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April 14, 2008

Here Comes More HD Video On the Web—Move Networks Raises $46 Million in C Round

Erick Schonfeld

22 comments »

move-networks-logo.pngInvestors are betting big on video streaming provider Move Networks. The Utah-based company just announced that it raised $46 million in a C round of venture financing. The round was led by Benchmark Capital, and also included Cisco, Comcast Interactive Media, Televisa, Steamboat Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. That brings the total raised since December, 2006 to $91.3 million. (Competitor Brightcove has raised $86.2 million and Maven Networks was bought by Yahoo for $160 million in February).

When it comes to streaming HD video on the Web, Move Networks is becoming one of the preferred video streaming partners for many major media sites, including ABC.com, Discovery.com, ESPN.com,and Fox.com. According to the company, it collectively streams videos to 6.5 million people a month, who average 50 minutes of viewing time per session. But Move requires that viewers install its own proprietary video player as a plug-in to their browsers. So in a way it competes with Flash, which is getting better all the time. (Brightcove is taking a different approach by experimenting with BitTorrent and other technologies to create high-quality video experiences through a Flash player). High-definition streams still tend to run into network bottlenecks and slow connection speeds at people’s homes. Whoever can solve or bypass these problems will become adopted by more video sites as the demand for HD video rises.

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Move Networks
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  1. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » ネットのHD動画にまた新顔。「Move Networks」がCラウンドで$46M調達

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:05 am

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Comments

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  1. Jason Jenkins

    April 14th, 2008 at 8:34 am

    any user generated upload options??

  2. Kate

    April 14th, 2008 at 8:47 am

    ?!?

  3. Shafqat

    April 14th, 2008 at 8:52 am

    1) This bodes really well for CDN providers like Akamai. Video growth continues to be strong.

    2) That’s a sh*tload of money raised. I dont think we could spend that much money if someone paid us to.

  4. Alex

    April 14th, 2008 at 8:55 am

    Hummer Winblad? Is this an April Fools joke or typo?

  5. LimeAll.com

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    Wow they raised quite a bit…
    http://www.GetMeValue.com/flavorhome.aspx

  6. Tuggle

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:17 am

    I’ve never heard of any of these companies.

  7. Raskin

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:26 am

    HD ON THE INTERWEBS!?!

    Too bad it takes me forever to stream SD. I live in NYC, not the boonies.

  8. Mike

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:29 am

    Where does Roo/KIT Digital fit into this scenario? Their entire market cap is under $10m and they power the video for Newscorp’s online newspapers internationally + the NYPost here.

  9. Brian

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:50 am

    For all the success that Apple has had, I find it interesting that they are not a player–or the leader–in this market.

    QuickTime has existed for years and was at one point considered a key technology for Apple. They had Streaming Server and some interative features long before others.

    Now when you look at ABC and ESPN, which are parts of Disney, making deals with other tech vendors it makes me wonder why Apple hasn’t been pushing for this market?

    Are the margins just too small?

  10. KiltBear

    April 14th, 2008 at 10:48 am

    @Brian
    IMO Apple tends to wait until the supporting technologies are mature enough to give the end user a pleasant (as opposed to wildly frustrating) experience. Unless some killer compression algorithm comes into play the bottleneck will continue to be the last mile to the homes. Until fiber to the home (or something equivalent in download speeds) becomes ubiquitous, you won’t see someone like Apple offering anything to the public (I’m sure they are keeping their eye on it for when it does).

    Even if Fiber to the home starts to come along, from what I have read most ISPs are overselling their bandwidth. Both at the back end of the networks and closer to the homes. If all your neighbors on Comcast started downloading at 3Mbps, your neighborhood connectivity would probably begin to stall significantly. If all of the Comcast users went for a large download at the same time, their network backbone couldn’t handle it. It is more of a timeshare situation and so far it has yet to bite them in the tukas, but that time is coming if they don’t build out or light more fiber.

  11. John

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:27 am

    Love it!!

    Sent from my mobile using FeedM8

  12. Sarah

    April 14th, 2008 at 11:42 am

    Those figures suggest a cash burn rate of $2 to $2.8 million per month since December 2006.

    That burn rate would suggest to me that the required adoption rate is a long way from catching up with what the company needs.

    Deadpool material, but given the backers, this company will be merged to some other company shortly.

  13. damon

    April 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pm

    everyone is hoping to be an investor in next youtube, I am sure one of these will hit it eventually, but most of these will just chug along in some middle ground

  14. Charles

    April 14th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

    Move’s highly touted adaptive streaming becomes moot with the introduction of FMS 3.0 - natively supported with this platform. They have some other cool features (their CMS is impressive) and have definitely overcome a hurdle in partnering with Microsoft to bundle their plugin with Silverlight - but that being said, I expect high quality Flash encodes to steal some of their thunder. Proprietary encoder boxes suck, too.

    Also, Mike - Roo/Kit Digital is a fading blip on the radar.

    I suspect Microsoft will acquire Move as it will help further their Silverlight initiative.

  15. Roman

    April 14th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

    I wonder how does that tie with Canadian providers limiting the internet traffic to 60 gb per month. From what I understand that equals to 15 high def movies assuming you are not doing anything else.

    So either they compress the movies to lessen the size or providers lift the stupid limit. Or Canadians just don’t watch high def movies online.

  16. Smith Ventures

    April 14th, 2008 at 1:14 pm

    Video went 0-50 million in less than 2 years - so fast that even the most cutting edge corporations are playing catch up. A venture that is helping corporate clients play catch-up with interactive video is realviewtv.com. Recently hired a former start-up pioneer from aol and won a webby award for recent work.

  17. Toronto SEO Consultant

    April 14th, 2008 at 1:29 pm

    The CRTC in Canada is extremely cautious about letting new competitors into the market. Perhaps ISPs will not count the HD Video into the bandwidth caps, just like they don’t count ondemand content in at the moment. There’s absolutely no reason Canadians wouldn’t want to watch HD movies online.

  18. Will

    April 14th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

    I for one hope Microsoft buys move and turns it into Media Player 12. ;)

  19. Adam

    April 14th, 2008 at 9:41 pm

    There are a few companies out there that have been working on this along with a more robust overall platform. For instance…one of the most promising is Ooyala (www.ooyala.com).

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