Archive for category Streaming

Sonos raises $25 million

Sonos, makers of home theater solutions (and some good ones, too), has announced that they’ve raised $25 million in Venture Capital from Index Ventures Partners, bringing the total funding Sonos has got to $65 million.

The company makes home theater and music solutions, and have recently launched an iPhone application where users can control their home theaters from their phones.

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4.3 million watch Hawaii Tsunami stream


The earthquake in Chile and the pacific brought destruction to Chile and tsunami warnings on Hawaii, and the hours that the island inhabitants had not only been spent on evacuating, but setting up cameras to document the event.

One video was streamed on Ustream, where it garnered over 4.3 million viewers. You can see the recorded video above.

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Chinese video site Qiyi gets support from Hulu backer

China’s Internet search giant Baidu has got a new video site, Qiyi, and it’s now backed by Providence Equity Partners, one of the investors in Hulu. Providence Equity Partners is investing $50 million in what appears to be a “YouTube” of China, funded with advertising revenue.

Baidu has set it up as an independent company and has so far invested $10 million into the venture.

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DazzBoard secures $1.5 million in funding

Finnish startup Linkotec, which makes the online-based music player DazzBoard — a sort of online rival to iTunes if anything — has announced that they’ve raised another $1.5 million in VC funding.

DazzBoard is a fully functioning media player ala iTunes but works only online and doesn’t have some of the constraints iTunes has. However, there still are constraints, for one, DazzBoard is only available on Windows where it requires a plugin to work (a Mac version is in development).

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DailyMotion adds EMI video content

French video hosting site DailyMotion, and YouTube competitor, has announced that they’ve struck a deal with EMI, which will allow DailyMotion to host video content (music videos) from the music publisher. The videos will be supported by advertising, of which revenue will be split between the two partners.

DailyMotion currently attracts over 65 million monthly users, and is the second most popular video site on the web, after YouTube, of course.

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Google getting into ISP business

Google has announced that it plans on getting into the ISP business, at least in a limited sense. The search giant announced that they plan to test a new fiber optic connection to 50,000 homes, a test which could reach as many as 500,000 homes.

The new fiber optic connection will be vastly superior to the current ones available in the US, as Google reports speeds of 1 gigabit-per-second — 20 times faster than any fiber optic service today in the U.S. This seems like a logical move for Google, as they already own quite a lot of fiber which connects their data centers.

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IVT raises $5.5 million

Web-casting startup IVT has raised $5.5 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the total amount of funding raised to $8.5 million.

IVT technology is used to power webcasts for enterprise clients, and offers streaming and file conversion software as well. In addition, they have a “YouTube” like hosting platform as well.

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Google working on Speech translation for Android

According to an article at TimesOnline, Google is developing speech translation for Android, and not just any speech translation, but speech-to-speech translation — the best kind of translation, if you ask us.

However, Google is noted as saying that speech-to-speech will be possible in a year or two, and will only work “reasonably” in a few years time.

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