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Hearst’s Latest Social Launch: A Redbook App For Father’s Day

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:54:35 +0000

Hearst is best known as print publisher, but this year its digital arm has been making a big push into social media. Its latest effort is a Father’s Day themed Facebook app for Redbook magazine . In order to use the Father’s Day app, people need to “like” the Redbook Facebook page. Once you’ve done that, you can bring up a list of all the dads in your network. Then you can post a Father’s Day message to any of their Facebook Walls, and optionally, on yours too. I was a little surprised to see the app coming from Redbook, which targets young married women — not necessarily the first audience I’d think of when it comes to celebrating Father’s Day. However, Brian Madden, director of social at Hearst Digital Media, points out that the emphasis is on thanking not just your father, but all the dads you know, whether it’s your husband, your brother, your uncle, or whomever. He also says this is a way for Redbook to leverage its fans to get into “the feeds of other like-minded women.” While I was interested in hearing about the Redbook app, I also wanted to get an update on Hearst’s general social strategy. Apparently Madden’s team was just created in February, and it’s focusing on two main strategies — increasing social sharing from Hearst websites, while also creating social network-specific experiences to engage fans. “The philosophy right now is to make sure that we have social strategies that pay,” says VP of Digital Grant Whitmore. “And when I say pay, I don’t necessarily mean in a monetary sense. We know that our social strategy can’t just be about counts of fans and followers, but it has to be tied to some measurable engagement.” When it comes to measurable engagement Hearst says the numbers are going up. In the first quarter of the year, on-site sharing was up 74 percent, and in April, Facebook drove a record 2 million visits to Hearst site. During that month, the reach of Hearst publications’ Facebook posts and pages also increased 30 percent compared to March.

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Hearst’s Latest Social Launch: A Redbook App For Father’s Day

KPCB’s Chi-Hua Chien: The Next Wave Of Tech Disruption Will Hit Commerce

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:51:01 +0000

Technology has helped to level the playing field across a wide range of industries, letting more individuals come to the table in fields such as publishing, entertainment and, of course, building web startups. And according to Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers partner Chi-Hua Chien , the next space ripe for a big tech-powered wave of democratization is commerce. In an on-stage conversation with David Kirkpatrick at the TechCrunch NYC Disrupt conference Wednesday afternoon, Chien explained how tech has helped flatten a number of previously stratified spaces. The mid- to late-90′s saw the democratization of information — companies such as Google made data available to everyone, no matter where or who they were. After that came the democratization of distribution, with services such as Twitter and Facebook allowing anyone to broadcast their content and potentially attract an audience. The democratization of computing has occurred as well, with billions of people in the world now having access to computers because of the availability of low-cost mobile devices. Up next? The world of shopping and selling. “We’re now entering an era around the democratization of commerce,” Chien said. The past, he said, has been about “mass aggregation,” with companies such as Safeway and Wal-Mart rising to the top of the commerce space by simply being the best at aggregating a suite of products into one space. These big companies also built up their own brand names to make shoppers feel secure in buying things from them. Today, though, we are starting to “see an unwinding of aggregation of commerce as technology starts to disrupt” the industry, Chien said. “If you think about what a Wal-Mart does, it aggregates credibility and inventory,” Chien said. Credibility is the Wal-Mart brand name, and the inventory is simply products and storage. Today, credibility can be established by smaller players via social media, and real estate and inventory can be outsourced much easier. Chien pointed to two Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies to illustrate this movement: Square , which he said is democratizing becoming a merchant, and Zaarly for democratizing the ability to do a particular job. In a short conversation off-stage, he told me that Gumroad is also one of the Kleiner-backed startups that is leading the way toward big commerce disruption. Looking at Kleiner Perkins itself, Chien not surprisingly declined from discussing the lawsuit filed by investment partner Ellen Pao (the news of which TechCrunch was the first to break yesterday) during his fireside chat. But, he did shed some light on the firm’s larger strategy, in particular its increasing focus on making digital investments, after a few years of being more well-known for making moves in the green tech space. “In the last five years, [Kleiner has] added four investing partners focusing on consumer digital,” Chien said.

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KPCB’s Chi-Hua Chien: The Next Wave Of Tech Disruption Will Hit Commerce

Amazon Partners With Paramount, Brings Hundreds More Movies To Prime Instant Video Service

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:35:37 +0000

Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery , which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in the deal are titles like Mission: Impossible 3, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, Nacho Libre and Clueless , to name a few, and Amazon says more will be added “soon.” With the new deal in place, Amazon Instant Video now offers over 17,000 movies and TV episodes for unlimited streaming by Amazon Prime customers who can watch online or on their Amazon Kindle Fire. For what it’s worth, “17,000+” is the same number that Amazon was touting earlier this year, so the increase via the Paramount deal didn’t include enough of a selection to warrant a new “milestone” announcement on the company’s part. Prior to the Discovery deal, Amazon signed a similar deal with Viacom in February , which then brought the number of titles up to 15,000. And in December, the count was 13,000 . So yes, the service is growing, and relatively quickly. Other popular movies you’ll know from Paramount which are now online include Star Trek, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, The Italian Job, and The Truman Show. In total, the service offers 120,000 titles which Amazon Prime customers can either rent or buy. The videos will be available at no extra charge to Amazon Prime customers who pay the $79/year for the service, which also includes free two-day shipping and access to the Kindle Lending Library.

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Amazon Partners With Paramount, Brings Hundreds More Movies To Prime Instant Video Service

VisibleGains Launches Postwire At Disrupt, Aims To Be The Flipboard For Client Communication

ACMAir — Wed, 23 May 2012 01:19:29 +0000

Email is broken. Social networks are not for private file distribution. Collaborative file sharing sites are missing pizzazz and key functions for the enterprise. This is the thought process behind Postwire by VisibleGains. The company explained to TechCrunch, “We want to do for client communication what Flipboard did for blog reading.” By using a private sharing workspace, Postwire allows for both client collaboration and asset management in a visually smart way. They take shared videos, images and documents, arrange them on a grid layout similar to Pinterest, giving users within the shared group a compelling receptacle for these files. In short Postwire aims to be a landing page for shared files. Click to view slideshow. Take internal designers: With Postwire they are able to upload media to a private page shared with just their client. The two can both upload and view media to their personal Postwire account, selectively sharing specific media for quick collaborative sharing. There is even a sidebar that shows usage stats of the media. The visual interface makes browsing and selecting media a bit more Luddite-friendly than traditional file sharing sites. The dead simple workflow might be Postwire’s most compelling feature. Postwire is a site for the masses. Files are displayed as media rather than, you know, computer files. Embeddable content like videos and pictures can be viewed directly on the site in a popup. After uploading media, emails can be sent indicating to users that a file was just uploaded intended for collaboration. I was told that an iPhone app is a few months out that will even allow for mobile uploads of pics and videos. VisableGains launched Postwire’s private beta in April and currently has “several hundred active users.” Prior to launching at Disrupt NYC today, VisableGains has raised $2.5M through two rounds of funding from AVG Ventures including a $1.5M Seed round in September 2010. Disrupt Q&A q: What’s the price? a: The price point will be free with a $20 plan over that which gives you 10 pages. There is other a long term plan that includes new designs. q: This could have been done 10 years ago with HTML. What have you guys seen in the market to suggest now is the time to launch? a: Especially over the 3-4 years there has been a visual explosion. Pages are becoming able to let users digest pages visual. People expect it. No one like getting an email with a bunch of links. There’s a possibility and an expectation. q: A big part of your early traction will come from small and medium business – -they are traditionally very hard to target — how are you going to get them on board? a: We think partnerships one way to start cracking. When you get shared with a Postwire page, you have to sign up for freedom account. q: What type of files will they be sharing? Why not Pinterest or Dropbox? a: First, with Pinterest, it’s all photos. Dropbox is al files. Frankly even a Crunchbase page can be put in as a file. q: How do you protect from new potentially spohiscated sites? a: By keeping it simple. These people are people who do not want to switch. You’re going to think a lot if you’re going to switch if you’re interacting with your clients with the current system.

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VisibleGains Launches Postwire At Disrupt, Aims To Be The Flipboard For Client Communication

Vinylmint Is A Jammin’ New Way For Pro Musicians To Collaborate

Achilles — Wed, 23 May 2012 01:14:35 +0000

Vinylmint is a Norfolk-based startup that aims to assist musicians in creating their music. It’s essentially a recording studio in the cloud. You record uncompressed audio right into the computer, the service uploads it to the cloud, and then you can listen to and edit tunes in your browser. Think of it as a mixing board with microphones all over the world. “Musicians can seamlessly store and manage their music projects from a single location,” said CEO Byron Morgan. “Whether it be a professional or amateur musician, Vinylmint easily fits into your existing production methods. Vinylmint enhances the creative experience ultimately providing our users efficiencies in speed, cost, and productivity.” The service is launching today and there are plans for a freemium model that offers faster turnaround and more storage space. All of the founders are avid musicians who just wanted to make the process of jamming online a little better. Click to view slideshow. Q & A: q: I think you did a fabulous job telling the story. I love that you’re tapping into trends that are out there. Collaboration is happening all around us. And the human desire to be on the internet is just as strong. Where do you see the business in two or three or four years? Who pays you, and how do you build revenue around that? A: First and foremost, accessing VM is subscription based. the other part is that the underlying tech allows individuals to share raw data files at a quick rate. That’s a scalable technology. Media and film and 3D modeling industries are looking to transfer raw data files as well as allow two remotely different systems to communicate and collaborate with one another. That’s where VM sees an evolution. Q: What are the barriers to entry? A: Our API fits into those systems. It allows us to tap into their users so they can collaborate and then create content through that. It also functions as a repository for that content. Our API also allows individuals to customize the solutions to their needs. They can add productivity tools to the system, and other collaboration functionalities and add-ons. We then function as a project management tool. Q: But what is the barrier to entry? If you discover a huge market and Apple says that they like the idea, why can’t they do it themselves? Well, Apple confines themselves to their own devices. There are other tools that users are always trying and using and that’s where we lie, outside of the Apple universe. New tools continue to arise every day. What kind of feedback have you had from musicians, and what’s most surprising? I’m a music producer myself, and working with other music producers across the world, I’ve learned that the issue is wanting to be able to reach or access sounds in other places. Because that’s where new things develop. There needs to be a central location where people can access each other and collaborate and that’s essentially where VM built its niche early on. We’re saying here’s a tool where you can now manage your products you’re creating with each other and collaborate in real time and overcome any technical obstacles you may be having like bandwidth speeds, etc. Q: Is there a discovery aspect of this? If I’m in Namibia and want to connect with a drummer in Munich, can I do that on the site? A: We’re in our early development but that’s part of an update in Version 1. Q: You talked about this being subscription based. Are you planning on charging subs straight from the get-go or making it free and then charging subs? A: It’ll be a 60-day trial period. From there, a user would pay for a container of 30 projects for $10. They can put as much as they can in that container until they have to upgrade. Q: Why doesn’t the product exist now? A: Competitors want to confine people to different recording systems called DOS. These sites are confining individuals to these DOS systems. We don’t want you to learn anything new. Use the tools you’re comfortable with to create your content. That’s where our value add is. Q: Once someone has collaborated and created music, what tools do you provide for editing, exporting and format? A: What’s currently in development is allowing them to render files from our platform. In the meantime, you can download tracks from the recorders. Then they can use ProTools or Reason to render the files and edit the files outside of the recorders. We give power to the users. Q: Have you thought about helping musicians promote their music after they use the platform? A: One of the cool things we’re interested in is using crowdsourcing initiatives and using the power of our content creation community to teach people who are using the site and help advertising campaigns to better promote them and our platform. Q: Have you thought about distribution? A: We’re currently in talks with digital distribution partners. There’s a supply chain there, and we’ve identified a place where we fit in the supply chain until we can continue to grow.

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Vinylmint Is A Jammin’ New Way For Pro Musicians To Collaborate

Tim Armstrong — I Love TechCrunch And It Made AOL Cool Again

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:58:20 +0000

A panel run by TechCrunch’s Josh Constine with with Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL and Melissa Brenner of the NBA was billed as being about how social advertising is working for those content brands. In the end, we heard a lot more about the future path of AOL and TechCrunch perhaps. But let’s review. Armstrong admitted that AOL was originally built as a portal and on a subscription model but that it needed to head in a content direction. He said the overall premise is that “content is going to be what differentiates platforms” from search and social. AOL “invested early in the curve and deep into content” in order to tie in business models and eventually move into paid content. A social strategy offers the possibility of huge distribution for this content play. But, asked Constine, was there a do-or-die moment regarding portals? Armstrong’s view is that “humans need curated information daily” and that may even mean the old notion of a portal coming back into vogue – something that helps people go about their daily lives. That requires content brands. He admitted that despite having some dissident shareholders that “don’t believe”, in the content strategy, most of AOL’s shareholders do believe in it. But should portals be powered by engineers or one where the brands and the people behind them “leave if they’re not treated right,” asked Constine in a barely veiled reference to Michael Arrington’s controversial departure last year. Armstrong took the diplomatic path. It’s important to “let strong strong brands thrive” he said, and AOL was “becoming a house of strong brands”. But, pushed Constine, why did people leave TechCrunch and Engadget? It was at this point that Armstrong was on the spot to address the issue directly. AOL has focused on letting its “brands have their own voices.” We will check the audio again, but I believe has also added “I don’t think you’ll see AOL play a super heavy role again in those.” So perhaps confirmation that AOL effectively plans to dial down its own brand in favour of pushing its portfolio of individual content brands. He went on. AOL invested in CrunchFund for instance… (yes I believe we’ve heard of that). Armstrong had a chat with Arrington backstage in fact (we’d love to have been a fly on the wall for that one). But AOL is now figuring out the branded content business for the next few decades. But by now Constine was on a roll. What did Tim think about looking “like a dark overlord”? “Did it drive people away?”. Ok… Armstrong came back. It’s about entrepreneurs, he said. Some sell up (to AOL) and leave and some don’t and stay put. His job as CEO is about making those brands thrive, and trying to keep the entrepreneurs involved and engaged. A lot of entrepreneurs have taken on bigger roles inside AOL he said, we presume referring to Arianna Huffington, rather than Michael Arrington. Constine kept on. Did TechCrunch make AOL cool again? Tim: “I think it did, and I hope to keep that atmosphere.” Ok folks, then we were back to talking about the actual topic for the panel… “How is AOL’s ad business going?” “It’s doing well”, said Armstrong. The ad space is getting more data-driven, and he’s placing his bets on Project Devil for instance. He said AOL’s ad network recovered from a double digit decline to double digit growth. AOL is building a CMS into the ad business to let brands be social. Melissa Brenner of the NBA said the NBA is “in the content business” and it’s up to her group to determine the best platforms for that. Social “has a place” said Armstrong, and Facebook has done a great job, but the content business is about allowing users to share. As a Boston Celtics fan, he said because of its online and social strategy the NBA now feels like it’s about a great deal more than just the TV broadcasts and programming. Constine then asked, “Don’t publishers wish they had Facebook’s data?” Brenner pointed out that without social they would not have realised how big NBA was in places like the Philippines, for instance. One thing AOL is doing that’s different to social is tracking offline behaviour. Social networks have a lot of data, but the content business has a lot of data on the migration between channels. So for instance, AOL knows the highest consumption of fashion information is on Saturday morning and Sunday night. That affects how AOL programs content around social. Brenner said that one big thing with social is that when it first appeared it was about real-time updates. As the NBA got deeper into it, they realised fans would be planning what they were watching that evening and used that to suggest NBA programming. Constine asked what what Facebook could do better, such as launch an off-site ad network. Armstrong said he’d seen 40-50 major AOL ad customers recently and social is a “big topic” for advertisers. So there seems like an opportunity to have a second-generation version of Facebook, which might involve an external ad network. Constine asked about blunders in AOL and the NBA’s strategies to date and the answers ranged from the wrong tweet into the wrong channel, and that perhaps some AOL sites were “over-monetized” (read: too many ads). And “sticking social buttons everywhere” is not the way to go, said Armstrong. Finally, Constine went into curve-ball mode and asked Armstrong which he loved more, TechCrunch or the Huffington Post? “I love them both. They are both my children. But they serve different markets. TechCrunch as a brand has a global opportunity to reconnect the future of where technology is going. Technology touches every person, every household and business. I would hope TechCrunch becomes a global tech property with much bigger scale,” said Armstong. He pointed out that former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde was consulting with the company after some “scuba diving and yoga”. “I think TC is just starting.”

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Tim Armstrong — I Love TechCrunch And It Made AOL Cool Again

Business Insider’s Henry Blodget Defends Linkbait, Slideshows, And Aggregation

A D M I N — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:16:58 +0000

If you are so inclined, it’s pretty easy to criticize Business Insider — the all caps headlines , the slideshows, and content that has been “aggregated” from other sites. (And yes, BI has some mean things to say about us too. ) But in the course of of the Disrupt panel on new media, BI CEO and editor in chief Henry Blodget offered several unapologetic explanations of why he and his writers do what they do. One idea that Blodget returned to a couple of times during the panel was that of “native storytelling forms.” In other words, he said that whenever a new medium emerges, traditional media companies are always treating it as extension of what they’re already doing, leading to a lot of “square pegs and round holes.” BI, on the other hand, is trying to explore and build a business around a “new form of storytelling.” Are phrases like “native storytelling form” just a fancy way for Blodget to say “slideshow”? To a certain extent, yes. For example, when moderator Alexia Tsotsis asked why Blodget published his profile of Mark Zuckerberg in New York magazine rather than his own site, Blodget said that he could have run it on BI, “but frankly, that’s not ideal for this medium.” As a counterexample of what does work online, Blodget pointed to a slideshow of the Canadian oil sand mines , which he said showed the “unbelievable power of photo essays.” At the end of the panel, Blodget addressed the criticism even more directly, when he thought Alexia was taking veiled potshots slideshows (something she denied, especially since she produced slideshows in her old job as SF Weekly web editor). He said slideshows are exactly the kind of “native storytelling” that he was referring to — something you couldn’t do in TV or in print. He pointed out that BI slideshows also have a “view as one page” option, so they don’t force people to click through each slide if they don’t want to. Blodget also discussed the idea that Business Insider publishes sensationalist “linkbait” headlines . “You know what the definition of ‘linkbait’ is?” he said. “It’s a story that people want to link to and share.” So Blodget has no problem publishing sad puppy photos next to Facebook IPO stories, because that’s what people want to see. He said that’s distinct from “clickbait” headlines, which may promise one thing while the story delivers something else. He became most excited when he moved to the topic of news aggregation. BI has been accused of aggregating stories from other sites without proper attribution, but Blodget said, “Please, please aggregate from Business Insider all day long. We will only thank you.” After all, he said this kind of citation is “what magazines used to have to employ PR people to do.” To be clear, there were other speakers on the panel — I’ve focused on Blodget since he spoke the most and was the most provocative. There were other approaches discussed on-stage. For example, as a counterpoint to all the discussion of traffic from social networks, Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera said a lot of his content doesn’t do well on social media. After all, he’s trying to reach the movers and shakers in tech who want their “news vegetables” along with “news desserts.” “A lot of stuff that you read on Techmeme and are happy for having read is stuff that you know wouldn’t make your Facebook feed fun,” Rivera said. (Though he was quick to add that Techmeme has fun stuff too.) There was lots more in the panel, but here’s the real conclusion, to quote my colleague Ingrid Lunden : “We need more puppies on the homepage of TechCrunch.” Ingrid, ask and ye shall receive .

reCaptcha Founder’s Language Learning Site Duolingo To Open To The Public On June 19

vertical8 — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:15:11 +0000

At TechCrunch Disrupt New York this morning, Luis von Ahn , the founder of the ambitious free language learning and text translation site Duolingo , announced that the site will come out of private beta on June 19. Duolingo was founded by reCaptcha founder Luis von Ahn in 2011. The site opened its private beta in late 2011 and currently focuses on teaching its users English, Spanish and German. Von Ahn, of course, is well-known for his work on reCaptcha, which Google acquired in 2009. As von Ahn noted today as Disrupt, more than 200 million captchas are now typed in every day. This insight led to the development of reCaptcha, which doesn’t just help developers distinguish between bots and humans, but also helps to augment optical character recognition. About 10 percent of the world’s population have now helped recognize at least one word. Now, with Duolingo, the team is pushing this idea forward. As von Ahn noted, virtually all major projects before the Internet were done with less than 10,000 people. Now, thanks to the Internet, a project that involved 100 million people become a possibility and with Duolingo, the idea is to get all of these people to help translate the web for free. The obstacles here, said von Ahn, are that there is a lack of bilinguals and that it would be hard to motivate these people to spend their time translating the web. The language learning market, of course, is huge and millions of people pay for it. With Duolingo, users start to translate easy words and then move to complex sentences. Duolingo says its users learn about as well as those who use Rosetta Stone, and that its translations are about as good as those from professional translators (thanks also, of course, to the fact that it can compare multiple translations from multiple learners).

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reCaptcha Founder’s Language Learning Site Duolingo To Open To The Public On June 19

Punch! Launches A Platform For Building Interactive iPad Apps, Sans Developers

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:24:02 +0000

It’s a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren’t available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform. David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2 . Vignette . TypePad . And yes, his startup Punch! , where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at Disrupt. Earlier this year, I wrote about the launch of the Punch! app , which offers current event themed games, usually with a satirical bent. (Or, as Bennahum describes it, “culturally relevant content that could only exist on a tablet.”) Some of the early games included one where players choose the wardrobe of then-presidential candidate Rick Santorum, and a general pop culture quiz with challenges like ranking Farrelly Bros. movies based on box office success. Behind the scenes, Bennahum says the challenge was to add content in a timely manner, so that it was “topical and relevant” — relatively easy for a newspapers or magazines that are only uploading new articles and other content, but harder for Punch!, which doesn’t create articles but rather “mini apps.” To introduce new content at the right pace, Punch needed to cut down on the development time, and it needed to avoid triggering the App Store review process whenever it added a new game. So that’s what the Punch! publishing platform does. It offers a content management system where companies can create apps without writing any code in Objective C. Like Punch! itself, these apps shouldn’t just offer a tablet-optimized version of a printed product, but instead include interactivity and gaming. It includes templates for content types like maps, “drag to fill,” and games and quizzes. And Bennahum says that by “creating an environment that sends scripts to effectively render these app-like experiences,” publishers can introduce mini apps without adding code, which means that once they get the initial approval from Apple, they don’t need to wait on further approval for every new piece of content. The Punch! platform will allow publishers and other media companies to pay Punch to license the technology and, optionally, to provide additional services to help get them get started. As for the Punch! app itself, Bennahum says it has now seen 35,000 user sessions. The next challenge is getting on a more regular publishing schedule, which should hopefully happen in the next few weeks. You can read more about the publishing system here . Disrupt Q&A Q: What existing tools is this replacing? A: To create app-like experiences, most publishers are hiring app development studios. Or they’re using tools that are replicating the print experience. Q: Tell us more about the pricing. A: $15,000 license for the year, versus $150,000 on average for app development. Q: Who are the ideal clients? A: Media/entertainment companies that have already experimented with tablets and been frustrated with what’s available. Also, brands that want to engage their audiences. Punch! could also partner with companies to create new publications. Q: What about distribution and discovery tools are you offering? A: None yet. This is probably for customers who are already engaging an audience on another medium.

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Punch! Launches A Platform For Building Interactive iPad Apps, Sans Developers

Digital Video Consolidation: Avail-TVN Picks Up $100M From Carlyle, Buys UK’s On Demand Group For $27M

jos — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:14:35 +0000

A double-whammy in the digital video space today: Avail-TVN , a video services provider that works with companies like NBC, Univision, and brands like Mattel, has announced that it has picked up $100 million in financing led by the Carlyle Group , and it is using those funds to make an acquisition outside of the U.S., buying rival video service provider On Demand Group in the UK from its existing owner, SeaChange International, for $27 million. Avail-TVN says that the deal will make it the largest provider of digital video services in the world. The move is a sign of how the digital TV industry is already fairly large in its geographical reach, but in many cases is still only providing incremental revenue on top of more traditional TV revenue streams — and so companies that work in this space, which can be capital intensive, are best suited to bulk up their scale to survive. Carlyle is leading the round that also includes existing investors Columbia Capital, Valhalla Partners, Novak Biddle and Pioneer Ventures. With the round of financing Carlyle, which already has an extensive amount of holdings in the media industry , becomes Avail-TVN’s largest investor. Avail-TVN will also use the funds for product development and for wider international expansion targeting content providers and multichannel video service providers. Avail-TVN already had a customer base extending outside of its U.S. headquarters, but this deal will extend that even further: it will now have customers in 25 countries covering 70 million households. Regions covered will be North America, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. “Our strategy has been to invest in leading players across the digital media ecosystem and incorporate them into one company to build Avail-TVN into the largest provider of advanced digital video services worldwide,” said Ramu Potarazu, Avail-TVN’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “The Carlyle Group’s investment supports that vision, and provides the capital and global network to build upon this foundation both domestically and internationally.” Avail-TVN already works with provides to provide enhanced interactive digital TV services: for example, it is powering the multi-platform video coverage that NBC will run during the London 2012 Olympics this summer. Adding ODG to the mix will bump up the kinds of services it can offer to customers: ODG helps broadcasters with a range of things from content acquisition and strategic consulting services, through to powering video-on-demand services for mobile, online and digital TV services. Its customers include Virgin Media in the UK, Disney, Cablevision and others. Its existing CEO, Tony Kelly, will stay on and become a part of the bigger executive management team, and will now report to Avail-TVN’s CEO, Ramu Potarazu. There is also some debt funding involved in this deal from Silicon Valley Bank, RBS Citizens, N.A. and Bank of America, N.A.

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Digital Video Consolidation: Avail-TVN Picks Up $100M From Carlyle, Buys UK’s On Demand Group For $27M