As Ed Laczynski observed his five-year-old watching YouTube clips about Minecraft rather than cartoons broadcast from the Disney Channel, he knew the cord cutting revolution was coming.
NYC-based
provides video content to those cord cutters. The multiplatform tool allows video content owners to broadcast directly to websites, mobile apps and services like Apple TV and Roku.
Content creators import their video to the Zype platform, where they can manage and curate it and then push it out to web, mobile or streaming devices. “You plug your content into our systems and it will spit out the Roku code,” Laczynski said (pictured left with cofounder Chris Bassolino). “We have apps out in a day that would normally take six to eight months to develop.”
Zype eliminates the middleman and doesn’t run the traditional revenue sharing model video creators are used to. Instead, they pay a monthly fee and charge pennies per view. Typically Zype makes between eight and 12 percent of what the content rakes in on advertising. Content creators have direct access to the revenue stream and the data, and they’re not tied down to an aggregator over time.
Zype’s first customer was Konami 4K Media, which came on board in December 2013 before the company launched. The platform became publicly available in December 2014 and the company won the SXSW accelerator competition and grew its customer base from one to 40 in the past year.
Zype is especially beneficial for talent from traditional broadcasting that is now looking to reach consumers directly.
Anthony Cumia, one half of the long running New York shock jock radio show, ‘Opie and Anthony’ had been broadcasting from his home in Long Island after the show ended. Using Zype he now reaches customers directly through his website, app, and Apple TV and recently opened a new studio in Midtown.
Additionally, there’s a generation of YouTube stars like “Hoopla Kidz" that are looking to grow their customer base to other platforms.
Expansion
Zype closed a $1.6 million funding round in October and has been using those funds to expand their sales, marketing and engineering teams. Currently Zype employs 13 people in New York and three in Los Angeles. “We have such great talent in New York that I’m confident we can find the next 100 employees here without having to go too far afield,” Laczynski said. “I’m really happy we’re here.”
It’s not just the funding driving this growth either. Zype has been making money since day one and has double digit month over month revenue growth. The platform hosts almost 600,000 videos right now and is on pace to reach 5 million video views per month. The growth area to watch in 2016 is live streaming.
“It was one percent of our business, but it’s now about 20 percent and growing,” Laczynski said.
Images via Zype
