I am a big fan of SplashCast, and not just because the company is based a couple of hours down south in Portland. The company has been on a roll lately, beginning with participation in the launch of the Facebook platform earlier this year. Recently, SplashCast released a new and improved player with a slew of cool new features. As it turns out, that was not the end, but just another step in what appears, at least to me, to be Splashcast’s larger plans; to enable viral, branded, distribution of video content.

Well just moments ago, the company made some major announcements on its blog. Key among these is a partnership with Columbia Records. The channel included below is for New York Based Coheed and Cambra, the first of many Columbia artist channels to leverage Splashcast (and I kinda dig them too)
.

The Columbia deal also brings some new features to the Splashcast player. The first, FanCast, is a new mobile publishing feature, that will allow the band’s fans to upload photos, audio files and video from their mobile phones to the Coheed and Cambria channel. This feature is being rolled out to all Splashcast publishers, and is a great way of engaging fans and followers. Channel owners will be able to designate any show to accept media files emailed from mobile phones or they can create a special show just for mobile submissions. FanCast submissions can also be moderated by channel owners.

A second feature, chat, will at first only be available on branded artist channels, including “some more Columbia Records artists with names everyone will recognize”. The chat feature will then be extended to all other channels and publishers can choose to add chat if they want to do so. This feature really excites me. My podcast has a SplashCast channel as well, and it would be cool to add chat facilities to it.

And for all the Twitter fanatics out there (which would include everyone involved with TechBizMedia), the third new feature - immediately available on all channels - makes SplashCast the only media player online that allows quick, inline messaging to Twitter. Viewers will be able to click the Twitter icon in your players, provide their username and login and then enter a message to be sent with a link to your channel to their entire network of friends on Twitter. For some audiences I would argue that this is a killer feature and I can’t wait to enable it on all the channels that I have set up. If I might add a plug for Twitter, this is what Twitter and micro-messaging is all about. Quick, viral distribution of content with just a few mouse clicks. The folks at SplashCast obviously recognize this and have taken advantage.

Some of the new features at SplashCast bring a dimension to Splashcast that I had only seen in Kyte.tv thus far. As a big fan of both and heavy user of both, I am trying to understand the differentiation. Definitely, both are vying for the personal publishing crowd, and while Kyte would like to go after the bigger publishers, SplashCast, with its rich feature set is ideally positioned for high-end, branded distribution and syndication. According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, Director of Content at SplashCast, smaller publishers like the flexibility and customization of the player, as well as the lack of SplashCast branding, something I can definitely appreciate as a small publisher. It will be interesting to see how this space evolves and the activities of companies like SplashCast, Kyte, etc, which are definitely vying for some of the same users. It only bodes well for publishers, who are likely to get more powerful features and better user experiences.

In the meantime, I am looking forward to what the folks at SplashCast will be up to next. Something tells me they are not quite done for the year.

Technorati Tags: SplashCast, Columbia Records