User:Audioman7/AudioTube

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AudioTube, LLC
Type
Founded 2007
Headquarters London, England, U.S.
Key people Karsten Becker, Founder & CTO
Scott DeMercado, Founder & CEO
Slogan Music Videos On Demand
Website AudioTube.com
Type of site Video hosting service
Registration Optional
(required to upload and comment on videos)
Available in English
Launched February 15, 2005
Current status active

Audiotube is a music community website where users can view, share and watch music videos. Founded in December 2006 by Karsten Becker and Scott de Mercado, it has offices in both London and southern Spain.

Visitors can use the site to build playlists tailored to their individual taste, interact with like-minded people and access the latest music releases. Audiotube also operates as a video management and distribution service, working directly with record labels and musicians to help market their media to consumers.

Audiotube is financed by private investors, which include the music and media entrepreneur Chris Blackwell; and the entertainer and industrialist Michael Flatley.

Contents

[edit] History

After being introduced to Chris Blackwell in 1999, Karsten Becker purchased the url for the site, motivated to use his technological expertise on a music industry project that combined both music and video. The slow spread of broadband technology at the time forced him to put the project on hold.

Once artists began leaving established record labels to promote themselves on UGC sites such as MySpace and YouTube, Becker recognised the full potential of creating a site that was solely dedicated to music. He joined forces with DeMercado and together they created Audiotube Ltd in December 2006 and set out to build the website.

In May 2007, the first public beta of the site was ready to go live and so the traditional ‘music-on-demand community driven web based portal’ of Audiotube was launched.

[edit] Technology

Audiotube used its initial capital to develop its online community and media steaming services, which is based on a LAMP architecture and is built on top of video management software from HumorSoftware and social networking software from SocialEngine.

Audiotube acquired key technology components from CineFX that it is using to roll out a online media management service at boxet.com (currently in beta).

Audiotube is also developing a cross platform, high-definition desktop based video player, built using the open source media toolkit the openlibraries, which will be the core component of its subscription based p2p network, audiotube.tv

[edit] Timeline

Sputnik7 – November 2007 In November 2007 Audiotube acquired the Sputnik7 network, host to an on demand audio/video internet entertainment portal which includes sputnik7.com and epitonic.com. Sputnik7.com was founded in 1998 by Chris Blackwell (founder of Island Records) and Les Garland (founder of MTV: Music Television and VH1), Sputnik has been awarded the ‘Invision Award of Excellence in Entertainment’, a ‘Gold Invision for Best Entertainment Streaming Media Site’, the ‘ASCAP Deems Taylor Award’ and was a ‘Webby Award' winner.

Epitonic.com – November 2007 epitonic is the sister site of Sputnik7. Launched in 1999, epitonic.com is a source for independent music across several genres from both signed and unsigned artists. Featuring MP3 song downloads, radio streams and many full album streams, at its peak it amassed content from more than 400 independent labels and represented a diverse array of artists helping them to promote and sell their releases.

CineFX – December 2007 In December 2007 Audiotube acquired the rights to video encoding and desktop playback products and technologies from CineFX, a UK-based open source software development company. CineFX’s products and services provided video transcoding on websites as well as media playback and editing on the desktop.

BigMusicBoard – February 2008 The realisation that the music platform of the future needed to be driven by the users of tomorrow rapidly led to the acquisition of BigMusicBoard.com, a small community of music lovers, whose feedback tailored the growth of Audiotube.com. BigMusicBoard has been online since 2003 and has a large community of rap and hip-hop fans, providing an international networking forum for followers of the urban music genre. It’s home to the monthly ‘RapAttack’ competition where members showcase their lyrical talents by submitting their own raps and lyrics for judging by the community users.

Brownpunk Exclusive - May 2008 In its first exclusive, Sputnik7.com will exclusively show the first two chapters of trip-hop star Tricky’s directorial debut ‘Brownpunk The Film.’ The eagerly awaited nine chapter indie music film features numerous Brownpunk artists, including Face,1st Blood and The Dirty, as well as Ocean’s Eleven star Elliot Gould. The mock documentary is an edgy and innovative take on today's competitive music business and it’s expected to receive a large number of viewers when it’s shown exclusively on Sputnik7.com at midnight on the 9th May, 2008.

[edit] Partnerships

Audiotube has partnerships with many high-profile record labels and content providers. To date, Audiotube has agreements with the following companies:

Palm Pictures/Blue Mountain Publishing Ministry of Sound
Brownpunk Graffiti Records
Gut Records Jungle Records
JustMusic Fat Records
Gronland Records Cooking Vinyl Records
Angel Air Records Erra Records

[edit] Facts

The Audiotube network, which currently has over 100,000 registered members, continues to grow by over 40% per month.

The Sputnik7 betwork currently has over 1 million registered users

[edit] References