The allure of building a business around user-generated content is fading fast. SplashCast, a company which launched two years ago around the notion of helping consumers put together videos, text, graphics, and music in embeddable broadcast “channels,” is discontinuing its original product. “Most of us would rather consume than create. This is one of the big ticket findings of the Web 2.0 technology wave,” concludes CEO Michael Berkley.
And after failing to raise a B round of funding, he is now trying to sell the company. Instead of trying to make money off of user-generated broadcast channels, he is focusing on his newer Social TV product, which adds social features such as chat, commenting, and polling to professionally-produced videos.
The SplashCast product being discontinued was simply too complicated for most consumers. It was a full content-management system which allowed consumers to bring together videos with images, text, and sound. In a candid assessment of why it fell flat, Berkley says: “We were hoping to launch a publishing revolution. What we found, however, is that very few users are willing and able to make an ongoing commitment to publishing and distributing content. Lots of users test; few stick with it.”
One of the most social video experiences I’ve ever had on the Web was watching the Obama Inauguration speech on CNN.com alongside a live chat stream of commentary from all of my Facebook friends. It was like being in a giant living room that stretched across the country and hearing everyone’s reaction as the event unfolded.
The same dynamic on much smaller scale is happening with popular TV shows on Facebook and MySpace. Splashcast, which has created apps for about 20 different TV shows, two weeks ago introduced a new feature called Chatter into its embedded video players. For instance on Facebook it has apps for The Simpsons, The Office, Family Guy, and more. Once you install each app, you can watch episodes of teh show, many of them streamed through Hulu. SplashCast tells me that it is getting about 7 million monthly video views from one million unique viewers across all of its apps, with Hulu videos being the fastest growing proportion of that.
Online multimedia player SplashCast has announced some new partners and has released a new branded multimedia player on Facebook .
Launch partners include Justin Timberlake, Pink, and Chris Brown, who are offering official branded players.
The SplashCast Facebook application allows users to add a player to their profile that includes a customized skin and comes preloaded with RSS feeds of the creator’s latest videos and images.
With the player, users can stream content organized into distinct channels (e.g albums, videos, music).
The new player is a big investment in Facebook by SplashCast. They specifically crafted a new administration panel for the application just for Facebook. Through the admin panel, owners can skin the player, manage their channels, and can even control the newsfeed update messaging. In exchange for the effort, they will be charging a base development cost that covers the first 1,000 users, increasing incrementally thereafter.
There have already been a lot of “fan applications” that let you follow a particular show on Facebook, but these have been custom jobs. The SplashCast player makes it easy for companies to create a multimedia fan application of their own.
I continually hear stories of Facebook application developers getting offers for work from companies looking to get on Facebook. White label applications like this may be a way to automate that process.
SplashCast, an embeddable Flash media player, is improving its product today. They are now allowing publishers to turn any RSS feed with a media enclosure, such as a podcast or videocast, into a channel on their player. Previously SplashCast only allowed RSS feeds from YouTube and Flickr. Now, any feed can be added.
The best way to understand SplashCast is just to look at the player, which we’ve embedded below. Feeds are organized into channels, making it possible to show your favorite videos, podcasts, and photos from within one player updated through RSS. SplashCast will continuously update the shows on the channel as new content is added.
Text based RSS feeds have had several multi-channel embeddable widget based platforms, including Grazr and SpringWidgets. Multi-channel video and audio RSS feeds are a smaller category, mostly consisting of widgets that play only your own content. Along with SplashCast, Cozmo.tv has been helping develop multi-channel video players updated via RSS, but only for social video sites YouTube and Blip.tv. VodPod has also released a new widget that plays RSS feeds of videos from social video sites.
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.
SplashCast, an online media publishing company, has informed us that former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick will join the company as director of content.
Kirkpatrick reviewed the service in November. He will now be responsible for SplashCast’s overall media strategy.
“For the past few weeks I’ve been planning on working independently but the combination of SplashCast’s technology, team, vision and the job they want me to do was irresistible,” Kirkpatrick told us. “I think the company is going to be a real game-changer and I’m super excited to be a part of it.”
Splashcast allows users to publish video, photos, audio and text via RSS feeds to a skinless Flash player. The service will officially launch in January but the beta player will be available within the next few weeks.
Congratulations, SplashCast, on getting such a great talent.
I got an early look last week at a media publishing tool being developed by Portland startup Splashcast and what I saw looked like something that anyone tired of overbranding and limited options in online media is sure to like. The product, which is still several months away from launch, is a clean, simple system for publishing channels of video, photos, audio and text via RSS feeds to a totally resizable, skinless Flash player. It’s easy to put media into the Splashcast steam and easy to pull yours or other peoples’ down into your player for sharing.
There are several strategies the company is employing that I think are likely to become best practices in the world of embedded media players and online publishing – and that’s a very large market. Tools like Splashcast are only going to make the online media market larger because they remove so much of the friction that’s present in tools currently available.
Widgets are the topic of the day and Splashcast is one of them that I’m most excited about.
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