Kyte Extends Its Social Video Platform to Living Room via Support for Boxee

Kyte, a San Francisco-based company that offers a social-enabled broadband and mobile video platform for live and on-demand content (note: customers include ABC, Clear Channel, ESPN, Fox News, MTV, and NBA Digital, among others), announced last week that it has extended its platform to support the Boxee over-the-top-TV platform.

According to the company, which says that it is pursuing a strategy of rolling out native support for emerging video consumption platforms, its new Kyte Boxee App Framework provides an easy way for video publishers to deliver fully brandable content to the Boxee platform, which viewers can then browse and view through the Boxee interface on their PC or TV set. Content can be made available in Boxee's apps directory, the company says; and customers can also push their content to Facebook and Twitter through Boxee's rating system, which recommends video content to contacts both inside and outside the Boxee community. "Boxee is fundamentally changing the way consumers experience television, providing a truly connected experience to not only view but to engage with media content," Kyte COO, Gannon Hall, said in a prepared statement. "Our support for Boxee is the first phase of a broader plan to support a range of emerging connected devices, giving our customers the ability to reach increasingly fragmented audiences."

According to Kyte, its platform allows customers to add social and interactive capabilities to their video content, and to natively distribute that content to mobile, social and emerging platforms. The company says that it also offers enterprise-class content management, moderation and analytics, and offers built-in integration with leading ad platforms.

In related news: RawVoice, a new media distribution company that claims to currently support over 5,000 content creators on a group of sites powered by its RawVoice Generator media network platform (including TechPodcasts.com, Blubrry.com, TravelCastNetwork.com and ProMedNetwork.com), last week announced the availability of two customizable, branded distribution apps for the Boxee and Roku OTT platforms. The company plans to demo its multiplatform capabilities, including the new Boxee and Roku apps, at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week (Booth SU9506S). "We're offering 'branded distribution' for content creators on these two devices and more to come this year, providing an all-inclusive pipeline to their content that was not possible before," RawVoice CEO, Todd Cochrane, said in a prepared statement. "Imagine having your own TV channel without the barriers to entry that exist today. We are a one-stop shop based on how the consumer accesses media."

According to RawVoice, custom content channels powered by its RawVoice Generator and available through Roku's line of OTT set-top boxes and Boxee's soon-to-launch Boxee Box represent a "tremendous opportunity" for its customers to reach a large and growing audience of new media consumers. In addition to delivering video to multiple platforms, RawVoice says, its technology tracks and measures the response to that content via its RawVoice media statistics system, which it bills as "tracking audiences, listener-base demographics and geographical data with worldwide mapping--all delivered via Web-based interfaces, custom reports and daily email summaries."