Oonair, a live video streaming startup, has secured €2 million in a series A round from bcnHighgrowth. bcnHighgrowth was also behind the recent round in Nuroa. Oonair comes out of a Barcelona based company called Visual Engineering and its technology is mainly aimed at businesses that want to capture, transfer and publish geo-tagged live or recorded video material from the mobile onto the web. As such it is compatible with major content management systems and video players. The pricing is based on a SaaS monthly subscription model per user. For the time being, Oonair is available for Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Symbian.
For media agencies the technology is obviously great for content generation. But Oonair is also pushing their services to engineering and construction firms that can manage work remotely. Likewise, there is potential for public administration and emergency services. Wooing the media agencies in Spain may very well be feasible but for the other client targets, Oonair’s market is clearly not in Spain–adoption of such technology is too slow and costly. The 2 million in newly acquired funding will be spent mainly on the local an international expansion through EMEA and LATAM, as well as on technology development, including improvements for Android and an iPhone version.
Oonair is not short of competitors. Most have heard of Qik’s live casting or Bambuser. These two are more geared toward regular users, rather than businesses per se where Oonair is aiming for. Other renown and well funded competitors are Kyte and Livecast who, like Oonair, are more focused on large brand customers rather than consumer. Oonair claims you can submit as much content as you’re recording at the quality level of your choice, integrating quickly with the client’s platform of choice, be it a simple embedded video, streaming into an online video platform or customized integration using Oonair’s API (in beta).