Chute (YC W12) Nabs $2.7M To Become The Twilio For Media Content
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
The article has close to zero content about the company, from reading Chute's own website it looks like it provides an API service for managing rich-media UGC content.
Obviously, they're not synonymous, but seems a convenient enough of a hook I guess.
Then again, it's main TC that opts for that analogy.
It's definitely not how we describe ourselves, but I think the analogy they're gunning for is simply around exposing an infrastructure for a specific media.
User-generated is definitely a broad use of Chute but certainly not the only one. It's also being used where you have your own media (photos, etc.) that you want to publish and have a bit more flexibility in both how they're used and the info you can gather from the usage.
Now if only Gregarious could figure out which bus stop to get off at. :-P
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 since our tools only work with those types of files. That means that not only do we spend a lot of time working through how they arrive and get processed, but also in how delivered back to your users.
This leads me to my point about workflow. We've seen and learned that every app wants to use media files in different ways. That creates a number of unique challenges as a platform: authentication, rights management, terms of use, custom metadata, custom profile data, 3rd party processing ,etc.
For many, and we'd venture most, media apps - simply putting the file online won't be enough. It will have to go through a number of steps and more often than not, there's a need to capture additional data as part of the intake. Put another way, a media file's life only begins when it gets "online".
We're focused on those use cases first and foremost and think we'll be the ideal fit for anyone who needs the same thing.
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.
Chute definitely seems like an interesting company, and I'm glad it's not just-another-photo-sharing site. Looking forward to seeing what else comes from your camp!