Tracking Kyte.tv’s Personal Channels

Kyte.tv is a project we’ve been eagerly awaiting ever since Katie drummed up some details on it for GigaOM in January. Recent stories by VentureBeat and Light Reading are starting to bring the project into focus. We’ll try to get you some more details, but for now here’s the jist.

The idea of Kyte, a project of Decentral.tv, seems to be making video both mobile and social; that is, creating conversations around video that can be accessed from all sorts of devices. The emphasis is on real-time communication, with users creating their own synced-up channels, loading videos and photos, and inviting others to contribute and give feedback. So perhaps, if Kyte lives up to the hype, webcams will have their day outside the confines of the teenage bedroom.

Kyte is currently in limited testing, though a reader let us know that Swisscom Mobile has started trials of Kyte.tv in Switzerland, free of charge to subscribers.

In his piece on the company, Light Reading’s Phil Harvey raves,

Decentral.tv’s kyte is about to fly right into a lot of consumers’ lives. When it does, telecom carriers, media companies, and others will need to understand how they can benefit from a mobile, dispersed, always-on social network where the content distributor always knows exactly how many people are watching and, possibly, who they are.

Decentral has raised $2.3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards, Niklas Zennström, and others. BusinessWeek had first reported on this funding last year.

As for a business model, Harvey mentions something about the possibility of ad-supported content. We could also see this being a valuable service for broadcasters interested in the whole transforming-audiences-to-participants shebang.

Image from Light Reading.