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Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content

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Re: Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content

#12

Post by revorad »

biot wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what Twilio for media content means? Twilio is essentially API-driven telephony infrastructure. It doesn't look like Chute allows you to use an API to drive real-world audio-visual infrastructure (that would be cool!), but is rather User-Generated Content with some do-it-yourself APIs and libraries.

It's like saying Shopify is the Facebook of ecommerce. Software company + API = Perfect analogy!

Re: Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content

#14

Post by ShabbyDoo »

I did some work for an ecommerce consultancy a couple of years ago where we were literally looking a a customer's request for "ability for customers to upload photos of themselves wearing our clothing" and saying, "Why isn't there a white box image service?" Now there is.

To those who have not dealt with user-generated media content, it is easy to underestimate the amount of effort involved in building a secure, monitorable system. Building an image grinding pipeline is non-trivial, even though all the open source tools are of high quality. Once users start uploading photos, marketing will realize that they need to be cropped, resized, and enhanced. As soon as your users upload the first pieces of questionable content, you will have to build an image moderation app. Then, you have to build a feature where the user sees his own photos on the site privately when logged in because users hate the lack of immediacy. Then, your marketing people will ask for video. Totally separate pipeline. Then, someone will upload custom-generated 40Kx40k single-color jpgs to see if your image crunching pipeline allows denial of service attacks. Once you get your first upload of child pornography, your legal team will become much more interested and ask how you are ensuring the destruction of these images from all your servers. Now, you'll learn that a reasonable portion of your bandwidth is being used to serve up deep-linked content for sketchy sites. Oh, and other stuff will happen too. Then, you'll see the value of Chute.

Re: Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content

#15

Post by gregarious »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #14

I did some work for an ecommerce consultancy a couple of years ago where we were literally looking a a customer's request for "ability for customers to upload photos of themselves wearing our clothing" and saying, "Why isn't there a white box image service?" Now there is. To those who have not dealt with user-generated media content, it is easy to underestimate the amount of effort involved in building a secure, moni…

This is definitely a great look into all the things we are working on and trying to manage.

Thanks for sharing your insights, definitely a great help in understanding why user-generated media has been very difficult for brands and agencies to leverage so far.

Re: Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content

#16

Post by esharef »

gregarious wrote: post #10
kevinwmerritt wrote: post #8

What are the benefits of Chute over a service like filepicker.io?

This is a great question Kevin. I think it comes down to a couple of things. 1. File Requirements 2. Workflow If you're looking to simply capture any binary data, Chute is not the ideal option. While we will offer access to even more sources than we have today, we're not focusing on the capture of documents, presentations or other non-media docs. If you definitely need media, then we think we're a great solution sinc…

What markets are you focused on with Chute?

Re: Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content

#17

Post by gregarious »

esharef wrote: post #16
gregarious wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great question Kevin. I think it comes down to a couple of things. 1. File Requirements 2. Workflow If you're looking to simply capture any binary data, Chute is not the ideal option. While we will offer access to even more sources than we have today, we're not focusing on the capture of documents, presentations or other non-media docs. If you definitely need media, then we think we're a great solution sinc…

What markets are you focused on with Chute?

We have two primary audiences today: brands/publishers and developers.

While there's a great deal of support for developers already, we know that there's a lot more that we can do and will be rolling out a great deal of new content soon.

Re: Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content

#18

Post by esharef »

gregarious wrote: post #17
esharef wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What markets are you focused on with Chute?

We have two primary audiences today: brands/publishers and developers. While there's a great deal of support for developers already, we know that there's a lot more that we can do and will be rolling out a great deal of new content soon.

Hmm...those are two fairly different audiences. What makes you think you can support both at once. Why don't you just focus on one?
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