48
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ISSUE 1 2015
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THE CHANNEL
NAME
Mark Kornfilt
JOB
Co-Founder and General
Manager, Europe
COMPANY
Livestream
PRO
FILE
and they have an audience that can’t
attend for whatever financial or
geographical reason. And our idea
is for these events to reach the full
potential of their audience through
live broadcasting online.
We have two separate missions:
The first is basically democratising
live broadcast – how to enable
anyone to easily, at low cost, stream
their event live to their audience.
That has been about creating the
right tools – online tools and mobile
tools where you can livestream, and
we’ve gone all the way to creating
hardware. Some of it’s simple and
low cost, some of it’s more advanced.
The second part of what we do is
the viewer side. How do we make it
engaging and interesting for viewers?
How do we make them feel like
they’re part of the event? We built a
website where you can find content,
but also created easy ways to share
the content and to send around it –
chat tools, for example, and easy
ways to share on Twitter and
Facebook. It’s about a community
around these events.
LATEST INITIATIVES
We have a big partnership with IMG.
We help them to livestream a lot of
sporting events. We also have a
partnership with the Associated
Press in London who we help with
their livestreaming. We’re talking
about tens of thousands of events a
year. Again, it’s based on the idea
that the platform we’ve built will
allow a democratisation of content
creation that ultimately benefits not
only the small band or the small
university that want to broadcast a
game, but also benefits the bigger
players in the markets.
The World Economic Forum is a
customer of ours in Europe. For me
it’s a great example of what the
technology allows you to do. When
the World Economic Forum runs in
Davos, the major broadcasters pick
up some feeds. They’ll broadcast
small highlights, but the TV
audience isn’t necessarily
interested in watching a full day of
the World Economic Forum for
seven days in a row. Still there are
many viewers who are very
interested in that. So the World
MY CAREER
My background is in computer
science and software development. I
had been one of the developers of a
popular peer-to-peer application
called LimeWire. Then I met
Livestream co-founder Max Haot
when I was in New York. We knew
each other socially and he was
putting together Livestream’s
founding team – the company was
called ‘Mogulus’ at the time. He
showed me a proof of concept and
talked to me about the idea, and I
joined as a co-founder.
For the first five years, I focused
on heading up engineering and
product development. Then towards
the end of 2011, I decided to move
back to Europe and open the
European office for Livestream. We
opened the office in London in
September 2012.
ABOUT LIVESTREAM
We started with the vision that any
event, anywhere around the world,
that has at least a small audience,
will want to broadcast live on the
internet. An event can be breaking
news or a political conference, or it
can be a small concert from a small
local band, or it can be a sports event.
All of these things have a physical
audience that can attend the event,
Economic Forum uses us to stream
to their online audience all of the
programmes of the Forum, and not
only Davos, but all of the Forums
they do around the world – in
Mexico and Dubai and China.
The European Space Agency is
another customer of ours. We
provided streaming for the landing
of Rosetta on the comet last year.
The last thirty minutes was live on
some major TV stations, but really
the event lasted 26 hours. They
used us to stream the entire 26
hours to an online audience. Their
Livestream channel had over 15
million views in that time period. All
of this was done using a fairly
simple set-up that allowed them to
share that video, but also allowed
that audience to share the content
and make it viral.
FUTURE STRATEGY
We’re continuing to come out
regularly with new versions both of
our software and our hardware to
add production value. Just recently,
we released a chromakey feature
for our production software. We’re
working on adding bonding, which is
the ability to combine multiple
internet connections for broadcast.
One could be a 4G card plugged
into your computer, one could be
WiFi connection on your computer,
and a third could be your Ethernet
connection. We send the stream
out through all these
connectionsand then recompose it
in the cloud. The idea is that if you
have issues with connectivity on any
one of these connections, the others
will take over. It helps you stream in
places where your connectivity isn’t
that great.
Another area of focus is
connected TV’s. We want to enable
our producers to stream the content
everywhere. Ultimately, we want to
be able to be compatible with every
device out there.
OUTLOOK
What we’re expecting in the next
couple of years - it’s hard to say
when exactly – is if something is
happening somewhere, and you
can’t go, you’re going to expect it to
be available online.
THE CHANNEL
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