MixerCast: A Multimedia Player With A Revenue Model

mixercastlogo.pngWe’ve seen a lot of action around personal media players recently, driven by people’s desire to share their content with friends and family. Slide recently announced they’re creating over 200,000 slide shows/day, and newcomer Flektor is getting snatched up by MySpace.

MixerCast is a similar embeddable flash media player that’s not only remixing all of your favorite media, but also a lot of web trends.

Like Slide, RockYou, and Flektor, MixerCast is a slide show based player that also plays multimedia content (like SplashCast, Flektor). In their upcoming release, MixerCast will be incorporating live RSS updates to your player content (SplashCast) and finally let users make money through affiliate fees (FavoriteThingz, Amazon Affiliate Badge).

MixerCast allows users to mix together personal and licensed media (images, audio, video) into a slide show. Slide shows can be created by dropping the content into one of their 18 customizable templates, similar to a lot of the templates you get with Slide or RockYou. Content for your shows can be uploaded from your computer, recorded on a web cam, pulled in via url, or selected from their library of content made up of partners like Getty images, Nature & Wildlife, Muze Music, Muze Reels, and Pump Audio. In the future, they will be incorporating other partners such as Universal Music Group, Virgin Records, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, among others. See below for a sample of the player.

The upcoming release will make the players “fire and forget”, enabling users to use RSS feeds to update the content in their players so it shows the most recent images and videos from their online content.

MixerCast’s incorporation of licensed content and variety of supported media differentiates it from the other thematic players. RockYou currently incorporates photos and images, with music from Pulse, Nettwerk, and Bebo. Slide incorporates photos with stand alone video player themes. Flektor has the multimedia down, but currently isn’t mixing in third party content.

In another week, similar to other social commerce projects, MixerCast will finally turn on the shopping cart at the bottom of their player, allowing users to profit from the licensed content they share with their friends. Part of the revenues from purchases within the widget will get kicked back to each of the parties involved: MixCast, the user, and the license owner. The hope is that people are more likely to buy content recommended by their friends.

This distributed advertising model across a widget network seems like a probable model for the other players like RockYou and Slide, when they finally decide turn on the revenue spigot across the networks they’ve built.

MixerCast claims 20,000 users, 1 million views of their players since launch, and received $2.6 million in financing from CommVentures back in December of 2005, the same guys who invested $7 million into Filmloop. They are currently pursuing a second round of funding.

http://asset.mixercast.com/share/resources/modules/blogifiedz/editor/bree/embedPlayerNew.swf