Founder Andreas Kröpfl has spent almost a decade hard-grafting in the b2b unified communications space, building a videoconferencing business with a patented single-stream system and a claim of no ‘drop-offs’ thanks to “unique low-bandwidth technology”.

His Austria-based startup’s current web-based videoconferencing system, eyeson (née Visocon), which launched in 2018, has had some nice traction since launch, as he tells it, garnering a few million customers and getting a nomination nod as a Gartner Cool Vendor last year.

Eyeson’s website touts ‘no hassle, no, lag, no downloads’ video calls. Pricing options for the target b2b users run the gamut from freelance pro to full-blown enterprise. While the business itself has pulled in a smidge less than $7M in investor funding over the years.

But when TechCrunch came across Kröpfl last December, pitching hard in startup alley at Disrupt Berlin, he was most keen to talk about something else entirely: Video dating.

That’s because last summer the team decided to branch out by building their own video dating app, reusing their core streaming tech for a consumer-focused social experiment. And after a period of internal beta testing — which hopefully wasn’t too awkward within a small (up-til-then) b2b-focused team — they launched an experimental dating app in November in India.

The app, called Ahoi, is now generating 100,000 video calls and 250,000 swipes per day, says Kröpfl.

This is where he breaks into a giggle. The traction has been crazy, he says. 

In the staid world of business videoconferencing you can imagine eyeson’s team eyeing the booming growth of certain consumer-focused video products rather enviously.

Per Kröpfl, they had certainly noticed different desires among their existing users — which pushed them to experiment. “We saw that private people like the simple fun features (GIF reactions, …) and that business meetings were more focused on ‘drop-off’ [rates] and business features,” he tells us. “To improve both in one product was not working any more. So eyeson goes business plus SaaS.”

“Cloning eyeson but make it social,” is how he sums up the experiment. 

Ahoi is very evidently an MVP at this stage. It also looks like a pretty brave and/or foolish (depending on your view) full-bore plunge into video dating, with nothing so sophisticated as a privacy screen to prevent any, er, unwanted blushes… (Whereas safety screening is an element we’ve recently seen elsewhere in the category — see: Blindlee.)

There’s also seemingly no way for users to specify the gender they wish to talk to.

Instead, Ahoi users state interests by selecting emoji stickers — such as a car, cat, tennis racket, games console or globetrotter. And, well, it goes without saying that even if you like cars a lot you’re unlikely to change your sexual orientation over the category.

There are no generic emoji that could be used to specify a sexual interest in men or women. But, er, there’s a horse…

Such limits may explain why Ahoi is generating so many early swipes — and rather fewer actual calls — in that the activity sums to (mostly) men looking for women to videochat with and being matched with, er, men.

And frustration, sexual or otherwise, probably isn’t the greatest service to try and sell.

Still, Kröpfl reckons they’ve landed on a winning formula that makes handy reuse of their core videoconferencing tech — letting them growth hack in a totally new category. Swipe right to video date.

“People are disappointed by perfect profiles on Tinder and the reality when meeting people,” he posits. “Wasted time. Especially women do not want to be stalked by men pretending to be someone else. We solve both by a real live conversation where only after a call both can decide to be connected or never see each other again.”

Notably, marketing around the app does talk rather fuzzily about it being a way to “find new pals”.

So while Kröpfl frames the experiment as dating, the reality of the product is more ‘open to options’. Think of it as a bit like Chatroulette — just with slightly more control (in that you have a few seconds to decide if you don’t want to talk to the next in-app match).

The very short countdown timer (you get just five seconds to opt out of a matched video chat) is very likely generating a fair number of unintended calls. Though such high velocity matching might appeal to a certain kind of speed dating addict.

Kröpfl says Ahoi has been seeing up to 20,000 new users added daily. They’re bullishly targeting 3M+ users this year, and already toying with ideas for turning video dates into a money spinner by offering stuff like premium subscriptions and/or video ads. He says the plan is to turn Ahoi into a business “step by step”.

“Everyone loves to make his profile better,” he suggests, floating monetization options down the line. Quality filtering for a fee is another possibility (“everyone is annoyed by being connected to the wrong people”).

They picked India for the test launch because it has a lot of people on the same timezone, a large active mobile user-base and cheap marketing is still “easily possible”. He also says that dating apps seemed popular there, in their experience. (Albeit, the team presumably didn’t have a great deal of relevant experience in this category — given Ahoi is an experiment.)

The intent is also to open Ahoi up to other markets in time too, once they get more accustomed to dealing with all the traffic. Kröpfl notes they had to briefly take the app off the store last month, as they worked on adding more server capability.

“It is very early and we were not prepared for this usage,” he says, admitting they’ve been “struggling to work on early feedbacks”. “We had to make it invisible temporarily — to improve server capacity and stability.”

The contrast in pace of uptake between the stolid (but revenue-generating) world of business meeting-fuelled videoconferencing and catnip consumer dating — which is money-sucking unless or until you can hit a critical mass of usage and get the chance to try applying monetization strategies — does sound like it’s been rather irresistible to Kröpfl.

Asked what it feels like to go from one category to the other he says “crazy, surprised and thrilling”, adding: “It is somehow also frustrating when all the intense b2b work is not as closely interesting to people as Ahoi is. But amazing that it is possible thanks to an extremely focused and experienced team. I love it.” 

TechCrunch’s Manish Singh agreed to brave the local video dating app waters in India to check Ahoi out for us.

He reported back not having seen any women using the app. Which we imagine might be a problem for Ahoi’s longer term prospects — at least in that market.

“I spoke with one guy, who said his friend told him about the app. He said he joined to talk to girls but so far, he is only getting matched with boys,” said Singh. “I saw several names appear on the app, but all of them were boys, too.”

He told us he was left wondering “why people are on these apps, and why they have so much free time on a weekday”.

For ‘people’ it seems safe to conclude that most of Ahoi’s early adopters are men. As the Wall Street Journal reported back in 2018, India’s women are famously cool on dating apps — in that they’re mostly not on them. (We asked Kröpfl about Ahoi’s gender breakdown but he didn’t immediately get back to us on that.)

That market quirk means those female users who are on dating apps tend to get bombarded with messages from all the lonely heart guys with not much to swipe. Which, in turn, could make a video dating app like Ahoi an unattractive prospect to female users — if there’s any risk at all of being inundated with video chats.

And even if there are enough in-app controls to prevent unwelcome inundation by default, women also might not feel like they want their profile to be seen by scores of men simply by merit of being signed up to an app — as seems inevitable if the gender balance is so skewed.

Add to that, if the local perception among single women is that men on dating apps are generally a turn-off — because they’re too eager/forward — then jumping into any unmoderated video chat is probably not the kind of safe space these women are looking for.

No matter, Kröpfl and his team are clearly having far too much fun growth hacking in an unfamiliar, high velocity consumer category to sweat the detail. 

What’s driving Ahoi’s growth right now? “Performance marketing mainly,” he says, pointing also to “viral engagement by sharing and liking profiles”.

Notably, there are already a lot of reviews of Ahoi on Google Play — an unusual amount for such an early app. Many of them appear to be five star write-ups from accounts with European-sounding names and a sometimes robotic grasp of language.

“Eventhough Ahoi has been developed recently, it had high quality for user about calling, making friends and widing your knowlegde [sic],” writes one reviewer with atrocious spelling whose account is attached to the name ‘Dustin Stephens.’

“Talking with like minded people and same favor will creat a fun and interesting atmosphere. Ahoi will manage for you to call like condition above,” says another apparently happy but confused-sounding user, going by the name ‘Elisa Herring’.

There’s also a ‘Madeleine Mcghin’, whose profile uses a photo of the similarly named child who infamously disappeared during a holiday in Portugal in 2007. “My experience with this app was awesome,” this individual writes. “It gives me the option to find new people in every country.”

Another less instantly tasteless five-star reviewer, ‘Stefania Lucchini’, leaves a more surreal form of praise. “A good app and it will bring you extra income, I would say it’s a great opportunity to have AHOI and be a part of it but it’s that it will automatically ban you even if you don’t show it. Marketing. body part, there are still 5 stars for me,” she (or, well, ‘it’) writes.

Among the plethora of dubious five-star reviews a couple of one-star dunks stand out — not least because they come from accounts with names that sound like they might actually come from India. “Waste u r time,” says one of these, using the name Prajal Pradhan.

This pithy drop-kick has been given a full 72 thumbs-up by other Play Store users.

Despite the U.S. government’s concerns over TikTok which most recently led to the U.S. Navy banning service members’ use of the app, TikTok had a stellar 2019 in terms of both downloads and revenue. According to new data from Sensor Tower, 44% of TikTok’s total 1.65 billion downloads to date, or 738+ million installs, took place in 2019 alone. And though TikTok is still just experimenting with different means of monetization, the app had its best year in terms of revenue, grossing $176.9 million in 2019 — or 71% of its all-time revenue of $247.6 million.

Apptopia had previously reported TikTok was generating $50 million per quarter.

The number of TikTok downloads in 2019 is up 13% from the 655 million installs the app saw in 2018, with the holiday quarter (Q4 2019) being TikTok’s best ever with 219 million downloads, up 6% from TikTok’s previous best quarter, Q4 2018. TikTok was also the second-most downloaded (non-game) app worldwide across the Apple App Store and Google Play in 2019, according to Sensor Tower data.

However, App Annie’s recent “State of Mobile” report put it in fourth place, behind Messenger, Facebook, and WhatsApp — not just behind WhatsApp, as Sensor Tower does.

Regardless, the increase in TikTok downloads in 2019 is largely tied to the app’s traction in India. Though the app was briefly banned in the country earlier in the year, that market still accounted for 44% (or 323M) of 2019’s total downloads. That’s a 27% increase from 2018.

TikTok’s home country, China, is TikTok’s biggest revenue driver, with iOS consumer spend of $122.9 million, or 69% of the total and more than triple what U.S. users spent in the app ($36M). The U.K. was the third-largest contributor in terms of revenue, with users spending $4.2 million in 2019.

These numbers, however, are minuscule in comparison with the billions upon billions earned by Facebook on an annual basis, or even the low-digit billions earned by smaller social apps like Twitter. To be fair, TikTok remains in an experimental phase with regards to revenue. In 2019, it ran a variety of ad formats including brand takeovers, in-feed native video, hashtag challenges, and lens filters. It even dabbled in social commerce.

Meanwhile, only a handful of creators have been able to earn money in live streams through tipping — another area that deserves to see expansion in the months ahead, if TikTok aims to take on YouTube as a home for creator talent.

When it comes to monetization, TikTok is challenged because it doesn’t have as much personal information about its users, compared with a network like Facebook and its rich user profile data. That means advertisers can’t target ads based on user interests and demographics in the same way. Because of this, brands will sometimes forgo working with TikTok itself to deal directly with its influencer stars, instead.

What TikTok lacks in revenue, it makes up for in user engagement. According to App Annie, time spent in the app was up 210% year-over-year in 2019,  to reach a total 68 billion hours. TikTok clearly has users’ attention, but now it will need to figure out how to capitalize on those eyeballs and actually make money.

Reached for comment, TikTok confirmed it doesn’t share its own stats on installs or revenue, so third-party estimates are the only way to track the app’s growth for now.

Plex’s expansion beyond a home media organizer to becoming a centralized platform for all your media, gives the company a distinct advantage. By tying all media together under one roof — streaming music, podcasts, web shows and video of all sorts — Plex is able to add interesting and unique features around personalization and recommendations.

We’re only beginning to see some of the results of these sorts of integrations now.

To start, Plex today is leveraging its TIDAL music partnership to highlight which songs appear in a TV show, episode or movie they’re watching. Currently, this works for library content only, but Plex told TechCrunch at CES this week that the feature soon will work for AVOD [ad-supported video on demand] content as well shows and movies recorded to their cloud DVR via a digital antenna.

In the months ahead, Plex will begin to roll out more cross-media integrations, it says.

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Sunday December 22, 2019. Most likely the last show of 2019, an analysis of 2020 in streaming media, the primaries, and the influence of old and new tech.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Liner Notes

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

The team at Wotch has created a new social video platform — but wait, don’t roll your eyes quite yet.

“Obviously, we’re very used to someone creating a new internet video-sharing platform,” said co-CEO Scott Willson. “It must be very irritating for everyone to hear that.”

And yet Willson and his co-founder/co-CEO James Sadler have attempted it anyway, and they’re competing today as part of the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin. They’re only 22 years old, but Sadler said they’ve been working together for the past few years, with past projects including the development of e-learning platforms.

They were inspired to create Wotch because of YouTube’s recent problems around issues like demonetization, where many YouTubers lost the ability to monetize their videos through advertising, and other controversies like an attempted overhaul of its verification system.

Willson said YouTube has been “leaving out creators in terms of communications,” and as the controversies grew, the pair thought, “There has to be a better way of doing this.”

The key, Sadler added, is giving video creators a bigger say in the process: “We’re very hands-on with these creators. We’re not just sending them an automated email.”

In fact, they’re giving creators an opportunity to buy equity in Wotch to get a stake in the company’s success. They’re also appointing a creator board that will be consulted on company policy.

Wotch creators will be able to make money by selling subscriptions, merchandise and ads — not the standard pre-roll or mid-roll ads (which Willson described as “irritants”), but instead partnerships where they incorporate brand products and messages in their videos.

Asked whether this might create the same tension between advertisers and creators that YouTube has been struggling with, Willson argued, “What it comes down to is correctly matching advertisers with creators.” Some advertisers don’t mind working with video-makers who are “pushing the boundaries” — they just need to know what they’re getting into.

Sadler also said that Wotch will be providing creators with more data about their viewers, like identifying their most loyal fans, their most engaged fans and their first “wotchers.”

And the site will take a different approach to content moderation, using technologies like video frame analysis to identify “risky” content, as well as relying more on community moderation. Sadler said it will be a “consensus” approach, rather than the “dictatorship” of other platforms.

“We’re rewarding users for helping to cleanse these platforms,” he added.

Wotch isn’t identifying any of the big creators who he says have signed on, but Sadler told me that the company is largely focused on emerging markets and has already recruited 25 of the top creators in Brazil (where YouTube has an enormous audience, to sometimes detrimental effect) and throughout South America. Those creators won’t be posting on Wotch alone, but they will be creating exclusive videos for the service.

Sadler said it’s those creators who will draw the viewers: “Consumers are loyal to the creators and not the platforms.” And once they’re drawn in, they’ll also experience “a more social platform — see the things your friends are ‘wotching,’ see the things that your favorite creators are ‘wotching.'”

The startup has raised funding from Dominic Smales, the CEO of influencer marketing company Gleam Futures; Bidstack co-founder Simon Mitchell; and Melody VR founder and COO Steve Hancock. Smales is also leading the creator board.

While a beta version of Wotch is already live, Sadler and Willson plan to launch a revamped version of the service early next year. You can get an early preview of the changes by using the promotional code “TECHCRUNCH.”

When Chris Williams founded entertainment platform Pocketwatch in 2017, he was certain that no one had yet found the right way to work with the generation of children’s talent finding its audience on platforms like YouTube.

Convinced that packaging creators under one umbrella and leveraging the expanding reach of even more media platforms could reshape the way children’s content was produced, the former Maker Studios and Disney executive launched his company to offer emerging social media talent more avenues to create entertainment that resonates with young audiences.

On the back of the breakout success of Ryan’s World, a YouTube channel which counted 33.6 billion views and more than 22 million subscribers as of early November, it appears that Williams was on the right track. As he looks out at the children’s media landscape today, Williams says he sees the same forces at work that compelled him to create the business in the first place. If anything, he says, the trends are only accelerating.

The first is the exodus of children from traditional linear viewing platforms to on-demand entertainment. The rise of subscription streaming services, including Disney+, HBO Max and Apple Plus — combined with the continued demand for new children’s programming on Netflix — is creating a bigger market for children’s programming.

“If you’re a subscription-based service, what kids’ content does for you is it prevents churn,” says Williams.

That’s drawing attention from new, ad-supported streaming providers like the Roku Channel, PlutoTV and SamsungTV Plus, which are also thirsty for children’s storytelling. Williams says he sees fertile ground for new programming among the ad-based, video-on-demand services. “Kids and family content tends to be the most highly engaging that creates consumption in homes. That creates a lot of opportunities for advertisers.”

The Roku Channel and Viacom’s PlutoTV service show that there’s still demand for ad-supported, on-demand alternatives that are more curated than just YouTube. It’s a potential opportunity for more startups, as well as an opportunity for studios looking to pitch their talent and programming.

“When we’ve launched a new 24-7 video channel and AVOD library and omni services… [we] know that content is surrounded by other premium content,” says Williams.

For all of the opportunities these new platforms bring, Williams says YouTube isn’t going anywhere as one of the dominant new forces in children’s entertainment,  despite its many, many woes. In fact, one of Williams’ new initiatives at Pocketwatch is predicated on changes that YouTube is seemingly making in terms of the programming that it promotes with its algorithms.

As music streaming apps struggle to differentiate, Apple is making concert video a more central part of its strategy with tonight’s big Billie Eilish show at its HQ’s Steve Jobs Theater. The Apple Music Awards concert will be streaming live and then on-demand to Apple Music’s 60 million subscribers. Apple would like to do more of these streamed concerts in the near future.

You can stream Apple’s Billie Eilish concert here

Beyond the concert streaming, Apple is looking to strengthen its perception as an ally to art and artists. Given Apple Music is just a tiny fraction of the iPhone maker’s massive revenues, it can look overly corporate and capitalistic compared to music-only competitors like Spotify that some see as more aligned with the success of musicians.

To grow its subscriber count amongst serious listeners and earn points with creators, Apple Music can’t look like it’s just designed to sell more Apple hardware. So tonight Apple is hoping to show its respect for artists, handing out its first Apple Music Awards. Billie Eilish has won artist of the year and Songwriter Of The Year (with her brother Finneas), while Lizzo is taking home Breakthrough Artist Of The Year. Additionally, based on Apple Music streaming counts, Eilish’s ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” has won Album Of The Year, and Lil Was X’s ‘Old Town Road’ is the Song Of The Year.

The award statues themselves are specially-crafted Apple artifacts, featuring overwrought design like you see in those WWDC videos of robots making gadgets. They start with a single 12-inch disc of nanometer-level flat silicon wafer — the same kind used to power Apple’s iPhones. Copper layers are patterned with ultraviolet lithography to etch connections between the billions of transistors on the wafer. It’s then sliced into hundreds of individual chips and lined up during the months-long process to create a reflective trophy suspended between glass and anodized aluminum. In what’s sure to become a kooky collector’s item, each award is packaged with its own special Apple spirit level and mounting screws for classy installation.

The hope seems to be that both the winners and their fellow artists will come away with the perception that Apple truly cares about music. That, plus Apple Music’s scale, could help convince them to share more links to their songs on the streaming service and feature their profile there ahead of their presences on competing listening apps.

On the concert front, Apple started holding its yearly Apple Music Festival, formerly the iTunes Festival, back in 2007. But after a blow-out 10th year where Apple streamed shows from Britney Spears, Elton John, and Chance the Rapper, it discontinued the event in 2017. Apple Music launched a dedicated Music Videos tab last year, but has done less recently with concert streaming other than a few events with Tyler, The Creator and Shawn Mendes. These concert videos can be tough to find inside Apple Music.

Yet this represents a massive opportunity for Apple. Across music streaming services, catalogs are becoming more uniform, everyone is copying each other’s personalized playlists and discovery mechanisms, and many are embracing radio and podcasts. Meanwhile, paying for exclusive music or whole artists has fallen out of fashion compared to a few years ago. Fragmenting the music catalog is hostile towards listeners, can be harmful for artists who lose out on mass distribution, and it can engender backlash from artists fans’ who don’t want to pay for multiple redundant streaming services.

Streaming concert videos, which typically aren’t available beyond shaky camera phone footage, feel additive to the music ecosystem. If platforms are willing to pay to shoot and produce the videos, they can be powerful differentiators. And if the recorded shows look unique from the typical tours, as with the tree-covered stage for tonight’s Billie Eilish show at Apple headquarters, they keep fans glued to their screens. Video viewing can lead users to develop more affinity for whichever company is broadcasting the shows compared to multi-tasking while they merely listen to a generic app.

Apple is already ahead of competitors like Spotify that do very little on the concert video front. Streaming more shows like tonight’s could help it better rival YouTube Music, which integrates traditional music streaming with a broad array of rarities, music videos, and streamed concerts like Coachella. Apple is also fortunate to have a global retail and office footprint that could help it throw and record more shows with fewer logistical headaches.

To date, Apple Music has leaned on its pre-installations on the company’s phones, tablets, and computers plus its free trial system to drive growth. But if it can spot holes in the industry’s content offering, leverage its deep pockets to invest in premium video, and prove to artists that it cares, Apple Music could build a brand separate from and with more street cred than Apple itself.

YouTube is warning creators they may see their subscriber numbers decline this week as the result of a purge that will remove closed accounts from YouTube metrics. Closed accounts could refer to those that were willingly shut down by users or those that YouTube shut down for policy violations — like spam or abuse, for example.

The company informed creators of the possible loss of subscribers via a message on its Help site community forum, Twitter feed, as well as through a notification on YouTube Creator Studio, its dashboard for channel management.

It explains that a purge like this is routine and a part of YouTube’s ongoing efforts to ensure the site stays free from spam and abuse. But while the removals may lead to a creator’s subscriber numbers dropping, YouTube says this shouldn’t have an impact on a channel’s watch time.

Creators who are affected by the purge will see the changes to subscriber accounts appear in their YouTube Analytics for December 3 through December 4. To view the exact numbers of closed accounts that are removed from a channel, creators have to click on the “See more” menu in YouTube Analytics, then select “Closed Accounts” from “Subscription Source.”

Purges like this are not popular with most creators because subscriber numbers determine whether or not they become eligible for certain monetization tools, like channel memberships or merch shelf, for instance. It’s also a factor as to whether creators can join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). For smaller creators just nearing the 1,000-subscriber threshold for entry into YPP, even a small drop in subscriber counts can impact their ability to monetize.

For that reason, many smaller creators are asking fans to double-check to ensure they’re still subscribed as they believe purges like this remove legitimate accounts from their fan base, not just spam and closed accounts.

According to social media posts from creators, the impacts of the purge seem to vary wildly by channel. Some only report losing a few subscribers, others say they lost thousands.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has purged subscribers. Last December, it warned creators it would be removing a significant number of spam accounts over a 2-day period which would lead to large declines in subscriber numbers.

The launch of Disney+ has been successful in terms of sign-ups and adoption, but the user experience wasn’t quite up to par with what you get from other streaming services out the gate. Most noticeable was the lack of an easy way to pick up streaming where you left off – but that changes with a new “Continue Watching” section being added to the app’s homepage across all platforms where Disney+ is available as of today.

It should show up automatically as a new fourth row, under the “Originals” section. It behaves just as you’d expect, giving you a list of in-progress movies and shows that you’re watching, with a progress bar and the amount of time remaining. Tapping any of the images will jump right back into that content at the place where you left off, and the resume feature works across your logged in devices.

Turns out that this feature was supposed to be live at launch but was removed temporarily prior to the service going live so that the service’s engineers could focus on making sure other elements worked as intended for consumers. Disney+ still had its share of launch issues, including temporary inaccessibility due to overwhelming volume.

Why are we all trapped in enterprise chat apps if we talk 6X faster than we type, and our brain processes visual info 60,000X faster than text? Thanks to Instagram, we’re not as camera-shy anymore. And everyone’s trying to remain in flow instead of being distracted by multi-tasking.

That’s why now is the time for Loom. It’s an enterprise collaboration video messaging service that lets you send quick clips of yourself so you can get your point across and get back to work. Talk through a problem, explain your solution, or narrate a screenshare. Some engineering hocus pocus sees videos start uploading before you finish recording so you can share instantly viewable links as soon as you’re done. “What we felt was that more visual communication could be translated into the workplace and deliver disproportionate value” co-founder and CEO Joe Thomas tells me.

Launched in 2016, Loom is finally hitting its growth spurt. It’s up from 1.1 million users and 18,000 companies in February to 1.8 million people at 50,000 businesses sharing 15 million minutes of Loom videos per month. Remote workers are especially keen on Loom since it gives them face-to-face time with colleagues without the annoyance of scheduling synchronous video calls. “80% of our professional power users had primarily said that they were communicating with people that they didn’t share office space with” Thomas notes.

A smart product, swift traction, and a shot at riding the consumerization of enterprise trend has secured Loom a $30 million Series B. The round that’s being announced later today was led by prestigious SAAS investor Sequoia and joined by Kleiner Perkins, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Front CEO Mathilde Collin, and Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.

“At Instagram, one of the biggest things we did was focus on extreme performance and extreme ease of use and that meant optimizing every screen, doing really creative things about when we started uploading, optimizing everything from video codec to networking” Krieger says. “Since then I feel like some products have managed to try to capture some of that but few as much as Loom did. When I first used Loom I turned to Kevin who was my Instagram co-founder and said, ‘oh my god, how did they do that? This feels impossibly fast.'”

Systrom concurs about the similarities, saying “I’m most excited because I see how they’re tackling the problem of visual communication in the same way that we tried to tackle that at Instagram.” Loom is looking to double-down there, potentially adding the ability to Like and follow videos from your favorite productivity gurus or sharpest co-workers.

Loom is also prepping some of its most requested features. The startup is launching an iOS app next month with Android coming the first half of 2020, improving its video editor with blurring for hiding your bad hair day and stitching to connect multiple takes. New branding options will help external sales pitches and presentations look right. What I’m most excited for is transcription, which is also slated for the first half of next year through a partnership with another provider, so you can skim or search a Loom. Sometimes even watching at 2X speed is too slow.

But the point of raising a massive $30 million Series B just a year after Loom’s $11 million Kleiner-led Series A is to nail the enterprise product and sales process. To date, Loom has focused on a bottom-up distribution strategy similar to Dropbox. It tries to get so many individual employees to use Loom that it becomes a team’s default collaboration software. Now it needs to grow up so it can offer the security and permissions features IT managers demand. Loom for teams is rolling out in beta access this year before officially launching in early 2020.

Loom’s bid to become essential to the enterprise, though, is its team video library. This will let employees organize their Looms into folders of a knowledge base so they can explain something once on camera, and everyone else can watch whenever they need to learn that skill. No more redundant one-off messages begging for a team’s best employees to stop and re-teach something. The Loom dashboard offers analytics on who’s actually watching your videos. And integration directly into popular enterprise software suites will let recipients watch without stopping what they’re doing.

To build out these features Loom has already grown to a headcount of 45. It’s also hired away former head of growth at Dropbox Nicole Obst, head of design for Slack Joshua Goldenberg, and VP of commercial product strategy for Intercom Matt Hodges.

Still, the elephants in the room remain Slack and Microsoft Teams. Right now, they’re mainly focused on text messaging with some additional screensharing and video chat integrations. They’re not building Loom-style asynchronous video messaging…yet. “We want to be clear about the fact that we don’t think we’re in competition with Slack or Microsoft Teams at all. We are a complementary tool to chat” Thomas insists. But given the similar productivity and communication ethos, those incumbents could certainly opt to compete.

Loom co-founder and CEO Joe Thomas

Hodges, Loom’s head of marketing, tells me “I agree Slack and Microsoft could choose to get into this territory, but what’s the opportunity cost for them in doing so? It’s the classic build vs. buy vs. integrate argument.” Slack bought screensharing tool Screenhero, but partners with Zoom and Google for video chat. Loom will focus on being easily integratable so it can plug into would-be competitors. And Hodges notes that “Delivering asynchronous video recording and sharing at scale is non-trivial. Loom holds a patent on its streaming, transcoding, and storage technology, which has proven to provide a competitive advantage to this day.”

The tea leaves point to video invading more and more of our communication, so I expect rival startups and features to Loom will crop up. As long as it has the head start, it needs to move as fast as it can. “It’s really hard to maintain focus to deliver on the core product experience that we set out to deliver versus spreading ourselves too thin. And this is absolutely critical” Thomas tells me.

One thing that could set Loom apart? A commitment to financial fundamentals. “When you grow really fast, you can sometimes lose sight of what is the core reason for a business entity to exist, which is to become profitable. . . Even in a really bold market where cash can be cheap, we’re trying to keep profitability at the top of our minds.”

New York-based Frame.io, a video review and collaboration platform now used by over a million customers, has raised $50 million in Series C funding to further expand its investment in cloud-based video workflows. The round was led by Insight Partners, and included participation from existing investors Accel, FirstMark, SignalFire, and Shasta Ventures.

Itai Tsiddon, co-founder of Lightricks — another company looking to modernize media creation, most recently with the launch of content creation apps for small businesses — is joining Frame.io’s board to represent Insight Partners. To date, Frame.io has raised $82.2 million.

Founded in 2014 by the owner of a post-production company Emery Wells and technologist John Traver, Frame.io was created to solve the workflows challenges filmmakers faced in their daily lives.

Today, the Frame.io platform helps creative professionals streamline the video creation process by centralizing media assets, including dailies, scripts, storyboards, work-in-progress, and more, while also allowing for frame-accurate feedback and comments, annotations, and real-time approvals. The company additionally touts faster upload speeds than other cloud hosting services, like Vimeo, Box, Dropbox, and others.

The Frame.io web platform was designed to be a part of its customer’s existing processes, by integrating with non-linear editing systems (NLE’s), like Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid, Apple Final Cut Pro, and DaVinci Resolve Studio. These integrations allow editors to upload directly to Frame.io, then organize and share their products both internally and with external clients.

The service today is priced starting at $19 per month for an individual creator, $49 for a small team of three people, with the option to add on seats at $25/per seat per month, for up to 25 total seats. Beyond that, custom enterprise pricing is available. The feature set, active and archival storage, and customer support also improves as you move further up the pricing tiers.

Since launch, Frame.io has been adopted by a number of larger customers, including Turner Broadcasting, Disney, NASA, Snapchat, BBC, BuzzFeed, TED, Adobe, Udemy, Google, Fox Sports, Media Monks, Ogilvy, and VICE Media. Of its 1 million active customer accounts, Wells tells TechCrunch around 17,000 are from paying customers. He declined to speak to Frame.io’s profitability or current valuation, however.

Frame.io claims its customer base is 60% more efficient after adopting its solution, 41% more likely to hit their project deadlines, and are able to produce 39% more videos per month, on average.

With the added capital, the startup plans to double its product, design, and engineering teams from 40 people to 80, growing its total team from 110 to 240. It will also open an L.A.-based office and showroom next year, invest further in security, develop a set of (still to be announced) new products, and deliver on its so-called “camera to cloud” initiative.

This initiative was announced in October alongside the appointment of Michael Cioni, previously of Panavision, to Frame.io Global SVP of Innovation. Cioni is known in the industry for creating creative services company Light Iron in 2009 and spearheading the Millennium DXL 8K large-format camera system at Panavision. He’s also known for his work on films like Total Recall, The Green Hornet, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Gone Girl, Muppets Most Wanted, and The Social Network.

Cioni will be heading up the new L.A. operation which will more specifically focus on bringing the Frame.io platform to the areas of motion picture and television production. In order to gain more traction in this market, the company plans to address industry concerns around image quality, archiving, security and future proofing, the company recently explained.

In addition, Cioni sees the potential for Frame.io to benefit from the growth of the streaming video market.

“As the ‘streaming wars’ motivate a historic level of content across the global media landscape, the need to optimize the relationship creatives have with their content must also dramatically evolve,” he says. “Frame.io’s cloud-enabled workflows will serve the community by building a centralized, parallel, zero-latency collaborative experience access all departments and across all regions,” he says. “Our platform is not native to one department, rather Frame.io will become Hollywood’s operating system that uniquely connects the cloud, 5G network connections, production technologies, and a centralized database with each individual department,” Cioni stated.

Meanwhile, on the security front, Frame.io has been ramping up on its focus since February 2018 To date, it has added TPN compliance, Soc 2 Type 2 compliance, plus published a peer-reviewed security research paper, and received a CSO security award, it says.

Frame.io is not without competition in the video management business. Vimeo has been pivoting away from being a consumer-focused service to become a hub for video creation tools for individuals, teams, businesses, agencies and others, with particular focus on live video for social media, cross-platform streaming, OTT, and more.

Meanwhile, Wipster’s rival video collaboration platform is used by Meredith, AMC, NPR, Time Inc., REI Studios, Sephora Studios, Shopify Studios, Deloitte Studios, and others, according to its website. However, its corporate video platform isn’t designed for Hollywood, but rather for use cases like HR review of internal video comms, legal reviews of external sales and marketing videos, subject matter expert reviews of training videos, creative reviews and signoffs on videos from external agencies and freelancers.

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Insight on this next round of financing. Insight deeply understands the creative space and the changing tides the film and video market will see over the next several years,” said Emery Wells, co-founder and CEO of Frame.io, in a statement. “2019 has been a year of massive growth and of major milestones for us: we celebrated reaching 100 employees, moved into brand new headquarters in lower Manhattan and, most recently, welcomed industry veteran Michael Cioni to the team. We are driving to create the most innovative approach to video workflows since the emergence of digital 20 years ago.”

Tinder’s big experiment with interactive content — the recently launched in-app series called Swipe Night — was a success. According to Tinder parent company Match during its Q3 earnings this week, “millions” of Tinder users tuned into to watch the show’s episodes during its run in October, and this drove double-digit increases in both matches and messages. As a result, Match confirmed its plans to launch Tinder’s new show outside the U.S. in early 2020. 

Swipe Night’s launch was something of a departure for the dating app, whose primary focus has been on connecting users for dating and other more casual affairs.

The new series presented users with something else to do in the Tinder app beyond just swiping on potential matches. Instead, you swiped on a story.

Presented in a “choose-your-own-adventure” style format that’s been popularized by Netflix, YouTube, and others, Swipe Night asked users to make decisions to advance a narrative that followed a group of friends in an “apocalyptic adventure.”

The moral and practical choices you made during Swipe Night would then be shown on your profile as a conversation starter, or as just another signal as to whether or not a match was right for you. After all, they say that the best relationships come from those who share common values, not necessarily common interests. And Swipe Night helped to uncover aspects to someone’s personality that a profile would not — like whether you’d cover for a friend who cheated, or tell your other friend who was the one being cheated on?

The 5-minute long episodes ran every Sunday night in October from 6 PM to midnight.

Though early reports on Tinder’s plans had somewhat dramatically described Swipe Night as Tinder’s launch into streaming video, it’s more accurate to call Swipe Night an engagement booster for an app that many people often find themselves needing a break from. Specifically, it could help Tinder to address issues around declines in open rates or sessions per user — metrics that often hide behind what otherwise looks like steady growth. (Tinder, for example, added another 437,000 subscribers in the quarter, leading to 5.7 million average subscribers in Q3).

Ahead of earnings, there were already signs that Swipe Night was succeeding in its efforts to boost engagement.

Tinder said in late October that matches on its app jumped 26% compared to a typical Sunday night, and messages increased 12%.

On Tinder’s earnings call with investors, Match presented some updated metrics. The company said Swipe Night led to a 20% to 25% increase in “likes” and a 30% increase in matches. And the elevated conversation levels that resulted from user participation continued for days after each episode aired. Also importantly, the series helped boost female engagement in the app.

“This really extended our appeal and resonated with Gen Z users,” said Match CEO Mandy Ginsberg. “This effort demonstrates the kind of creativity and team we have a tender and the kind of that we’re willing to make.”

The company says it will make Season 1 of Swipe Night (a hint there’s more to come) available soon as an on-demand experience, and will roll out the product to international markets early next year.

Swipe Night isn’t the only video product Match Group has in the works. In other Match-owned dating apps, Plenty of Fish and Twoo, the company is starting to test live streaming broadcasts. But these are created by the app’s users, not as a polished, professional product from the company itself.

Match had reported better-than-expected earnings for the third quarter, with earnings of 51 cents per share — above analysts’ expectations for earnings of 42 cents per share. Match’s revenue was $541 million, in line with Wall St.’s expectations.

But its fourth-quarter guidance came in lower than expectations ($545M-$555M, below the projected $559.3M), sending the stock dropping. Match said it would have to take on about $10 million in expenses related to it being spun out from parent company IAC.