Monday, January 21, 2008

Change is good.

Well, more accurately, change can be good.

As some of you you may know, my day job is running a company called ClickCaster. It's goal was to become the premier podcasting service (create, publish, and find audio and video podcasts) on the web. We built a world class, easy to use and very powerful RSS media platform for the masses.

We were early, we had great technology, a excellent team and a popular service. The big issue was answering the question: How do you monitize podcasts?

It turns out to be a difficult question to answer. To date, no one's really hit it out of the park.

The good news is the technology needed to deliver podcasting is a very malleable thing. It mixes all the cool Web 2.0 buzz words likes RSS, media, audio, video, opensource, RoR's, Ajax, etc. etc. into a powerful platform that can deliver rich media (that's web code talk for audio and video) as channels of content you can subscribe to. You can use tags and directories as a guide to find things and you can use social networks to spot trends and use your friends likes and dislikes to help guide your own. And, of course, you've got great stats and analytics capabilities (we count good).

Channels, content, guides, analytics.... this is sounding like...

Television.

Among other things.

But We like Television. More accurately, we like video. And delivering video via RSS to the 2 foot (on your computer) crowd AND the 10 foot (on your big screen TV) crowd is something we found we were good at.

So, we've created a new business built on the ClickCaster technology platform.

We're calling it:

medioh!

In a nutshell, it's a broadband television middleware platform.

It's built on top of proven ClickCaster server technology (99.99% uptime over the last 2 years handling hundreds of millions of hits). It has a deep media guide with 100's of thousands of channels with access to millions of videos. It has an easy to use set of producer creation and encoding tools and it can use our lightweight streaming P2P based CDN software (co-developed with the University of Colorado) called DistribuStream (which we recently released as Opensource software).

We've partnered with the folks at iPlatform, A newVideo Appliance company to create unique applications and capabilities on top of their set top box platform.

We're also working closely with the folks at Digital Effects to streamline our server technology to work as either a Software As A Service (SAAS) that we provide for you, or as a server appliance you can install in your own data center, co-lo or just set it up on your broadband video server, flip the switch and you've got your very own Television Network.

If you want to reach people in the living room, the lobby (digital signage), a school or training campus or throughout the enterprise, medioh! makes it easy.

Check it out: medioh!





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