Do They Know It’s Christmas?
I know….. Again with my “child of the ‘80’s” references. This time I’m channeling Bob Geldof, Bono, David Bowie, The Style Council, Duran Duran and others from the UK rocker mash-up known as Band Aid. I always have a bit of holiday music playing in the background around these times, and this song came on as I was thinking about what to write and I thought: “Oh, what the hell.”
Anyhow, my last blog post for 2009 really has less to do with Christmas and more about my utter amazement that we have reached the end of another year.
For the team at 1CAST, 2009 has been an extraordinarily busy and exciting year for our company. In addition to helping deliver the news of the world to our users in a highly personalized manner, we achieved some very significant milestones in the evolution of our young company. Examples include:
- Android Application Launch (February);
- Announcement of Infiniti Motors as our first charter advertiser (March);
- Reaching 3.2M monthly video streams (July);
- Launching our Entertainment and Lifestyle programming in partnership with E! Entertainment, Style and NYMag.com (October);
- Integrating 1CAST with Boxee (October); and
- Commercially Launching 1CAST (October).
Additionally, here at 1CAST we’re always making little adjustments to make the site better for our users. A lot of these tweaks come about based on our own use of the site, but we also implement a lot of the suggestions submitted to us by our users. Recently, we released an update to our web service that provides full screen viewing, easy link sharing and a host of other updates to our backend system all designed to make 1CAST a better place to not only watch news videos, but also to find them, too. Updates to our mobile and iTV platforms are underway so you can be assured of a high quality viewing experience whenever or wherever you are.
Looking ahead to 2010, we see our share of challenges but also a tremendous opportunity to continue to provide a truly differentiated video viewing experience. As content aggregators and syndicators come and go, 1CAST intends to remain focused on its core mission, continue to listen to its users, provide more engaging and sought-after video programming, and extend its reach into new platforms and distribution channels. Admittedly, it’s a “no-duh” operating strategy, but we’ve learned over the past couple of years that keeping things simple and focusing relentlessly on execution, leads to long-term success.
We’ve enjoyed being part of your daily lives and appreciate your continued support and feedback. As a bit of a Christmas treat, below is a link giving you a sneak peak at 1CAST for Blackberry, our latest mobile application.
http://www.1cast.com/blackberrybeta/index.html
We hope you enjoy 1CAST for Blackberry and look forward to providing you with more of what YOU want from your favorite video news network in 2010.
Cheers
Anthony Bontrager
