Revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world were already helping the live-news-streaming service Livestation grow its audience. Now, Japan’s earthquake and tsunami are providing an ongoing fillip to the service aimed at news junkies…
Here’s the CEO…
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More viewers is all well and good, but Livestation also has its premium subscription model, which it launched last year, hoping viewers would pay for enhanced picture quality.
“Obviously subscriptions are a percentage of visits,” Berlucchi tells paidContent:UK. “But, more importantly, we have massively grown our ad revenue (being able to carry long pre-rolls in front of quality news brands) and our syndication deals with Dailymotion and AOL.”
Beet.tv: “CEO Matteo Burlucchi told Beet.TV in an email that traffic has surged with 50 million video views over the past eight weeks, up 560 percent over the same period last year. A great deal of traffic is coming from the Middle East, via the Arab language services.”
Livestation was formed from out of Skinkers, the desktop alerts vendor which comprised Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) P2P technology developed in Cambridge. Berlucchi is also now heading a social book discovery site, aNobii.