return of Mystery Science Theater 3000?
I don’t know… it’s just my or that page is absolutely unclear.
Are there some trafficissues? Everytime I try to add Videos from youtube it tells me that “there has been a problem saving data for this page”. I didn’t succeed even one time.
I’d really like to try it out.
oh man that dude in the video has hell of neckbeard
it is basically amazing
Seems quite a few services are re-broadcasting content. It will be interesting to see if a business model with revenue sharing takes shape to make this viable for YouTube….if there is any revenue from the leeching service.
Is there a tutorial out there on how this is done? Is it by capturing the URL? I’d like to get a better technical understanding of how this works and if YT can cut off access.
Thanks!
Jaafer
re:17 never mind, works now
sold. wicked awesome.
Pretty dang cool.
I put together my first splashcast here:
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2.....dpresscom/
I had a few issues with the text editor — hopefully that will be fixed in the future.
My advice for men with narcissistic urge to be on camera: I know your mom and your wife (or girlfriend) call you “a handsome devil” on a daily basis, but deep down you know the ugly truth, so please spare us your suicide-bomber-like 15-second fame.
Marshall, you’re a darn good writer, but Brian Williams you ain’t. You must have female colleagues in your office, so beseech them to do you a favor of reading the prepared text, as a feminine face and voice is easier to take on any given day.
I really like this and how it works, though I too was a little put off by the all Flash site interface. But that’s not a serious thing. The serious issue is what Chris said in #13 and Jaafer said in #19. If SplashCast puts in their own advertising, I think YouTube or any other service providing the content and hosting would want a cut. And, if YouTube has in-stream advertising (which will not be pre-roll, by the way), will SplashCast remove it, get a cut from it? This is the same issue I raised with AdBrite’s player and I think we will have to wait and see how it plays out. No one wants to be the sucker host, everyone needs to monetize. Marshall — care to tell us of any conversations or deals with those sites that are hosting a lot of the content?
I see a lot of features in Splashcast that leave Slide.com in the dust - I like it a lot. Of course, I already have a wishlist for new features I’d want to make it killer:
- more slideshow sizes (up to full screen - why not? if you have the bandwidth…)
- transitions
- control over audio levels
- more control over text
- layers and transparency
…why, i’d be ready to pay to use such a product!
Basedon the long, long emails and that painful intro video they sent out… the guys at Splashcast talk too freakin’ much.
This is close yet to my patent!
Its really amazing to have seen the market grow from nothing to something in the last 15 months. Everyone is going to get Blip’d in 2007.
Very nice. Bill Gates is right on the money with his prediction about the Internet totally changing TV in 5 yrs.