Over the past week, I have been playing with kyte.tv, which could be labeled as a personal video publishing platform. How do the folks at kyte describe their efforts?

kyte allows anybody to create their own interactive TV channel on their website, blog, social network or mobile phone

With kyte, you create your own live TV shows and broadcast them on your own interactive channel, on your website, blog, social network or mobile phone. You can share your kyte channel with your friends and collaborate with them so that they can also be a part of your shows, by adding their own content, by voting and by chatting live with other viewers. With kyte, you can share your experiences live with the world and be the star, director and producer of your own live TV channel, wherever you are and however you want.

It does take a while to get your head around all the possibilities with kyte. The easiest thing to do is to use your mobile phone and just email videos to your kyte channel. More powerful tools are available via the web interface, where users can use media other than video, add music, annotation, etc. The player itself is interesting. The look and feel is very different from other services out there. In the beginning I didn’t like it too much, but it grows on you. The player also has a chat room that accompanies it, with all the chat in public. I do have some problems with this as it is not possible to control abuse. Either that or I missed something.

It is the social aspects of the channel you create that are perhaps the most interesting feature of kyte. It allows others (assuming the channel is set up to allow that) to post material to your channel. In my opinion this is the best aspect of the feature. Chat around a channel is neat, but the ability to have a single location where multiple people can post, perhaps have a micro-blogged conversation has some promise.

The social aspects of kyte are further enhanced by the Facebook gadget, which is how I discovered kyte. I am not sure how many people are using the gadget and it is not among the more popular ones, but it definitely integrates well into the site.

Where does kyte go from here? The site is not monetized, and it still hasn’t seen the kind of spike in user adoption that one might see with people like Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte on there. The online video market is very crowded and while I can see a place for kyte there as a collaborative microblogging/connectivity platform, I am not yet convinced that it can get the kind of growth required for long term success. The best cast scenario is an acquisition to acquire the kyte platform, which definitely has potential. Much as I like Kyte, it does not seem to have the kind of viral nature as say splashcast, and will probably work best integrated into a social framework rather than trying to be one by itself.