Kyte‘s Mobile Producer for Nokia S60 phones has just come out of beta and is now publically available. The Mobile Producer allows you to stream video directly from your camera phone, or to upload video later, which is especially useful if you want to edit the content or your connection is not fast enough to support live streaming. While the Mobile Producer is now freely available, Kyte is mostly targeting larger brands and content producers. The private beta of Kyte only worked on Nokia N95 phones, but the public version now supports a wide range of S60 3rd Edition camera phones.
As we mentioned earlier this year, Kyte’s focus has slowly shifted away from User Generated Content towards professionally produced video. We talked to Kyte’s chief marketing officer Gannon Hall about this yesterday and he confirmed this notion. Kyte, as Gannon also stressed, is focused on providing a media platform and does not aim to be a destination site.
Big Name Users
Kyte’s business model is to license its technology to larger companies, though Kyte is also looking at some revenue sharing deals. Some of the sites that currently feature Kyte’s service include the Huffington Post, which used Kyte for its coverage of the Democratic and Republican National conventions, the Pussycat Dolls, who have offered behind the scenes footage thanks to Kyte, and the celebrity TV magazine Extra, which features three branded Kyte channels.
S60 Only
We asked Gannon about support for other mobile devices, but for now, Kyte is strictly focused on supporting Nokia S60 phones, which, according to Gannon, provide the best video streaming experience. Also, because Kyte is mostly trying to attract branded content, only supporting a limited range of hardware is not a real problem according to Gannon, as these larger companies will just buy a specific phone for this purpose, though this might slow down adoption by individual users.
With Kyte now being available on most S60 mobile phones, the mobile streaming market is quickly becoming even more competitive. Already, users can choose between Qik, Flixwagon, and other streaming video providers. Kyte’s advantage over some of these other companies is that it provides a wider range of services and that it can stream from webcams and mobile devices. Kyte also allows you to upload videos from virtually any camera phone by emailing videos to a private email address.
