Conviva Raises $20M for Live Video
Tuning into live online video is often an exercise in frustration. So even though Conviva is being somewhat secretive about what it’s doing, I’m inclined to give the startup — which simply says it’s building a live video platform — a pass for the time being, in the hopes it will some day prevent me from tearing my hair out.
Conviva is announcing today it has raised $20 million in second round funding. The investment came from UV Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Foundation Capital, and brings Conviva’s total funding to $29 million since being founded in November 2006.
In an interview last week, Conviva CEO and President Carlos Ramón would not disclose much about the platform he is building, but said the company already has customers signed. He was happy to talk about the market need, however:
“The first generation of video delivery just doesn’t work,” he said. “It’s like playing Russian roulette. That’s just not the way you run a business, and that’s not the way you monetize content.”
Ramón said the company’s platform would enable content owners to create a “virtual living room” — whatever that means! Conviva has a demo on its site of a car race that users can watch from multiple camera angles simultaneously and chat about in-window.
Conviva has an engineering- and PhD-heavy team of 55 focused on building out its live platform, and along with the investment is touting its board of directors, which includes Ramón, formerly of Akamai; Hui Zhang, its chief scientist and co-founder and a professor at Carnegie Mellon; Ion Stoica, its CTO and co-founder and a professor at UC Berkeley; Mike Ramsay, of NEA and formerly TiVo; Forest Baskett, of NEA and formerly Silicon Graphics; Peter Sonsini, of NEA and formerly VMware; and Adam Grosser of Foundation Capital and formerly Excite@Home.
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Did Conviva ink the Olympics? No.
Did they ink the NFL? Who knows.
Do they have MLB? As far as I know, no.
So… seems like Conviva has their challenges ahead of them. Given the recent challenges BitTorrent has had… landscape doesn’t look good…
HmmConvenient on August 25th, 2008 at 4:28 am - Permalink
Ramon is a self-promoter and a bit of an idiot. Not certain why he is getting money. Valley logic.
Doubter on August 25th, 2008 at 6:22 am - Permalink
[...] living room,” though CEO Carlos Ramón didn’t care to clarify what that meant in an interview with NewTeeVee. Sans any details about itself, the company is mainly speaking up about the weaknesses of current [...]
Paid Content : Conviva Raises $20 Million Second Round For Live Internet Video on August 25th, 2008 at 1:38 pm - Permalink
these hobo’s don’t even have any customers profile on their site just some script kiddie video. What type of dipshits would pay out 29M for a company that has vaporware product and no visable customers?
bahaha on August 26th, 2008 at 3:19 am - Permalink
I can tell you as a employee who really hates where I work, the company had had only one paying customer for the past 2 years. There are no other trials going on, no really other potential and the management is running the company into the ground. This company is a joke. And no the company did not ink NFL nor are they close to. This company has more sales people then engineers and the software is less reliable then windows xp.
anybdy on November 20th, 2008 at 12:59 am - Permalink
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Yahoo Using Conviva for Live Streams « NewTeeVee on January 21st, 2009 at 10:53 am - Permalink
[...] far, the secretive startup Conviva has done little more publicly than announce it’s raised a bunch of funding — million from UV Partners, New Enterprise Associates [...]
Yahoo Using Conviva for Live Streams | Viral Video Maker on February 15th, 2009 at 8:31 am - Permalink
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