Happs, an app that allows YouTubers to simultaneously stream live videos across social platforms, raised $ 4.7 million in a post-seed round. The product originally started as a platform for independent journalists, but over the past year it expanded its mission to bring tools to all online creators while connecting them through a new social network.
Funding was led by Bullpen Capital and Crosslink, with Goodwater, Corazon, Rob Hayes of First Round Capital and Bangaly Kaba, previously on Instagram and Sequoia, also participating.
What sets luck Aside from a few well-established competitors in the field, the team’s desire is not just to develop tools to help video producers produce professional-looking online streams, but to maintain a kind of meta-community that attracts people from other social media Bringing Sites Together.
“We see this as the essence of what the Creator Economy is all about,” Happs CEO Mark Goldman told ProWellTech. “The idea of keeping creators on a single platform is a very traditional way of thinking about content creation.”
Like Goldman, the other co-founders David Neuman and Drew Shepard come from the media world. Goldman was the founding COO of Current TV, an experimental television broadcaster dedicated to user-generated content that was eventually sold to Al Jazeera in 2013.
“The whole idea was to democratize and open up the media,” said Goldman of his time at Current TV, which he connects directly to his interest in building Happs. “[We] loved the creativity it unleashed. “
Online creators tend to be isolated within the app where they have built the largest community, but Happs wants them to be able to get as many followers as possible in a platform-independent way. For YouTubers, the appeal of multistreaming is to maximize reach while creating content efficiently. You risk alienating YouTube followers at the expense of your Twitch community if you don’t play your cards right, but some savvy content creators have turned to the model to grow their audience.
Happs connects people on different platforms in different ways. On the one hand, Happs users can broadcast live on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch at the same time. The app also collects live comments from all supported social media sites and beams them into its own interface, where they appear in a continuous cross-platform stream.
The built-in commenting feature is a nice built-in option for anyone commenting on multiple devices at once during the live stream, which is no easy task. If you’re streaming live, you can add a comment so that followers can see it on screen regardless of which platform they’re watching the video on.
Other companies in the field like OBS, Streamlabs and Restream focus on the tools that are part of the equation, providing power users with a useful backend for distributing live, multi-stream video. Stromhof also offers multistreaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms via a simple browser interface.
In contrast to these services, Happs feels more like a social network, with familiar features such as user profile photos, follower numbers and a feed next to a “go-live” button. Anyone can use the multi-streaming platform through their iOS or Android apps or a web interface, whether they are a creator who signs up for the tools or a fan who wants to support the content they love.
Happs lacks some of the bells and whistles of its competitors, such as B. Fancy custom graphics and lower thirds, but it has a few interesting tricks. While you’re streaming live on Happs, you can invite someone else on the app to join your feed for real-time collaboration. The elements of the social network are designed to encourage cross-platform creativity so that a YouTuber and Twitch personality can hang out together and increase their reach while simultaneously streaming to a number of other apps.
Happs also provides users with monetization tools from the start with no requirements before they can start making money. That speaks to the app’s appeal to creators who may be less established or just starting out. Happs could be a much tougher sale for a popular creator who has invested heavily in a platform like Twitch, which has anti-multi-streaming rules for most accounts that are allowed to monetize.
There are several ways to make money. You let everyone on Happs sponsor a station through regular monthly payments. The other is a one-time option that allows you to redeem a prize for each livestream or retrospectively for the VOD (Video on Demand). The in-app currency is a virtual coin that users can buy or earn by doing things in the app. Advertising is not (yet) planned.
The company will cut 30% of its subscription revenue, though it will be waiving those fees for an indefinite period of time in order to attract people to the platform, according to Goldman.
“We raised this round to really build the product and tech team [and] make the platform much more stable and reliable, ”said Goldman. The company looks forward to using the new resources to “really go out there now and step before the Creators so they know Happs exists”.