SplashCast Archive

SplashCast and Hulu have announced a new partnership today that will bring shows from Hulu into SplashCast widget video players. Basically what the partnership does is allow a person to embed a "channel" into their Facebook and MySpace profiles along with blogs which will continue to import the latest episodes and content. This keeps the content more current than an individual Hulu embed.

From the release, "The SplashCast player includes full episodes and clips from various seasons of each show, as well as interviews with the show’s characters, producers, and more. Fans can even upload their own humorous photos and videos for all to see, as well as view, rate and comment on photos and videos submitted by others."

SplashCast will sell ads into the embedded players. I wonder what that experience will be like to interact with advertising in the player and then interact with advertising in the actual Hulu videos and clips.

Last month SplashCast partnered with 70 radio station websites.

SplashCast and Entercom Communications have announced a new partnership today which will bring the SplashCast player to the 70 radio station websites owned by Entercom. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed but I assume there’s some sort of revshare deal going on.

The partnership will bring "SplashCast micro-channels" to the radio station websites which will serve a variety of news, music, videos and interviews. And like with other SplashCast installations, viewers of the micro-channel can contribute to the channel. The micro-channels can be lifted and shared on Facebook, MySpace and blogs.

Back in September, SplashCast partnered with Clearspring on a social ad network.

SplashCast and Clearspring have announced plans to partner together to create a social advertising network targeted towards consumer brands. SplashCast provides content management services while Clearspring is a widget distribution service.

Here’s how this new relationship works: SplashCast customers will create content and Clearspring will help distribute it through their widget distribution network. Clearspring will also inject ads into the widgets and also provide tracking and analytics services back to SplashCast.

I’ve said many times that consumer brands need to engage widgets and social media to push their advertising dollars further than buying traditional online advertising. This partnership should help push this concept further.

SplashCast raised an additional $3 million in venture capital earlier this year. NY-based KickApps partnered with Clearspring earlier this year on a similar distribution deal.

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.