As we know, Roku’s got several partners lined up to provide additional content to their $99 media playing box. Although I’ve correctly identified one of the upcoming biggies privately and am sworn to secrecy, I can inform owners that Mediafly is slated for a fall deployment. Prior to yesterday, I’ve never heard of them. But they’re in the business of aggregating and organizing podcasts, both audio and video. Using Roku’s developer kit, Mediafly intends to provide quick access to more than 500 top podcasts. For free. (How companies like these intend to make money without ads or subscription fees, I have no idea.) Like everything Roku versus TiVo (Netflix, Amazon), I assume this will be a much quicker and uniform UI. Which I’m looking forward to.
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Looks like a nice service and they support a ton of devices. Wish TiVo would offload their podcasts to a dedicated service to overcome their limited selection and less than ideal Desktop transcoding option.
@Dave Zatz,
Thanks for posting about Mediafly. Good question on how companies like ours make money. We actually have an enterprise hosting and ad solution that is being adopted by some of the larger media companies so that they can finally make money on their great content.
Also, we can leverage our device partners and applications to do secure content delivery. We do this for training companies and for internal communications. This product is still ramping up but looking very successful so far.
Thanks!
Carson
CEO
Mediafly