Vator Box: Kyte and Ad Infuse

Portfolio.com's Blaise Zerega talks mobile video and ads

As someone who has spent hundreds of hours capturing digital video, then downloading it to a PC before uploading it to the Internet, the ease of a streaming video service like Kyte is a godsend.

The ability to capture video and send it directly to the Web with a wireless connection is the heart of the business proposition for Kyte and for its main competitors, Qik and Flixwagon.

 Helping us evaluate Kyte is this week's guest host, Blaise Zerega, deputy editor of Conde Nast's Portfolio and former managing editor of Wired.

As Zerega points out, Kyte garnered a lot of attention after well-known blogger Robert Scoble praised its service and started using it again after earlier switching from Kyte to Qik.

One of the reasons was Kyte's embeddable player that lets users create their own custom video channels that can be housed on any Web site, including Kyte's, or on a social network like Facebook or MySpace.

Businesses and entertainment users have the option of using the Kyte Premium Player for capturing and distributing  branded video on the Internet.

50Cent is the biggest-name artist using the Kyte platform to beam short videos to his fans on his own Web site.

Kyte's chat feature is part of its plan to create social networks around shared video content.  In the hands of citizen journalists, mobile phones streaming Kyte video can produce live coverage of an event anywhere there is mobile service.

To succeed as a business, Kyte will have to aggregate a lot of content and traffic so it can eventually sell ads, or license its technology to companies that want a mobile video platform.

While the online video market has proven tough, with many sites abandoning content plays in favor of licensing their technology for white label video platforms, mobile video streaming may prove more profitable if its allows advertisers to place highly-targeted ads in front of users.

Next up is Ad Infuse, which delivers personalized ads to mobile phones and networked media players.

Mobile ad networks like Ad Infuse, and rivals like AdMob, are attractive takeover candidates, Zerega says, because the highly personal nature of a mobile phone is helping to support high CPMs for mobile ads, at least so far.

As Vator.tv managing editor John Shinal added, "non-relevant ads are DOA on mobile phones," because no one is going to allow for that level of intrusion for an annoying ad.

Whether the high CPM rates for mobile ads can be paired with high click-through rates, or can last at all if Google and other large Web ad firms migrate to mobile is a key question for mobile ad networks. The big players can use scale to improve efficiency and help drive down rates, just as they have done with Web search and display advertising. 

Still, Ad Infuse  and others are likely to get snapped up by larger firms, just as Web ad networks such as Blue Lithium, Tacoda, RightMedia, Adify and others were snapped up.