Balakam Makes Searching for Live Video and Audio Easy

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Sponsored-Articles/Balakam-Makes-Searching-for-Live-Video-and-Audio-Easy-87203.aspx

[Note: This sponsored interview was recorded at Streaming Media West 2012.] 

Creating live online events is a hot topic for broadcasters and other companies right now, but how to people find those events? What's needed is a simple search engine that focuses on live streams. What's needed is Balakam.

During a red carpet interview at the recent Streaming Media West show in Los Angeles, Balakam's CMO Daria Golyanina explained what makes her company's search tools unique and useful.

"Balakam actually uses almost the same search algorithm as traditional search engines do," said Golyanina. "But it has a very important benefit, a very important so to say thing that differentiates it from any other solution on the market: It can easily sort live media from recorded ones. It is really very critical when, for example, you're in the middle of your favorite baseball team game and you want to find it here and now and so the time becomes critical and you do not want to browse through a lot of irrelevant information on the Web so looking for live stream but bumping into a lot of text, graphic, and a lot of irrelevant information."

It sounds great when searching for local content, but can Balakam search for foreign streams, too? Can it bring a world of live events to the browser? Yes, it can.

"Another important benefit is its boundless searching area—our search engine browses the whole web so the searching area is global," Golyanina added. "We can find stream from any part of the world, from any part of the World Wide Web. So I think it's really unique for the streaming media world and that is why we can say that Balakam is a unique solution on the market."

To learn more about Balakam and what it delivers, watch the full interview below.

http://bcove.me/emf1yek6

Spotify will only lose $40 million this year. (Yes, that's considered a success.)

Spotify, the streaming music startup, was having serious trouble paying its bills, if you believed reports from earlier this year. Its 2011 financials showed a loss of nearly $60 million on revenues of $244 million. But it made $200 million in total revenue over the first six months of 2012, and is on an annual run-rate that could put it around $500 million by January.

 Its deal structure with the labels requires either a $200 million annual payment, like what it had to do last year, or around 75% of total revenue (whichever is higher). 2012 will be the first year that revenue is high enough for the percentage structure to kick in.

The company is projecting profit after cost-of-sales to be around $60 million. It still has another $100 million in engineering, marketing, sales and other operating costs, on top of the licensing burden, so it’ll likely post an annual lo

ss of roughly $40 million.

The situation still sounds painful, but it’s not bad at all. The record labels are happy with Spotify’s progress so far because internal data has shown that it is growing the digital music market; the company is working on a large new round of funding — more than $100 million at a $3.25 billion valuation, according to a Wall Street Journal article; and it's building a browser-based version of its desktop software.

http://goo.gl/uxuXG