Buzzwire is a Denver based mobile startup that streams multimedia content (mostly podcasts) to your mobile phone. They’ve just closed an $8 million series B from Sequel Venture Partners, and exiting investors Matrix Partners and Spark Capital. Earlier they raised an undisclosed A round.
Buzzwire is using the round to deploy the service on major carriers in the U.S. and overseas, although the CEO, Andrew MacFarlane, has only said they have “a deal in place with one of the top U.S. carriers.”
There are a variety of mobile podcasting services out there Podlinez and Fonpods (deadpool) are two we’ve covered. However, these services have emphasized backwards compatibility by playing podcasts on specific phone numbers.
Instead, Buzzwire relies on your dataplan, playing lists of media through your mobile browser. Creation and management of these play lists can be handled through their (somewhat ugly) website on your desktop browser. You can either add in content from their library of exiting podcasts to lists or upload your own. It works well on my iPhone, playing audio and video through the Quicktime player.
Keeping account management on the desktop web was a smart move. The mobile web experience on most phones is horrendous, however, that will change over time. Buzzwire is just a mobile customized website away from a lot more competition from other podcasting services.
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Inst BuzzWire the name of the Journalism Company on Moonlight? I Love that show, wonder if it is shameless plugs like Dexter seems to do for Craigslist, or if it is just coincidence?
I’ve tried Buzzwire and it’s no fault of theirs but streaming is a drag over mobile. You can’t rewind or jump ahead (on my Treo 700p at least), you can’t stop and resume at the same spot later, and if you lose your connection you have to start over. For longer content such as hour-long news shows this makes it pretty unusable. I’ll stick with podcasts.
The iphone’s client side caching helps it run well.
The site design is not pretty striking like other on-demand media sites.
Glad to see that 4th Media changed their name.
http://4thmedia.com/ now redirects to http://www.buzzwire.com
Congrats guys.
8 million?
sheesh, chump change!
Now I know my mobile domains may get some use.
You can watch a video interview of Buzzwire here:
http://us.intruders.tv/index.p.....;preview=1
Bruno
A very nice badwidth increase. I’ll have to give it a try with my iPhone.