This has been a bit under the radar, but JumpTV, the Toronto-based startup that aggregates foreign broadcast channels onto the public Internet, has raised over $200 million in an IPO managed earlier this month by Morgan Stanley. The company is public on both the Toronto and London exchanges.
I caught up with company president Alex Blum on Friday. Alex is a former long time senior AOL executive who charted the introduction of video at AOL during his 8-year tenure. He is astounded by the way the whole online video revolution has taken off in the past few months.
He AOL left last year to head-up JumpTV; the company pulls together broadcast feeds from an incredible range of countries – — and serves a global diasporas of immigrants with streaming video from far away.
The business presently is subscription-based, similar to satellite TV that offers special foreign country channels, but Alex told me that the business will transform to an advertiser-based model in the near future. He says that there enormous demand for online video content by advertisers. The next step from JumpTV is to create social networking around the channels, specific to particular immigrant groups. Pretty amazing.
Alex will be among the cavalcade of stars at Streaming Media West next month in San Jose, Ca. Beet.TV is the Official Vlog of the show.
AOL Maximizes Video Search with New Developer Tool – Interesting news from AOL today – they are providing video content developers a new tool to make sure their videos are effectively searched. AOL has made a big push to becoming a mega video search engine over the last few months; check out what Fred McIntyre told us about AOL search earlier this summer. This is a very interesting development.
— Andy Plesser
Movies on the Move Attracts Advertisers – Big media like Amazon and Apple are touting ways to download online video on the go and advertisers are tuning in, as the gap between watching content on your television screen and streaming it to your computer or iPod narrows. eMarketer estimates that ad spending on online video will top $2.3 billion in four years.
JumpTV, Alex Blum, Online Video Advertising, Streaming Media West