Kyte launched today, and as Rex Dixon pointed out, it has already been discussed ad nauseum. But never one to shy away from the latest hot trend, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Kyte is a media remixing service that lets anyone "create their own interactive TV channel," which basically means you can upload video, photos, and audio and mix them into slideshows that other people can watch.
Of all the comparisons being made -- and there are many -- SplashCast made the most sense; they appeared to be more or less the same application, so I initially set out to compare them. But after playing with both services for awhile, I realized that in terms of editing together media, there isn't much that either can do that more mature video editing services like Jumpcut, eyespot, or motionbox can't do. Video? Check. Photos? Check. Audio? Check. Text? Check. Create a channel, leave comments, share on MySpace? Check, check, check. All that, and with generally more intuitive editing tools, in my opinion. However, editing, isn't what makes Kyte compelling.
What makes Kyte compelling, are its mobile and social tools. The ability to watch TV from your phone (assuming your handset and service plan is compatible) is nifty, so is chatting with other users watching the same video and leaving in-video polls for real-time feedback. But what will really get users excited is that Kyte lets people broadcast live video direct from their high-end cell phone, which makes the service more like Twitter or Ustream.tv.
As Kyte says in their introduction video, if you want to do a live stream of the banana you're holding, you can. And I fear, that somewhere, someone will very soon being producing a live show of stationary fruit.
While I admit that the constant-blogging phenomenon is one that I don't really get (I lead a pretty mundane life; this video I made on Jumpcut this morning with my cell phone while playing around with various video editing services is proof of that), there's no denying that Twitter has struck a chord with users. And what's better than live blogging your location and thoughts in text? Perhaps, doing it in video.
User who are looking for a way to put up slide shows or edit videos for the web would be better served by more mature services dedicated to media editing, but Kyte might find a niche among people of the Twitter crowd who yearn for a more visual way to show the world what they're up to. One thing Kyte needs to fix post-haste: the annoying noise that sounds every time a new users signs into the chat room. It is, well, annoying, and really distracts from the video you're trying to watch.
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You have a cool dog! Nice post too.
Posted by: steve | April 23, 2007 10:12 AM
Thanks for the mention, Josh. Congrats to the Kyte team for launching an impressive tool and getting lots of good press. For the record, video editing is less what we (SplashCast) focus on than media aggregation.
I think the primary way our services are different though is that Kyte does live video (we don't) and we use the heck out of RSS - both inbound and outbound - in ways that no one else does. Look and feel are very different, too. I think there's more than enough room in this market for a large number of related but different services.
Good luck and see you arround the web, Kyte!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | April 23, 2007 11:09 AM
Josh, just checked out kyte.tv
I like it so far.
I wonder if they will support other phones in the near future.
Apparently, they don't do this annoying sounds anymore.
Posted by: damian | April 23, 2007 11:41 AM
Yep, looks like that "one more person watching" alert noise was turned off.
@Steve: Thanks! I like to think my dog's thought process during that clip was something like: "Someone's petting me! Awesome! Wait, he stopped... Hey, you, with the fingers... don't stop! Aww, man. I'm gonna go look out the window, then."
Posted by: Josh Catone | April 23, 2007 12:02 PM
Quite interesting project kyte.tv And nice post too
Posted by: meras | April 23, 2007 12:55 PM
@Josh: Yep, that's exactly what he was thinking.
Posted by: steve | April 23, 2007 1:06 PM