Mogulus, the live internet broadcasting platform, announced today a new pro service. The company, that provides superior feature set to ustream and blogtv, revealed a new feature set, including HD streaming, optional ad free service, private channels, white label player. Pricing starts at $350 per month, which includes 25GB storage and bandwidth. Also, all free channels will have ads now.

It is a logical step for the company targeted more professional live broadcasters then their competition. Also, charging per bandwidth brings some business sense to the live broadcasting market.

Please note that this post was updated on the 26th of November. Updates are marked in Italic bold font.

BlogTV, the live streaming pioneer, is facing both opportunities and challenges.

BlogTV's CEO, Guy Eliav, defined and executed a brilliant strategy to increase traffic. In a targeted marketing activity, he managed to convince some of the brightest stars in YouTube to start live broadcasting in his network.

This activity and others enabled the company to grow its audience considerably, as the graph above clearly shows. It seems that under Guy's leadership, the efforts bear fruits. They also claim to get in some cases $10-$12 CPM for ads in some of their star broadcasters.

Financial Challenges Ahead

BlogTV is a subsidiary of Tapuz, a publicly traded Israeli portal. The company went through several changes recently. Guy Eliav, who served as Tapuz's CEO, became full time CEO of BlogTV. Dan Chen, who was responsible for Tapuz money making cellular activities, was appointed as Tapuz CEO, and additional key positions were filled with new people, such as Ilan Zinman as VP of Marketing and Itay Nagler who was promoted from Flix (Tapuz's UGC video site) to the chief content editor of the site.

Tapuz is financing BlogTV's operation since its first day. As a public company, we have unique opportunity to see the operating costs of BlogTV.

In their latest report (Hebrew) the company claim that BlogTV lost more than 5M NIS, which is about $1.4M, in the first nine months of 2008.

BlogTV significantly changes Tapuz's operation results, as it brings it to a loss of approx. $153K in the first quarter of 2008, last 3 months, instead of operational profit of $252K. However, in later quarters Tapuz managed to reduce the effect of BlogTV expenses. In recent interviews and discussions with the company, Dan Chen explicitly said that Tapuz will stop supporting BlogTV as it is a financial burden. Tapuz stock lost 68% of its value since January 2008.

As a part of this move, Tapuz appointed Shai Schiller as BlogTV chairman. Shai was Emblaze's CEO, and a chairman of Parrot Media and Axis Mobile. He was recruited to BlogTV in order to help the company raise the required funds to continue operation after Tapuz will stop supporting the company. According to Tapuz's financial reports, Shai's incentive program is based on a successful financial round. Prominent VC also confirmed that the company is in a financial round.

Dan Chen later on calrified that they will not be able to support BlogTV as they do today, but not have intentions of closing the company. He also stated that he believe in the product and company, and certain that Shai Schiller will continue supporting it in the future.

And the business model?

However, it is not only nickels and dimes that are a challenge for Guy and his team. BlogTV focuses its efforts in live streaming of user generated content. Unlike ustream.tv and Mogulus, which invested in superior platforms and stronger content focus, BlogTV is aiming at being the YouTube of live broadcasting, a questionable model in my opinion. As stated in previous post, YouTube failed to monetize their UGC content, and now using it as a way to attract viewers to professionally produced content. BlogTV doesn't have any pro content what so ever. BlogTV's focus on UGC still pose a major challenge to the monetization of their content.

BlogTV CEO believes that their content has better monetization ratio than others, as it is legal, thus raising its monetization factor. This claim still does not mitigate advertisers' reluctancy to affiliate their content with poorly produced video.

It is yet to be seen what will be the future of BlogTV. In any case, live streaming is still an interesting niche to follow.

BoinxTV, a software video mixer with high end features, is about to be released in November 11th. The product, by the award winning company Boinx, is pushing the envelope in semi-pro video productions and live events.

The product enables users to mix up to three sources (pre-recorded media, or live cameras), add transitions, lower thirds, overlays, logos, and live elements to the video feed and record it as a quicktime file or upload it to Apple's podcast producer.

When you launch the software, you can chose a show template - news, hi-tech, sports, or blank template.

Based on your choice, a complex and unintuitive interface is opened, that allows you to define which overlays should be used, titles, lower thirds, transitions and logos.

Though filled with options and out of the box graphics, it took me a while to learn how to operate this tool. Having said that, it is still much simpler (and cheaper) then learning After Effects or other post production tools.

This application is very appealing to churches, local football teams, schools, and other communities looking for a cheap and easy to use tool that will give their video production a bit of a boost. The same goes for video podcasters. However, it has some major disadvantages:

1. It doesn't support live broadcasting - unlike CamTwist, BoinxTV is only for recording media, not live broadcasting. This is a major disadvantage as its live mixing abilities are impressive, and could make the life of blogtv and ustream broadcasters much simpler, and improve their production value.

2. The interface is not easy to use at all. it took me a while to get the UI concept - even though Boinx make some amazing apps.

3. Many of its features can be found in free alternative, though online, such as Mogulus.

4. And on a personal note, I don't really like applications which promise too much before they are able to deliver it. They do make post production easier, for a very specific segment of users, but this is still not a substitute for post production applications such as After Effects. Therefore, their notion of "Say Goodbye to Post Production" is a little overdoing it in my opinion.

You can follow the application's twitter account, watch an interview with the company, and read more about the application here.

]]> http://pravdam.com/2008/10/14/boinxtv-offering-low-cost-alternative-for-high-end-post-production-tools/feed/ 5 http://pravdam.com/2007/07/05/3-ideas-on-how-to-use-internet-live-broadcasting/ http://pravdam.com/2007/07/05/3-ideas-on-how-to-use-internet-live-broadcasting/#comments Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:57:35 +0000 Kfir Pravda http://pravdam.com/2007/07/05/3-ideas-on-how-to-use-internet-live-broadcasting/

Live broadcasting over the Internet is gaining ground. BlogTV, Mogulus, and Ustream, are only some of the companies offering similar products, and fighting for market share.

Some are using this medium as another tool to express their opinions. Jeff Pulver is a great example.

Some are exposing their life and looking for support. Some are just exposing themselves...

But, can we do more with this medium? How can Internet TV shows enhance their content with this technology? What kind of shows can be solely based on this technology?

Here are some of my ideas:

Do a Q&A session with your viewers, live, with the main characters of your show (Ninjas included...)

Join forces with 3 other video Bloggers and do a multi-location online event, covering one common topic

Announce a trivia session about a topic, get some sponsorship for a prize, and do a live session around it. Whoever answers the questions first using the chat application - wins.

What do YOU think? How can we use this medium in an innovative, exciting, and useful way? please add your comments below. We can then aggregate all our ideas and publish a nice, long and useful "best practice" post.

[digg http://digg.com/tech_news/Mogulus_Proffesional_Live_Broadcasting/blog] I was lucky to be included in Mogulus closed beta this week. Mogulus is another Personal Broadband Broadcasting platform, similar in some aspects to BlogTV and Ustream.

Mogulus is loaded with top notch features. You can add logos, tickers, backgrounds, show schedule and other information to live broadcasts. A major feature of the platform is the ability to use several cameras in one show, with contributors from all across the world. Furthermore, you can rate your show as it fits all audience, R rated, etc.

It doesn't stop there. You can search for video clips, online and on your computer, and add them to your show seamlessly. You can also create a storyboard for your show. These features, combined with the use of multiple cameras, make this platform by far the most professional application out there.

Moguls has a full blown control room, where a person can control all these abilities. Therefore, It enables a professional work flow, separating the presenter and the producer.

The Show can be embedded in other sites as well.

The most interesting point is a missing feature - you can't chat with the presenter.

So, what's the difference between Mogulus and BlogTV or Ustream?

Mogulus offer different experience and aimed at different media creators.

BlogTV and Ustream have two strong attributes - they are easy to use, and enable interaction with the presenters. You just plug in your camera, and you are live. The interactivity feature makes these applications more community oriented then Mogulus.

Mogulus setup time is relatively long, as you need to go through a long list of features and decide whether to use them or not. It also has a structured work flow, including creation of storyboards.

In case Mugulus are aiming at high end users, who want to create a high quality live broadcasting experience, they have a very compelling offering. However, the product is too complicated for people who just want to broadcast quickly, and build a community around their content.

In a way, BlogTV/Ustream is the live broadcasting equivalent of basic UGC clip with a guy crashing into a wall, while Mogulus is similar to high end shows, that requires planning, script and time to create.

It is not that Mugols can't approach BlogTV/Ustream market. If they just add a shortcut button on the first screen of the studio site, allowing users to immediately go online, they can have a decent offering for the UGC crowd.

I'd love to hear Mogulus team's views on this market and their future plans.

More to come...

Technorati Tags: Mogulus, BlogTV, Ustream, Personal Broadband Broadcasting, Internet TV, Internet Broadcasting, Live Broadcasting

NewTeeVee » Video Funding Keeps on Coming - post about financial rounds in the online video industry

paidContent.org: The Economics of Content - @ Streaming Media: Video Blogs Try To Hold On To New Media Values As Old Media Pays Attention - forwarded by a friend, this excellent post provides additional figures (wallstrip chapter costs 2500$, Scobleshow makes 6 figures for Podtech a quarter).

The Business Of Online Video: Mogulus, Vator.tv, ScanScout and Black 20 All Get Funding - another post about video related financial rounds.

VentureBeat » Kyte.tv raises single-digit millions for online TV channel service, from prominent European investors.