Conversation With Kyte CMO Gannon Hall

Earlier this week I wrote about my thoughts on selecting the right online video partners for CN. In the post I noted that I left out "live" video players including Kyte, Qik and Flixwagon. The next day I received an email from one of the execs at Kyte who wanted to chat with me about what Kyte has to offer and their placement within my post. This afternoon I spoke for well over an hour with Gannon Hall, Kyte CMO to find out what's new at Kyte.

Gannon explained that the best way to think of Kyte is as, "a universal media platform." While they provide live video streaming with some Nokia phones, it's just one piece of their platform. Kyte can do video uploads, live streaming video, webcam video, etc. We looked at the client they speak about most, 50cent. At the time we viewed his community site, there were 952 people actively watching a video in his Kyte channel. This is not people viewing the player, Gannon says this is active engagement. As of the time of writing this post, it was down to 888 - simply amazing.

I asked Gannon who he would consider their biggest competitor. He said Brightcove and that they are winning deals away from Brightcove. He said they are like a "Brightcove 2.0" as they have many social media tools including a strong Facebook player and can do multimedia chat.

They are working with a variety of consumer and b2b brands and will announce more partnerships soon. The real strength of using Kyte is that your fans can pick up your Kyte channel and place it on their page, blog, or social network. When they embed the Kyte player, it retains your branding. This is certainly more powerful than a simple YouTube embed and the Kyte channel is always updated with your latest videos. From my perspective the embed and "channel" concepts are the real strength of what the Kyte platform offers.

I asked Gannon his thoughts about the notion of paying video talent for using Kyte or any other video platform. He said they have never done it and never will. They don't need to he added.

As I add a video channel to the new CenterNetworks, Kyte could play a role in the strategy. I still don't see us using it for the executive interviews or the funny videos, but for event coverage, it could be the perfect fit. The ability to feed into a channel is key for that type of video. It allows for easy posting and viewing without the need to create multiple content posts.

Check out my video interview with Kyte co-founder Daniel Graf at SXSW and 10 Great and Fun Mobile Video and Photo Apps.