The Tamiami Angel Fund II (T2) has been busy in recent months, adding a slate of new investment targets to its roster. T2 recently added one new operation—Streann Media—to bring it up to a score of 10 so far. Streann Media may not be a familiar name as yet, but what it does will likely ring familiar.
Streann Media offers over-the-top (OTT) transformational tools as well as next-generation streaming capabilities for content providers, allowing same to get better into the growing piles of content available online. With more and more users—though in fairly small numbers at an interval—cutting the cable and instead turning to the Internet for entertainment, providing that content is a potentially lucrative operation. It's less about TV, and more about content, which calls for content providers which can offer the content of choice on a variety of devices, not just on one central platform.
Currently, the bulk of Streann Media's customers are in Latin America, with 64 percent of its customer base found therein. It will be taking its new investment funds from T2 to step up its availability into North America and Europe, as well as developing its product line outward to encompass new features, along with new support staff to manage a customer base that will necessarily grow as it enters new markets.
One of the new features it's working on is live streaming virtual reality using the Oculus platform, a technology that might be particularly valuable in years to come. While right now, virtual reality doesn't exactly have a great following—it's still in its earliest stages of release—that's likely to change as the prices come down and the tools go more mainstream.
T2's chairman, Timothy J. Cartwright, offered comment on just why it put the money into Streann Media, saying “T2 sees Streann Media as a disruptive technology based business that will participate in the democratization of streaming video. Content providers, social media influencers and personality brands can launch their own TV channel utilizing Streann Media without ever needing to negotiate a contract with Comcast (News - Alert).”
That's a particularly valuable form of diversification; not only does Streann Media seem to work with some of the tools required to make new content, but also to display it. It's looking at a deeper scale than many content providers would look at, and its unusual focus on Latin America—generally nowhere near as big a market as, say, Europe and North America—is also noteworthy. Content provision is an increasingly major industry, however, and that makes it valuable enough to put some investment into early on.
We've never had so many options for viewing content as we do right now, and those involved in content creation for the Web should have a ready market to work with in the coming years. Networks like Streann Media—and investors like T2—should see plenty of success to follow by working together on a growing market.