One to Watch: Tvinci

A year which will surely be tough deserves to at least begin on an uplifting note, so today I wanted to bring your attention to a Tel Aviv-based startup called Tvinci. The 1-year-old company has 20 employees, $1 million in funding, some big-name paying customers, and says it will break even at the end of 2009.

We’ve been following Tvinci since it got a deal to power MTV’s Israeli portal last year, offering a stylized web platform for video viewing similar to the original downloaded Joost experience. Since then, the little startup has also expanded to MTV Poland and MTV Hungary, and just recently it launched with mobile carrier Orange in Israel.

Basically, Orange is trying to get into offering content, and as a toehold it set up a Hulu-like video portal, bringing American Hollywood content from Disney, Warner Bros, NBC U, 20th Century Fox and Paramount to the Israeli market. Tvinci got to the Orange deal through a partnership with NDS, the software and DRM provider for digital TV. Tvinci is leveraging NDS to get trials with other pay TV operators, which may well turn into more deals next year.

There are so many competitors clogged into the white-label video market, it seems a little strange to be picking one as having a sliver of a chance more than others. But what I like about Tvinci — besides the fact that they’ve done so much with barely a smidgen of the resources of their competitors — is that they’re creative about the business model. Sure, on the user end, their platform is personalized and social and features recommendations (see demo video — sadly there’s no embed). Whoo-hoo. But more than that, they figure out a way for both their customers and themselves to make money.

Tvinci tells us it has never once given away its product for free. The hosted platform requires payment of a one-time set-up fee, plus a monthly payment based on usage stats. But what it does do is customize the entire experience — there’s no self-serve option here. At a simple level, that means providing both ad-supported and paid content. But to get specific, for MTV Poland, the sponsor of the Tvinci-powered site is leading ISP Netia. To make the sponsorship more valuable, Tvinci created a “VIP” section with the best and most recent content that only Netia customers get access to. In the Orange implementation, most of the video is paid, and while it’s available to everyone Orange customers have the added benefit of being able to simply add it onto their existing bills. It’s not rocket science, but it’s nice to see a video startup actually finding a way to make money.