Kamcord

» see kamcord.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every game I have cared about ran on a desktop. Counter-Strike in Ankara internet cafes between 2002 and 2005, Ultima Online private servers at home, all of it keyboard and mouse and a monitor that somebody sitting next to me could also see. Kamcord was built for a person holding a phone, and for the proposition that strangers would want to watch them hold it.

It launched on 13 June 2012 out of Y Combinator, built by Aditya Rathnam and Kevin Wang with Matt Zitzmann as chief executive. The first product was not an app. It was a software kit a developer added to their own game, and once it was in, a player could capture the last stretch of play and post the clip, voice track included, without ever leaving the game they were in. That is a clever place to sit. You are not asking anybody to install anything, because you are already inside the thing they opened.

It worked. By October 2014 close to five hundred games carried the kit and more than a million players had shared twenty five million clips. Over $35 million came in across the life of the company, from GungHo and Tencent early, then a $10 million round led by Time Warner in April 2016. Offices opened in Tokyo and Seoul, because the Asian mobile game market was several years ahead of the American one and everyone in the category knew it.

For three years this was a component business, and component businesses are quiet by construction. Players shared clips without ever learning whose software had captured them, and growth was a question of how many developers would sign rather than how many strangers could be persuaded to download something. It was a defensible position and Kamcord walked out of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pivot ~

In August 2015 the company dropped the recording kit and became a live streaming app. The reasoning was legible from outside. Amazon had just paid close to a billion dollars for Twitch and phones were where most of the world's players now were, and nobody had built the mobile version of that. Live went out in Japan and Korea in November 2015 and reached every Android user a month later. By February 2016 broadcasters could take money from the people watching.

What the pivot gave away was the only wall the company had. A kit that lives inside other people's games cannot be displaced without a business development deal and a new build shipped through an app store. An app on a home screen sits one icon away from YouTube. Google launched YouTube Gaming in the same month Kamcord went live, and Twitch shipped mobile broadcasting of its own not long after. Kamcord was now competing on marketing spend against two companies that had more of it than it could measure.

~ how it ended ~

On 16 November 2017 Lyft hired twelve of Kamcord's fifteen employees, both surviving co-founders included. The terms were not disclosed and Lyft was explicit that it had not bought the technology, only the people, who knew a great deal about mobile video capture and low latency streaming and were pointed at Lyft's own product instead. The apps stopped working before the end of the year. There was no farewell post that anybody archived, which is why this grave carries a month rather than a day.

~ what happened to the category ~

The function Kamcord sold to developers became a checkbox in the operating system. Apple had shipped ReplayKit in 2015 and put a screen recorder into the control center with iOS 11 in September 2017, which is roughly the month the company was being taken apart. Android arrived at the same place shortly after. Any game could now record itself with no kit to integrate and no revenue share to sign.

The live half of the idea was correct and went to other people. Mobile broadcasting is ordinary now, mostly inside Twitch and YouTube, and the games it happens for are the ones Kamcord was serving. Getting the timing right and the position wrong is a specific way to lose, and it usually looks like this: a good product, real usage, real money raised, and twelve engineers walking into a ride hailing company because that was the last asset left worth anything.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »