Introducing: Caffeine
Today, I’m announcing a new social broadcasting platform called Caffeine.
I am really excited to talk about it for the first time publicly. Caffeine is something I’ve been working on for 20 months now, with my co-founder Sam Roberts, but it’s something I’ve been dreaming about for a lot longer.
Live broadcast has been stuck on the 10 foot television experience for years. With television, there is no keyboard, no touch screen and no way to interact with the broadcaster or other people watching, like there would be if you were there in real life. The cable industry has been on the downfall since 2011. Gaming and eSports are quickly becoming the most important category in live broadcast. WebRTC has reached a level of maturity, making it viable to build a few-to-many video platform with zero delay. Turning an established video platform into a social platform is hard to do. We saw all of these things and wanted to see if we could create something completely new and undeniably better for the world’s creators and soon-to-be creators.
Caffeine is that re-imagined experience for live broadcasters and their audiences. It is currently in pre-release and is targeted at video gamers, but can be used for all kinds of other content too. There are three key things that make Caffeine different:
- We create our own broadcasting tools designed for the platform that are simple and easy to use.
- All broadcasts are in real-time and with no delay, so conversations are natural.
- It’s a social platform like Twitter or Instagram, where you discover content based on who you follow and where conversations are filtered based on your connections.
It’s the combination of these three things that make Caffeine feel instantly different than other live broadcasting platforms.
Later this year, we plan on introducing some new and fun ideas for monetizing live broadcasts, which are not advertising or subscription-based like you’ve seen on other platforms. They will feel natural for the experience we are creating.
Over the past 20 months, Sam and I have built an incredible team and group of investors that believe in us. One of the key people that has joined our team is Anna Sweet who was previously at Facebook and Valve before that. She has an incredible background and is heading up business and content for us at Caffeine. We also have a world-class engineering team, and an incredible group of people working on building our community, content and business relationships. The entire company cares deeply about the product experience and are all-around great human beings. I am also excited to have Ben Horowitz from a16z and John Lilly from Greylock on our board of directors.
I want to thank the entire Caffeine team for all of the incredible work they have done so far. The team is passionate, fired up and just a super cool group of people to work with every day. We are building something for creators that we want to use ourselves. Many of us are gamers, including me, but we all love live entertainment and think we will contribute something truly great to it.
We’d love for you all to try out what we are working on at caffeine.tv today or download our iPhone app. Follow @ben on caffeine.tv to see what I’m watching too. ;-)
Ben Keighran
CEO at Caffeine
