We’ve seen a lot of trends around video streaming and broadcasting in the since the Internet started to become a mainstream means to communicate. As hardware and bandwidth options improved, we saw a shift from sharing images to sharing video. Especially in the mobile market, this became increasingly relevant. We’ve seen major companies jumping on this trend as well. A pioneer here was Google acquiring YouTube in 2006, and more recently, Amazon buying Twitch in 2014.
We did some research and listed down the ten largest VC funding rounds and investments in video streaming startups in the last twelve months. The top ten list starts with the largest funding gig and moves towards smaller sums. Investments with no funding sum disclosed have been excluded from this listing.
1. Peloton
Headquarter: “Silicon Alley” (New York City), US
Founding year: 2012
Founded by: Graham Stanton, John Foley, Tom Cortese, Yony Feng
Funding amount: $325M
Funding type: Series E
Total funding amount: $444.7M
Website: http://www.onepeloton.com/
This Manhattan startup combined indoor exercising devices with instructor-led video streams and sells cutting-edge media-enhanced bikes and treadmills. Along with the equipment you can also get access to their video services. Peloton offers these units at one-off purchase or you can opt-in for monthly payments if you prefer that approach.
2. Panda TV
Headquarter: Shanghai, China
Founding year: 2015
Founded by: Wang Sicong
Funding amount: CN¥1B
Funding type: Series B
Total funding amount: CN¥1.7B
Website: http://www.panda.tv/
As YouTube isn’t available in all countries, in some regions like China, there is still a lot of competition between various video platforms. Panda TV is one such competitor that seeks to gain market share with user-generated video content. They host videos from categories such as lifestyle VLOGs, gaming videos, singing, and even eating in front of a camera seems to become a trend.
3. iflix
Headquarter: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Founding year: 2014
Founded by: Mark Britt, Patrick Grove
Funding amount: $133M
Funding type: Series unknown
Total funding amount: $298M
Website: http://www.iflix.com/
The Malaysian startup iflix offers online video streaming on demand with a focus on the user base in South East Asia. Users have access to a library of TV shows and movies and can watch content on various devices online, as well as download the media and watch it offline. The team from iflix wants to stand out by not showing ads and by providing curated playlists to introduce the users to new content.
4. Vuclip
Headquarter: Milpitas, US
Founding year: 2008
Founded by: Jay Borges, Nickhil Jakatdar, Xinhui Niu, Zhigang Chen
Funding amount: $110M
Funding type: Series unknown
Total funding amount: $158.1M
Website: http://www.vuclip.com/
Backed by Hong Kong-based investor PCCW, Vuclip strives to be the “most admired and innovative MediaTech Company.” Their mission is to entertain a billion people, according to their website. They offer “Asian Entertainment” video content to consumers with a mobile app that’s available in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and in the Philippines.
5. Live.me
Headquarter: Athens, US
Founding year: 2016
Founded by: Sheng Fu
Funding amount: $50M
Funding type: Series B
Total funding amount: $110M
Website: https://www.liveme.com/
This platform allows their users to broadcast themselves as live video to their followers and random viewers. On a glance over their “Explore” listing, I had the feeling that they feature mostly young girls in tempting poses. I had a feeling that this space is NSFW or at least not entirely safe for all audiences. Top performers had a live audience of 9,000+ users at the time we checked.
6. Caffeine
Headquarter: Palo Alto, US
Founding year: 2016
Founded by: Ben Keighran, Sam Roberts
Funding amount: $46M
Funding type: Series unknown
Total funding amount: $46M
Website: https://www.caffeine.tv/
Only a few days ago, Caffeine received funds from Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, to compete with Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch in the market for social broadcasting, with a focus on gaming, entertainment, and creative arts. They also allow their streamers to broadcast directly from their mobile devices and interact with their audience in real-time.
7. M17 Entertainment
Headquarter: Taiwan
Founding year: 2015
Founded by: Jeff Huang, Joseph Phua
Funding amount: $40M
Funding type: Series A
Total funding amount: $40M
Website: http://17.media/
The mobile video broadcasting solution by M17 Entertainment is simply called “17” in app stores. The app received an age rating of 17+ for iOS and 18+ on Google Play Store. While the UI looks much like other video streaming apps from larger companies, M17 also incorporated filters and stickers to further allow the streamers to customize their video feed. Just like with Live.me above, there is a possibility that this app is not suitable for everyone. An auto-translated description contains the statement, “…over a thousand of hot girls share their live hood on live”. Whatever that might mean.
8. Conviva
Headquarter: Foster City, US
Founding year: 2006
Founded by: Hui Zhang, Ion Stoica
Funding amount: $40M
Funding type: Series unknown
Total funding amount: $110M
Website: http://www.conviva.com/
Companies such as HBO, Sky, and Turner are using Conviva’s video AI platform to get insight into user data. The solution delivers Conviva’s customers content viewing trends and allows them to better understand this data by providing actionable data-driven analytics.
9. CC video
Headquarter: Beijing, China
Founding year: 2005
Founded by: Yuan Zhang
Funding amount: CN¥208M
Funding type: Series C
Total funding amount: $54.3M
Website: http://www.bokecc.com/
CC video is also known under the alias Bokecc and under that name it also seems to be part of a Chinese holdings organization, that is an asset of Disney. As there doesn’t to be much English information about this startup, let me quote what their Crunchbase entry says, “CC video is a Chinese video operation platform and technology service provider. By February 2011, more than 120 thousand websites had been connected with the company’s video service platform.”
10. Pear Video
Headquarter: Chaoyang, China
Founding year: 2016
Founded by: Qiu Bing
Funding amount: $25M
Funding type: Seed
Total funding amount: $25M
Website: http://www.pearvideo.com/
The focus of Pear Video is to offer rather short videos, edited for best experience on mobile devices. Content is cut and cropped for best efficiency in communicating the information people need to know instead of skipping through long videos, trying to find that chunk of information they want to know.
Bonus
Other noteworthy video streaming companies that had slightly smaller funding rounds are The Young Turks, cheddar, Playkey, Voices.com, Caavo, Pixvana, Tmeng.cn, PlaySight Interactive, LiveEdu.tv, Make.TV, Clip App, Vemba, Zype, Passionflix, OVO, Streamroot, Maestro, Curiosity, HAAWK, Minkonet, Peer5, FaceRig, Switchboard Live, Neverthink, Tiledmedia, SportsFix, Smiletime, SYNQ, Simplestream, and Flickstree.
Photo credit: Peloton / logos are copyrighted by the respective companies as indicated
Source: Crunchbase / Wikipedia
