YouTube prepares its second YouTube Channels push, 60% of content partners to lose funding.

YouTube introduced professional channels — an initiative to add original content to the Web’s top video site — back in December 2011, after an investment of $100 million; but the fresh money will only be seen by 30 to 40 percent of its 100 plus channel partners, which were recruited to make the service more TV-like and competitive against video-on-demand (VoD) services.

The money is, as it was last year, not a free lunch since it is essentially an upfront payment of one year of advertising revenues. Each producer must earn the money back via ads attached to their content before they can make additional revenue from the service. For example, $1 million comes it at 50 million views on a $20 CPM (cost per mil/thousand) – fairly high stakes.

Netflix recently announced Q3 revenues of $905 million and the US firm expects to make $400 million of operating income this year after covering its global operating expenses. Amazon, which owns UK Netflix competitor LoveFilm, is also in the game and is trialing an $8 per month subscription for its Prime service.

http://goo.gl/xZQAT

Image via http://goo.gl/GBOQ2

Balakam, live stream search developer, starring at IPOboard.

Balakam, the developer of a solution to search for online broadcasting content, participated on October 29 in a presentation of IPOboard companies for potential investors and was identified as one of the best companies on this online exchange platform in Russia, the official Russian Venture Company (RVC) website reports.

Information and trading platform IPOboard, also known in Russia as RII-board, has been established by the Moscow Stock Exchange and Russia’s Rusnano to facilitate the raising of investments by privately owned Russian hi-tech companies. Balakam joined the platform in May 2012. 
A portfolio company of the RVC Seed Fund, Balakam focuses on the development of an Internet service to optimize search of audio and video streams that run live on the Web. 

The Balakam search system is said to be based on a unique patented technology that speeds up the process and boosts efficiency. The new solution reportedly pinpoints special identifiers that help it locate, recognize and save links to the sources of audio and video content being broadcasted on a real-time basis.

A system prototype is currently available at their project website. The commercial launch of the product is slated for the end of this year. 

Balakam received seed capital from the RVC Seed Fund in 2011. Also last year it joined the IT cluster of Skolkovo, the state-sponsored innovation hub currently under construction outside Moscow.

http://www.marchmontnews.com/Technology-Innovation/Central-regions/19110-Balakam-live-stream-search-developer-starring-IPOboard-.html

Evolution of Balakam: From prototype to alpha and beta

Everything in this life evolves through a certain number of stages. A rock band has to come up with the idea of its musical frames, then the line-up, then the name, then the label (but not necessarily in that order). The same goes with any TV show: the genre, the script, the actors, the pilot, the frantic search for the ideas for a new season.

Balakam is also in constant process of refining itself. After we have decided on the outline for conquering the world, the name and the technology to deliver the best entertainment for you in the most hands-down way we were due to present a prototype of the search engine.

 

Prototype

• Basic search functionality
• Ability to categorize streams by types (TV, Radio, webcam)
• Publicly available