Tapping the opportunity to move video games on YouTube

Absrtact: If you want to ask what YouTube video is most popular, many people will think of a pet or music video (MV), but perhaps few people will know that the game video is also very popular. A start-up company Ka that provides video recording SDK for mobile games

If you want to ask what YouTube video is most popular, many people will think of a pet video or music video (MV), but perhaps few people will know that the game video is also very popular.

Kamcord, a start-up company that provides a video recording SDK for mobile gaming, has studied some of YouTube's data and found that more than 250 million visitors a month are watching video games on YouTube, and that overall, people watch video games more than they can see.

But they also found that video games on YouTube are mostly PC games, such as StarCraft, the League of Heroes and Dota. "We believe that in the next 2 years, the mobile game market will be bigger than other games, in the game video is the same." Kamcord co-founder Aditia Rathnam (Aditya Rathnam) said to Tencent Technology.

Not long ago Kamcord announced that nearly 120 games had been implanted in their SDK, and that more than 1 billion video games had been recorded through the tools they provided. That's just what they've done with IOS devices, and their video recording program for Android Games is still in the process of development.

Opportunities to move video games

In the era of PC games and host games, sharing game video is a strong demand, and the demand comes from both the game makers and the gamers.

For game vendors, the spread of video games can better promote their own games. For gamers, they also want to show more people how to play the game and get a sense of satisfaction. In addition, by watching the game video, the player can also improve their game level.

Twitch is now the biggest player in the market, with more than 3500 people watching video games over the Twich each month, averaging 1.5 hours per day per person. No Twitch has been working with Sony and Microsoft, and the new Sony Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox one can be streamed through the Twitch video game screen.

But in the field of mobile gaming, no company has yet dominated. Kamcord that this is their chance. "Although we have some competitors, the market is far from saturated," he said. "Aditia said.

He believes YouTube and Twitch have proved that game video is very popular, although most game videos are PC games and host games, but two years later mobile gaming videos will become a huge market, and they are likely to be the driving force behind this.

"Now we've recorded more than 1 billion videos with the tools we've provided, which proves that the market is huge and our products are very popular," says Aditia. ”

The important point of Kamcord's success is that it requires the support of game developers, and more developers will be able to embed the SDK provided by Kamcord into their own code. Kamcord also attaches great importance to this, saying it only takes 10 minutes to implant the SDK. Interestingly, one company has 10 minutes to add our SDK to the product, and 7 minutes for coffee breaks.

At the same time Kamcord also strive to make the recording of the video without affecting the player to play the game, do not appear in cotton and so on, and recording can be very convenient to share.

Player sharing is the most important reason for developers to use Kamcord services. Aditia said 10% of users clicked on the game's link in the App store after watching the game video. This is a great help to increase the amount of game downloads and gamers.

Star Investment team and China market

As a start-up company, Kamcord is not famous, but the investment team behind it is very important.

Kamcord's three co-founders are from MIT's Computer Science program, which was hatched in Y Combinator in the summer of 2012.

Interestingly, now the game video boss Twitch originally belonged to Justin.tv company, the company also graduated from Y Combinator. Only after graduating from the Justin.tv is the online calendar, after Google (Weibo) launched a calendar service, the transformation of the video service.

Aditia says they have benefited a lot from Y Combinator. The most important of these two points is to listen to the voice of the user to build the product that the user wants, and to do a good job of customer service--usually developers have any questions they will respond to within a few hours. At the same time, they have learned a lot of fast-growing experiences from other startups in Y Combinator incubation.

At present Kamcord has received two rounds of financing, the first round of 1.5 million U.S. dollars and the second round of 1 million dollars. Although the amount of financing is not large, but its investors are very strong investment institutions and angel investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Google VC, Tencent, Innovation workshop and Yahoo CEO Marissa (Marissa Mayer) and so on.

Among them, the second round of Kamcord investors are from China, respectively, Tencent and innovation workshops. Aditia said Tencent has a strong presence in the North American gaming market and has a large stake in the two well-known gaming companies, Riot Games and Epic Games.

The Chinese market is also Kamcord's next stop, Tencent and innovation Factory can be a great help to expand their China business. But when it comes to China, Adi does not give a definite point of time, but says it will speed up the march to China after they have a video-recording solution for Android games.