Mogulus

Infobox Dotcom company
company_name = Mogulus LLC.
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = February 2007
founder = Max Haot, Phil Worthington, Dayananda Nanjundappa and Mark Kornfilt
location_city = New York
industry = Broadcasting
genre = Video Streaming
company_slogan = Everything you need to launch your own 24/7 TV station.
url = http://www.mogulus.com/


website_type = Internet TV Platform
language = English
advertising = Banner ads, video overlay ads
launch_date = June 2007
current_status = Active

Mogulus is a website that provides an Internet television platform for live video streaming. The free-access website is privately owned and operated by Mogulus LLC. Users can watch, create and distribute television channels on the Internet without downloading or purchasing software. The website has over 100,000 user generated channels and more than 3,000,000 unique viewers monthly who view more than 200,000,000 unique viewer minutes per month. Max Haot, Phil Worthington, Dayananda Nanjundappa and Mark Kornfilt founded the company in 2007 in New York City. Mogulus is funded by Angel Investors and the Gannett Company, Inc. (NYSE: GCI), the largest U.S. newspaper publisher [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/28/big-media-gets-serious-about-livestreaming-gannett-invests-10-million-in-mogulus/] . The name Mogulus derives from "Media Mogul" and “us”.

The media often compares Mogulus with Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Stickam, Blog TV and other streaming services [http://www.masternewmedia.org/video_internet_television/live-video-streaming/ustream-vs-mogulus-which-is-live-video-streaming-service-is-better-20071008.htm] ; but the idea behind Mogulus is significantly different from that behind these other websites. While these Web 2.0 companies offer streaming solutions for live shows, Mogulus simulates the traditional television model with scheduled content play lists in addition to supporting live shows. Mogulus also provides the producer with a full functional TV Studio control room. A Mogulus channel is therefore always “on- air” but not always necessarily live.

Website

The Mogulus website has 2 levels: ”Watch” and “Produce.”

Watch Internet TV

At the “watch” level, visitors can watch Internet TV channels without the need for registration or log in. It’s just like regular television but with added Internet inter activities like chat or even the ability to syndicate channels into other websites.

Produce Internet TV

At the “produce” level, users register to obtain access to the Mogulus studio, which is a TV control room accessed from an Internet browser. Supported browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. The Mogulus studio lets users/producers appear as polished as any multi-million dollar network broadcaster. Unique features include the ability to mix multiple live cameras, imported videos clips, overlay graphics and the ability to record live shows for later playback or download. Producers can broadcast live from a mobile phone via Qik (a mobile live streaming solution) use a customizable flash player with integrated chat, and develop a branded channel page on Mogulus.com that incorporates interactive chat.

Business

The Mogulus distribution model is based on the traditional television model with scheduled content play list when not live (i.e., all viewers are watching the same content at the same time) and the opportunity to go between live and scheduled content anytime in the same player. Appointment TV assumes that people will tune in at the same time every week, like clockwork, to watch their favorite shows. But the DVR and VOD generation demands "anytime" TV. In the offline world, the vast bulk of viewer minutes are linear; that is, channels broadcast to TV sets and passively consumed. On the Internet, this picture is reversed, with perhaps 99% or more being VOD. As yet, linear video does not exist on the Internet. According to State of Interactive TV 2005 report from Kagan Research [http://www.snl.com/media_comm/] , 34.1 million households in the States subscribe to Interactive TV service and the number of subscribers is expected to reach 69 million by 2009, more than half of U.S. TV households. Revenues for electronic transactions for games, television or t-commerce (television commerce), and interactive advertising are estimated to reach $2.4 billion by 2009. Kagan Research estimates the interactive services segment will generate $780 million in operator revenue in that same period for cable; digital broadcast satellites (DBS), and Telcos.

Technology

The website is built exclusively on Amazon Web Services [http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/the-serverless-internet-company/] , which is the most efficient, scalable and cost effective infrastructure available today and the Flash streaming servers used are from Wowza Media Systems (Wowza Media Server® Pro). The key engineers are ex-Limewire engineers (the peer-to-peer software company) who are experienced in scaling software for use by millions of concurrent users.

Television and the Internet

It’s been sixty years since media experienced a paradigm shift as big as the one currently in progress. At that time, television conquered radio; and in the same David-versus-Goliath fashion, Internet TV is now overtaking broadcast television. In the 1940s, radio stations couldn’t foresee the potential of transferring their call letters to television. And today, broadcast television stations are equally blind to the power of Internet television to transform and truly unify broadcasting. The huge gains made by radio stations crossing-over to broadcast TV pale in comparison to those we are now seeing. Yet despite the industries blind spot, the Internet has become a $34 billion media industry in fifteen years, with video playing no small part. Internet advertising already grosses more than radio advertising, and is poised to overtake newspaper-advertising revenue within the next 5 years [http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/008134.html] . Web sites are evolving. In fact, we can even call them internet “channels” as people add video and live streaming to their pages. Of course delivering video over the Internet is not new. But recent technical advances that have allowed for the delivery of longer length and better resolution video from low cost equipment, has resulted in better interactivity and a growing sense of community. Streaming technologies and the proliferation of broadband has aided the Internet TV explosion, as have integration of MPEG-4, H.264/AVC codec and VC-1 technologies. Clearly, video creation and distribution has undergone a revolution in the last decade. Once a purview of trained professionals, video production and distribution can be done by anyone interested in cinematography. All that’s needed is access to an inexpensive digital video camera, some easy-to-use editing software, and a distribution site like YouTube. The gap between amateurs and professionals has been bridged. With linear television the viewer chooses a channel and is passively entertained by the content selected by someone else. With video on demand, viewers search for content repeatedly (e.g. from DVD, streaming video, or websites). Some insist that classic, "linear" TV is dead. If a viewer can see what they want, where they want and when they want, why would anyone bother watching linear TV, where you can't control any of this? But the truth is, even after the rise of video on demand (VOD) in all its various forms, most video content continues to be consumed passively, distributed over traditional linear television channels. Businesses using the Internet for cheap video distribution among niche groups are emerging. Perhaps most importantly, once the USA transitions to complete digital transmission in February 2009, all programming will become files and therefore easily distributed and sold -- a potential boom to Internet TV. Internet TV emphasizes new types of video programming, production, alternative distribution platforms and associated next generation services, including interactivity.

Founders

Max Haot, Co-founder and CEO

Based in New York, Max Haot is co-founder and CEO of Mogulus. He is an expert in user-generated content, broadcast technologies and workflow. Haot previously founded ICF, a media asset management platform that was sold to Verizon Business in 2005. He held positions as Vice President of Digital Media at Verizon Business and Senior Vice President at IMG Media - the television and interactive arm of the sport marketing giant ( [www.imgworld.com] ). Max Haot is a recognized digital content industry pioneer and is regularly invited to speak and contribute at industry events/forums for the broadcast, broadband and mobile industry. He is a Belgian national and lived in London, UK between 1995 and 2005 before moving to New York.

Phil Worthington, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer

Phil Worthington is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Mogulus. His unique experience spans the worlds of fine art, brand and interface design, and software development. Worthington is also a renowned interactive artist and still exhibits at many of the world's leading institutions and events, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Tokyo Design Week among many others. He holds a Masters (RCA) in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London and a First Class Honours BA in Graphic and Media Design from London College of Printing.

Dayananda (Daya) Nanjundappa, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

Dayananda Nanjundappa is co-founder and CTO of Mogulus. Prior to Mogulus, Nanjundappa worked as the technical architect at IMG in London, UK on its media asset management platform - ICF, which was later acquired by Verizon Business. He has vast experience on various technologies and platforms including asset management systems, media ingest and delivery, distributed applications and design and development of workflow engines. Dayananda Nanjundappa heads Mogulus’ development and operations center in Bangalore.

Mark Kornfilt, Co-founder and Chief Architect

Mark Kornfilt is co-founder and Chief Architect of Mogulus. He holds a Master’s of Science in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL). Kornfilt moved to New York to work on distributed systems and algorithms for the popular open-source peer-to-peer client LimeWire, where he focused on new ways to improve and scale the discovery and delivery of long-tail data. He has a vast expertise in designing and building systems that scale to millions of users.

References

External Links

http://newteevee.com/2008/07/28/mogulus-gets-10m-from-gannett/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/28/big-media-gets-serious-about-livestreaming-gannett-invests-10-million-in-mogulus/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/18/2007-crunchies-live-from-herbst-theatre/

http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/the-serverless-internet-company/

http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/27/the-future-of-scobleshow/

http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/008134.html

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/10/24/mogulus-we-are-media/

http://www.beet.tv/2008/09/gannett-has-liv.html

http://www.masternewmedia.org/video_internet_television/live-video-streaming/Robin-Good-interviews-Mogulus-ceo-Max-Haot-20070610.htm

http://www.masternewmedia.org/it/2007/05/23/live_video_streaming_crea_la.htm