SplashCast

SplashCast Media has announced a new round of Series A venture capital today in the amount of $4 million. The round was led by Mark Bayliss, with additional Series A funding provided by Emergent. Bayliss is a former advertising executive and will help the company gain more exposure for advertising relationships. He will also join the SplashCast Media board.

The SplashCast player allows a user to take different types of media (video, audio, pictures, text) and merge them into one show. SplashCast claims more than 250 million views to their SplashCasts and viewed by more than 8.5 million monthly unique users.

I haven't heard as much from SplashCast after Marshall Kirkpatrick left as their social media buzz generator last September. While I don't believe any social media campaign can make or break a company, having an evangelist out in the trenches, absolutely helps to keep the brand top of mind.

Check out all of our prior SplashCast coverage.

As I noted last night, Marshall Kirkpatrick has left his post as Director of Content at SplashCast to join RWW as a writer. What did Marshall bring to SplashCast and where would SC be without him?

Last month Beckham came to the U.S. to play soccer (football) and immediately all of the sports analysts said that not only was he a great soccer player but he also would bring in a new audience of soccer fans. They suggested that he alone would fill the stadiums and get more U.S. kids interested in soccer. Marshall was SplashCast's Beckham.

Marshall brought with him a black book of bloggers, contacts and readers that followed him on his blog journey over the past few years (including a stint at TechCrunch). And more than that: Marshall is well liked and respected. That combo got SC major press on almost any news. Would SplashCast have been able to reach as many without him? And he understood the technology making it easy to understand what the updates were in real terms not just a standard press release that many PR people normally send.

While Marshall's title was "Content Director", I always thought of him as the company's PR VP. As blogging becomes more professional, we will see more of these hirings as companies leverage the name and online reputation a blogger has built with their brand.

Will bloggers and journalists care (as much) about SplashCast now that Marshall is gone? I think so because the product is very good and they now have at least a semi-loyal blogger following. But the management needs to reach out to the bloggers and journalists now, introduce themselves and start to build relationships of their own leveraging those that Marshall has left behind.

This just in from Read/WriteWeb: Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving SplashCast Media and joining Read/WriteWeb as a Lead Writer. RWW already has the most impressive tech blogger lineup (like the NY Yankees of tech blogging!) with Head Blogger Richard MacManus, Josh Catone and part-timer Alex Iskold. Marshall is a great free-agent pickup. Looks like I have to pick up my game again (thanks Richard NOT!)

It was just this morning that Marshall and I were discussing the updates to SplashCast and after Marshall's twitters about his own consulting practice Web site, I have wondered about his ability to handle everything for a couple of weeks now but decided not to ask.

Congrats to Marshall and to Richard and the team. Reports are Marshall picked up a 10 million dollar signing bonus (linden dollars) and some are wondering if Richard will keep his shave policy in effect (Marshall has a beard). :)

More details on the RWW blog and Marshall's blog.

SplashCast has just announced a new partnership with Columbia Records to create artist channels and some additional enhancements to their player. The first artist channel comes via NY-based "Coheed and Cambria". I have embedded the channel at the end of this post.

The other enhancements include: FanCast, a way for fans of a band to get involved by uploading pics and videos using a mobile phone. No word on what kind of security is in place to make sure naughty images/videos don't make it into the channel.

Chat is the second enhancement and while it will begin with the artist channels, chat will be available to all publishers in the near future. I tested the chat with Content Director Marshall Kirkpatrick last night and it worked very well. The key to any chat app is making sure there are chatters when you want to chat. Large blogs and Web sites should find this a way to make the embedded videos and pictures more sticky.

The last enhancement available to all publishers today is Twitter-integration. You can send Twitter messages from within the SplashCast player about the stream you are watching to your Twitter friends and followers.

SplashCast continues to innovate the multimedia player space. They need to be careful of overwhelming the player so much that users are confused about what to do. Check out our previous SplashCast coverage.

SplashCast has launched a new version of their multimedia player. SplashCast is best known for the ability to take different types of media (video, audio, pictures, text) and merge them into one show. Today's upgraded player is very sweet indeed.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Director of Content at SplashCast offered the following list of features:

• Item level navigation, with preview thumbnails and captions.
• Inline, multi-media commening - text, video and audio - with easy publisher moderation.
• “Follow me” email subscription to future shows by any publisher.

Continues inside with commentary, demo video and live player »

This morning SplashCast launched a new channel for NPR (National Public Radio). From the SplashCast blog:

The application, called the NPR Podcast Player, displays the latest episodes of a variety of NPR Podcasts. Facebook users can add the application to their profiles (via the URL http://npr.org/facebook ) to automatically receive new NPR Podcasts episodes to listen to and to share this great content with their friends.

Additional discussion on the release can be found here, here, here, here and here. I guess what I don't get is why would you want to listen to these shows inside Facebook and not on iTunes or your favorite audio player?

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Director of Content for SplashCast, Twitter'd about the buzz/traffic from the launch which I thought were worth sharing:

• marshallk Did I say monster day for SplashCast? The numbers for the past hour just came in, 2X our best hour ever for player loads. Woo hoo!
• marshallk monster day for new users at SplashCast. hooray!

Congrats to the SplashCast team for the great launch! Check out our previous SplashCast coverage as well.

I think we can all learn a good marketing lesson from Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall is Content Director at SplashCast Media. SplashCast launched a new RSS feed thingymabob today. But forget about what he launched. To me, it's the way he launched it that gets him some major street cred in my book. Now of course Marshall is well known inside the tech circles and blogo' which certainly helped the release get out there. No doubt that is one of the reasons that SC hired Marshall which makes great sense.

Marshall sent me the embargoed press release over the weekend and we chatted about it some (along with others). I asked for some quotes and he sent some over (which I included in my post this morning). SplashCast also setup a page for writers to look at (I am not sure if I can link to it) which provided more information about the release, images, videos, and other media. Also included was contact information for Marshall and some of the other execs at SplashCast. I wish more companies (and specifically PR firms) would do this. Don't make me work for art and media for YOUR release.

Third, once the story went live, SplashCast setup a page about the launch. Typical content release but also at the bottom is a live embedded chat. Marshall was in there all afternoon answering questions and helping users with any concerns. He also answered questions from CenterNetworks visitors and I bet he did the same on the other sites that posted about the news.

Anyway, just a few things for you to think about when you launch your startup or add new major enhancements. Communicate the news, help the writer, and be around to answer your customer's questions and concerns.

SplashCast is launching a new feature, MyPodcastNetwork, as part of their player that (in simple terms) will allow you to take any media RSS feed and show it on your site. You set the feed in the player and then the player will always show the latest plus the other media that is part of the feed. I haven't seen anything like this before (if you have please post it in a comment and I will update).

SplashCast defines the new feature as, "SplashCast is releasing the first version of a new feature that will allow the video or audio enclosures in any RSS feed to be displayed in a SplashCast player on your web page. This will take podcasts beyond iTunes and make every page on the web an avenue for live distribution."

In their upcoming section they speak about stats and since I am a stats freak, I think this is a piece that is really missing. How many people have viewed my video/audio files inside the rss, where are they, who are they, what page did they view it from (using this new player option), etc. As videocasts become more popular, the dreaded ROI discussion will begin. Whomever can own the video stats market might do pretty well for themselves.

I asked Marshall Kirkpatrick, Content Director, for some comments on the new service:

This new functionality really speaks to a big part of the original vision for SplashCast. When the My Podcast Network featured gets combined with the forthcoming quick editing capabilities, then we'll see all kinds of remixed, multimedia channels of commentary on media from around the web. I'm way stoked about that. I saw something on the O'Reilly factor yesterday that really needs to be sliced up and interspersed with some PowerPoint documents I've got and video responses I've recorded - if you know what I mean. Creating a whole channel of that kind of interaction with media will be awesome.

Podcasts - they're not just for iTunes anymore!

It's great that so many media outlets are releasing content via RSS. RSS is a very versatile technology that can be mixed, spliced and filtered in so many different ways.

I think SplashCast seems to be thinking first about where the gaps are currently but, just as importantly, also considering where we need to be moving. The latter is what makes a company sustainable and succeed over the long-term.

Marshall has posted some updates to the SplashCast player. Besides Viddler, I like SplashCast a lot. I think those guys are doing some interesting things with the way you can create almost dynamic presentations including video, audio, pictures, etc. Just imagine a mashup of the two :)

The updates include:

• Easy embed - thank you! This was one of my frustrations with the service
• RSS feeds - grab a RSS feed for any channel
• Sidebar sizing - this is another great addition - I think many of the video services don't offer enough options in size of their widgets
• Adding a channel to a player takes one click

Keep up the good work guys and gals!

SplashCast has released some stats on their first 30 days in operation. The information looks pretty good. I think one of the best things they did was to hire Marshall. He is very well known across the new tech market. Since these techies are early adopters, it allows SplashCast to get "in" quickly. While his official title is Director of Content, he is an evangelist for the company. Their video player is not perfect (yet), but it sure is innovative. There are a lot of useful features that make it quick and easy to make a "cast".

Come inside for the highlights...