Mogulus & the Post-YouTube Era

Mogulus and the Post-YouTube Era

By

Neal Romanek

(as originally printed in TVBEurope, Dec. 2008)

Internet video company Mogulus, headquartered in New York, has taken the next logical step past the on-demand model and brought no-cost 24/7 live streaming to producers. Live worldwide broadcast has at last become available to anyone with a web connection.

Ironically, live images were one of the very first “broadcast” features carried by the internet in the late 1990’s. The main handicap was that the frame rate might be four frames per minute – and require you to refresh your browser every time you wanted to see the next frame.

Mogulus and its competitors - principally Ustream.tv and Justin.tv – represent the next iteration of internet video, and Mogulus is keen on providing a service in which on-demand, linear and live streaming video are all in the same producer toolbox.

Max Haot, Mogulus co-founder and CEO, moved to London from his native Belgium in 1995. He is best known for founding the ICF Media Platform while at sports media giant, IMG Media. The ICF Media Platform was purchased by Verizon Business in 2005. In 2007 Haot founded Mogulus with Phil Worthington, a graduate of the Royal College of Art and Mogulus’s Chief Product Officer, IMG Media colleague Dayananda Nanjundappa, and Mark Kornfilt, the company’s Chief Architect. Dayananda Nanjundappa is Mogulus’s CTO and oversees the company’s second office in Bangalore.

Max Haot explains, “Most internet video platforms center around on-demand, based on the assumption that people want to watch what they want when they want. But with Mogulus our vision is to give our producers everything that a TV station can do.” “Everything” is the ability to create a live 24/7 channel that runs all the time. Currently, most of Mogulus channels are loop-based with a playlist cycle of programming repeating itself, but Mogulus content can also be schedule-based.

The Mogulus online studio features a text ticker and overlay of simple graphics or logos. A Mogulus channel can go live at any time, allowing multiple live cameras or a mix of prerecorded and live video content. Within the same player, producers have the option of offering an on-demand library of their clips as well.

“We provide the full turn-key service,” says Haot, “So a producer does not need to understand what a content delivery network is. All he needs to do is use our browser-based Studio. And then he can take our player widget and embed it on any webpage or social network.”

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