I mentioned in an earlier post that for the past few months I’ve been working with Kyte. That’s their widget above. My lineup of shows so far is pretty weak, but the thing I really want to talk about is the product.
It’s pretty powerful, and feature-packed. Users can produce and broadcast shows instantly (even broadcast live) from a webcam or supported mobile phones (right now, Nokia’s S60 handsets are our flagship devices), or they can upload beautifully produced and edited high-quality videos and use Kyte simply as the publishing platform.
The content is what attracts the audience, but once the audience is there they can engage more deeply with things like chat, comments and ratings. They can also grab the widget and embed it on MySpace pages, Facebook profiles, blogs, etc. It’s a completely decentralized experience, but no matter where people discover and engage with the widget, they are all participating with each other in real time.
Kyte users can then monetize this audience via a number of different ad formats (pre-rolls, overlays, banners, etc.) and solutions (ad server integration, ad networks).
Kyte started as a destination website for user-generated online video, in the vein of YouTube, but they got a lot of traction with some pretty high-profile customers, and over the last year they’ve repositioned themselves as an enabling platform.
This is an exciting time for me to have joined Kyte, because we are planning to roll out a whole bunch of new features in the coming months to round out the platform strategy, and also because the current product needs some streamlining. As I mention in the video above, it’s like a Swiss Army Knife with too many tools open at once. This makes some obvious features too hard to use, and it makes other features too hard to discover.
We’re also rolling out a lot of new stuff for mobile devices. I’m not sure what I’m specifically allowed to mention, so I’ll just leave it at that. But basically, I’m stoked because I’m working on a very cool product, and I’m working with some of Kyte’s partners doing pretty amazing things with it. As a case in point, 50 cent’s Kyte channel surpassed 50 million views last month!
Lastly, here are a few of Kyte’s high-profile users:
Lots more here