Company: upLynk
Website: www.uplynk.com
Founders: Nine founding members
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2010
Employees: 9
Investors: Self-funded, profitable since 2012
Twitter: @upLynk
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/uplynk
Brief Company Description: upLynk is the simplest, most cost-effective way to adaptively stream high quality live and on-demand video to all devices and platforms.
# # #
By Ken Brueck, CMO
Product Overview
upLynk is the simplest, most cost-effective way to adaptively stream high quality live and on-demand video to all devices and platforms.
Looking for an example of our work? Check out the ABC Player and WATCH Disney apps on iOS. We’re the technology behind the curtain. By eliminating the need to create and maintain multiple copies of the same content, upLynk removes the complexity associated with streaming to multiple devices and increases your ability to scale and deliver more dynamic experiences. upLynk customers enjoy:
No capex
Our patent-pending encoding solution gives broadcast-quality results without expensive encoding appliances.
Low opex
upLynk technology reuses the same adaptive stream across all platforms. You’ll never encode, store, encrypt or distribute multiple copies of the same video, as opposed to traditional methods.
Flexibility
We make complex things simple: closed captioning, inserting targeted ads in a live linear stream, repurposing live content for on-demand playback, analytics and even billing.
Founders’ Story
We created upLynk to simplify streaming.
During the last several years, content owners wanting to stream video have been forced to become technology experts. Instead of focusing on creating and monetizing high quality content, they’ve had to think about codecs, bitrates, resolutions and protocols.
Our team has years of history working with premium content owners and broadcasters. We have one of the inventors of adaptive streaming on our team, and we have one of the inventors of TV Everywhere as an advisor. We’ve used our understanding of the technology and business to create products that directly address content owners’ streaming challenges.
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
upLynk is highly focused on broadcasters and premium content owners. We build awareness with high-visibility customer deployments, joint press releases, working closely with industry analysts, and most important, word-of-mouth recommendations.
Market Opportunity
The television business is massive. Globally, it welcomes $380 billion in subscription fees and ad revenue each year. Now it’s coming online.
Broadcast networks, content aggregators, cable and satellite providers, and even local affiliate stations are all looking for ways to get in on the action. The problem is, by 2020, there will be over 50 billion Internet connected devices. Streaming video to that many devices has been prohibitively expensive.
upLynk is uniquely positioned to enable these companies, both domestic and international, to efficiently make their content available to consumers anywhere on any device.
Differentiator
upLynk simplifies both the technology and business of adaptive streaming.
Technology
Other streaming providers encode content to multiple formats to reach multiple platforms. This strategy doesn’t scale. Every time a new platform is released, content owners must go back and encode all their content to another format. This means duplicate costs for things like encoding, storage and encryption. It’s impossible to escape this complexity, and the rest of the solution becomes bulky and fragile.
upLynk technology enables a single format to work across all devices, reducing costs, eliminating duplicate effort and simplifying the workflow. This puts upLynk at an advantage, making it easy to perform more complex tasks like closed captioning or dynamic ad and content replacement.
Business
Other streaming providers often have complicated pricing models that are difficult to forecast. Our pricing model is simple, predictable and even encourages providing a good user experience. It’s also pay-as-you-go, going against the industry standard multi-year contractual agreement.
Business Model
upLynk is a Software as a Service (SaaS) model that charges for three things:
- hours of content encoded
- hours of content stored
- hours of content streamed
All other aspects of our service are included, like ad integration, analytics, encryption and even the content distribution network (CDN). There are no signup fees or monthly support fees.
For example, if you have a 42 minute episode, you’d be charged for 42 minutes of encoding. That 42 minutes includes everything you need: adaptive bitrates, multiple devices (including those that haven’t been invented yet), and even HD. Similarly, if you keep that episode in our system for a month, you’d be billed for 42 minutes of storage.
Streaming charges are based on viewership. If 100 users each watch that entire 42 minute episode, you’d be charged for 4200 minutes of streaming, regardless of device, bandwidth or region.
It’s that simple. Unlike other models, you’re never burdened with predicting on which devices your users will stream or how capable their bandwidth is. Because billing is measured in hours of content instead of something like gigabytes, our customers are never punished for delivering HD content. In fact, we encourage HD streaming because if you look good, it makes us look good.
Current Needs
upLynk is looking for energetic developers that can interface with customers. We want people with strong problem solving skills that can walk into a content owner’s facility, develop a good relationship, and help design and deploy an architecturally sound integration. These guys should be happy wearing multiple hats, because upLynk is a small company that moves fast and adapts quickly.
We’re self-funded and not actively seeking investment, but are always open to conversation.
upLynk – www.uplynk.com
