Watchitoo Distinguishes Itself with its Live Streaming Technology

Watchitoo has only been in the business video space for a few years but it has certainly made its dent in the market already.

In just a few years, the video collaboration platform has helped bring history to life for college students – by connecting coeds with citizens of Libya and Egypt to hear about their experiences with the riots – and has helped other companies like the Vancouver Sun stream political debates to over 35,000 viewers.

“We see ourselves as poised to be the dominant company in the space,” Watchitoo’s Vice President of Marketing Zach Stevens told TMCnet at Streaming Media East 2011 Tuesday.

Watchitoo offers a platform that can be embedded into virtually any website and is the “perfect solution” for anyone with a website who wants their communities engaged in a completely new and dynamic way, according to company officials. It offers multi-stream collaboration that allows up to 25 people to collaborate in a virtual video conference environment; a fully brandable solution that allows you to customize to your specifications; and quadruple servers to assist in redundancy.

One feature that Watchitoo touts is its Green Room staging area, which allows webinar participants to be prepped before they enter the webinar. In the Green Room, webinar administrators can hear in advance what the participant wants to talk about before adding them to the live webcast. 

By using Watchitoo the number of participants for a webinar is limitless as the platform can support thousands of viewers at once. Moreover, its “revolutionary new layout manager intelligently rearranges the layout of your screen every time you bring a new person into the webinar,” according to company officials.

Watchitoo’s solutions and webinar features can benefit education institutions, enterprises, entertainment companies and those in the conference space.

In particular, Watchitoo has seen a “large uptick” in the education vertical and, accordingly, has been working with resellers to sell into that space. Watchitoo has currently helped create “virtual classrooms” for New York University, Columbia University and Princeton University, according to Stevens.

When asked what Watchitoo is most excited about with the business video space, Stevens said the possibility for more opportunity.

“The space is definitely nascent but it’s growing,” he said.

Today, Watchitoo unveiled a series of enhancements to its online meeting and collaboration platform that improve the attendee experience, and make it possible for online event organizers to fully customize the experience, according to company officials. While content owners can already stream live or recorded HD content to thousands of viewers through any website with Watchitoo, the latest version of the platform has added new customization features and other enhancements that make it easier to add multiple high-quality video streams to any online event.

"By adding video, collaboration and multistreaming, Watchitoo has changed the character of the online event - from a one-way communication, to a collaborative means to engage communities," Watchitoo CEO Rony Zarom said in a statement. "With this new functionality, event organizers have a the industry's most powerful set of tools at their disposal that allow them to deliver a visual experience of their online events that rivals broadcast television."

Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin