Portland based SplashCast is launching this morning after a long beta period. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a long review late last year after demo’ing the product (and he liked it so much he now works there).
Splashcast is a little hard to describe, but once you get it it makes sense. It’s a Flash media player where the user can make various channels of content – including text, video, pictures, and audio files – and then embed the player containing those channels on a website. It basically incorporates functionality lots of other embeddable products. YouTube videos, photo slides shows like those offered by Slide, podcasts feeds, etc. can all be added as channels and will take up a fraction of the screen real estate required by all of those other services. For already busy websites, the Splashcast player is much easier to stomach than 3-4 widgets from separate companies.
Each channel of content also has a RSS feed, so interested viewers can subscribe to it and not have to come back to your website for access.
Splashcast will host content directly, but the real utility comes from plugging in videos from Youtube, photos from Flickr, etc., so that you can keep your media where you want to and not have to copy it over to Splashcast. You can even add voice overs to any of the show segments as Marshall has done below.
Splashcast originally started as QMind, a creator of enterprise e-learning software, and had raised $1.3 million from angels. They relaunched last summer as Splashcast and are currently working on a series “A” round.