During the coronavirus pandemic, live sharing of video arrived on its own, with sites such as Zoom, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, and many others providing users a way to remain linked, manage activities and continue to function even though they cannot be in the same physical spaces together.
Today, a company called Restream, which has developed a network to support people who want to stream to more than one location at the same time, is reporting a major round of investment on the heels of seeing its 300 percent market growth over the last eight months. The Austin-based startup has raised $50 million, a Sapphire Ventures, and Insight Partners co-led Series A.
In an interview, Alex Khuda, CEO, and co-founder told TechCrunch that Restream is not revealing its valuation for this round, except to mention that it’s certainly higher than the modest $17.8 million (per pitch book) valuation it achieved when it announced a seed round in 2018.
Several years before that the company was bootstrapped and has been successful right from the outset. Khuda said this latest; a significant round of financing has primarily been collected not for existing activities, but to carry the company into new regions.
In particular, it will help drive the launch of Restream Studio, a forum for producers to do more output around their videos: for example, writing captions and lower-thirds, inserting watermarks, handling chats, uploading, and repurposing stream extracts on other platforms, and handling analytics. Think of it as the video-sharing Hootsuite.
That will also go into expanding the content that holds with more regional servers in a broader range of markets.
Today, Restream includes about 30 streaming sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube, and also helps users to take content from sites like Zoom and retransmit it to wider viewing channels. It runs on a freemium platform, with most clients choosing the free tier and others charging between $19 and $299 a month based on service quality.
Any of the high-profile organizations that used it included the World Health Organisation that ran the One Planet: Together on the forum at the Home Charity Concert to shore up morale at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic which had around 270 million viewers.
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Indeed, it’s been a help to the business of the entertainment industry with all the negative facets of the pandemic, and no less so to the business of Restream: the service reached 750 million monthly views in July.
Many big-name companies include Dr. Phil, Deepak Chopra, Microsoft, Redhat, Ubisoft, and SalesForce.
Although live streaming was already shaping up to be a major industry — and companies like Vimeo were already promising a path to retransmission — we’re seeing more and more businesses pushing further into the room to meet today’s market need and potential. Just yesterday, we discussed how Spotify is already planning a virtual event streaming service while also introducing its live event sharing channels for a variety of other music services.
Conclusion:
The big question will be whether we tend to see a spread of content across various outlets in the near term, or whether entertainment services – aiming to attract more customers into their channels and distinguish themselves more – are looking for greater exclusivity rather than something that anyone will watch everywhere.
