Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

LongTail Raises $5 Million to Take on Web Video Heavyweights

Remember the Web video boom? Most of the venture capital buzz is now directed at mobile ads, a small market that’s supposed to grow like a weed. Meanwhile, video is dominated by Google/YouTube, with everyone else way, way, way behind.

But there are still people willing to bet on video advertising and infrastructure.

Here’s LongTail Video, for instance, which has just raised $5 million in a round led by Greycroft, along with money from Cue Ball Capital.

Five-year-old LongTail provides video services and ad sales for a slew of small publishers, along with an open source video player that noncommercial sites can use for free.

That puts it in competition with bigger players like Brightcove and Ooyala, but CEO Dave Otten says he’s doing fine. He says LongTail is profitable and will come close to $10 million in revenue this year.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik