It’s been two years since we first wrote about Spreecast, a startup that allows anyone to create live, social video broadcasts. After all that time, it’s finally coming out of beta and doing so with a big new redesign.
Spreecast was launched as a platform for enabling users to quickly and easily create multi-user video broadcasts. As a free product, it provides all the producer tools necessary to invite multiple speakers into a broadcast, take questions and invite audience members to participate, and archive those conversations to be viewed later.
With the redesign, the new Spreecast is cleaner and more airy, cutting out all the jumble of logos and screenshots that used to dominate the homepage. With everything else in the world going flat — from iOS 7 to the New TechCrunch — Spreecast has followed in those footsteps, simplifying the product and making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. Uh, yeah, it also has a new logo.
Besides the updated home page, Spreecast has made some changes to the way its player works, incorporating user feedback to improve the broadcasting experience. It changed the colors of its call-to-action buttons, for instance, to more clearly emphasize them and help its users along in creating and managing broadcasts as they happen.
While not entirely new with this release, Spreecast has also done a fair amount of work on the backend in order to add other features that broadcasters were requesting. For instance, it recently added new monetization features for its big media partners, which enables sponsorship placements and pay-per-view options. It also has a paid analytics offering and the ability to download archived videos for paying users, as well.
For Spreecast, the new monetization features are a way for it to cash in on a large number of serious media organizations who have begun using it for broadcasts. That includes partners like ESPN, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Oxygen, ABC, and ABC Family. The product is also used by organizations like LinkedIn, The Heritage Foundation, USC Athletics, Stanford Athletics, and Sesame Street to connect with users and fans.
With the launch of monetization features, as well as the availability of Spreecast’s mobile app and mobile web experience, the company decided it was finally time to pull off the beta tag. Spreecast was founded by Stubhub founder Jeff Fluhr, and has raised more than $13 million from investors that include Meakem Becker Venture Capital, GGV Capital, MentorTech Ventures, Stan Shuman, Frank Biondi, Gordon Crawford, Sandy Robertson and Edward W. Scott, Jr.