Mogulus Gets $10M in Gannett Cash

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Wednesday, July 30. 2008 at 11:55 AM EDT Post a comment

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Online broadcast service provider Mogulus received a strategic investment from Gannett this week, and announced that the newspaper company has signed on as its first announced Pro customer.

Mogulus, which provides a platform for live Internet broadcasts through Webcam, professional video cameras, or TV feeds, received a $10 million investment from Gannett. The cash will make Gannett a minority stakeholder in Mogulus, which has raised a total of $12.7 million so far.

Perhaps more importantly, Gannett has signed up as a Pro customer and will be using Mogulus's broadcast platform to feed live video content to several newspaper Websites. So far, Gannett's Indianapolis Star, AZCentral.com, and Argus Leader have used Mogulus to broadcast feeds of interviews with political candidates and live press conferences.

And so far, Mogulus has provided a mostly free online broadcast platform for anyone that wants to sign up. Company spokesperson Rainer Cvillink says Mogulus enables anyone to start his or her own live TV station with just five mouseclicks.

The free service is supported by Google video overlay ads, but the company also provides a Pro version for individuals or companies that want a white label solution without any ads. While Cvillink wouldn't disclose the price structure for Pro accounts, he says the price is structured so that almost anyone can afford to use the service.

Unlike other live Internet broadcast services, Cvillink believes Mogulus's services are differentiated by allowing multi-feed broadcasts, as well as the ability to upload graphics and video into the broadcast stream.

Mogulus doesn't own any of its servers, but uses Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)'s Simple Storage Service (S3) to host and transport video content, allowing it to scale without investing in infrastructure.

The company, which has less than 30 employees, is headquartered in New York with a development center in Bangalore, India. Although the bulk of personnel now is devoted to development of the platform, Cvillink says the Gannett funding will be used to ramp up its staff on the sales and business development side of things.