Kyte.tv

» see kyte.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

kyte was a san francisco company in the part of the web-video boom that did not survive the iphone becoming the camera. i never opened kyte.tv. the user base was anglo-internet musicians and brand accounts running mobile-broadcast experiments in 2008, and i was an engineering student in ankara on a desktop browser running youtube. mobile live streaming in 2008 was a category that only worked in places with the right phone and a data plan that could carry video. that combination was a san francisco demographic, not an ankara one.

the company was founded in 2006 by daniel graf and erik abair. graf was a former apple manager who had worked on quicktime, abair was the technical cofounder. the early product was a publishing platform that let an account holder stream live or on-demand video to a web channel that worked on desktop and on mobile clients. by 2008 the mobile angle was the pitch and kyte had partnerships with verizon and sprint to ship a branded player on selected handsets.

the brand-name customers were the marketing material. lady gaga ran a kyte channel during the fame tour in 2009. european football clubs deployed it for fan content, which the kit digital acquisition would later highlight. the revenue was $3.7 million in fiscal 2010, which is a real number for a five-person startup and a small number compared to ustream and justin.tv on the same market.

kit digital acquired kyte on january 31 2011 for around $5.7 million in a three-way deal that also picked up kickapps and kewego for a combined $77.2 million. the consumer-facing kyte.tv brand was folded into the parent platform by mid-2011 and the san francisco office was downsized that summer. erik abair joined kit digital's product team. daniel graf moved on to google as a product manager on the maps team. kit digital itself filed for bankruptcy in april 2013 after a securities-fraud scandal that ended with the ceo kaleil isaza tuzman convicted in december 2017. the post-bankruptcy company renamed itself piksel and the kyte technology was absorbed into a generic video-platform stack.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

kyte sat in the mobile-live-streaming pocket between ustream (the laptop-webcam tier) and stickam (the teen chat tier). the differentiator was the mobile-first orientation, kyte's player worked on phones years before youtube had a usable mobile clip player. the back-end was a cloud-based publishing tool that let a producer schedule live segments and run the whole channel from a phone. that workflow looked novel in 2008 and obvious by 2012.

the partner integrations were the moat for as long as the moat held. kyte had the verizon and sprint deals because the carriers were trying to differentiate handsets with bundled video apps before youtube took the category over. when the iphone shipped with a real youtube app and android handsets defaulted to youtube on the home screen, the carrier-bundled-video pitch lost its strategic value. kyte's revenue plateaued in 2010 and the founders started looking for an acquirer.

~ the postmortem ~

kit digital was building an online-video roll-up. kaleil isaza tuzman had taken the company public in 2008 and the strategy was acquire-acquire-acquire to build a single integrated platform that could compete with brightcove and ooyala. the january 2011 three-way deal was the largest roll-up of the cycle. the press coverage was glowing. techcrunch ran an exclusive headline. the kit stock jumped on the announcement.

the rest of the story is in the sec filing record. the share price had been inflated through transactions with an investment vehicle controlled by tuzman. the auditors flagged it in 2012, tuzman left in april of that year, the bankruptcy followed in april 2013. the kyte engineers were laid off in waves through 2012. the platform was rolled into the surviving piksel product, which is still operational in 2026 as a small video-tech vendor with no consumer brand.

~ what carried over ~

mobile live streaming as a consumer category did not arrive until meerkat and periscope in march 2015. those products are widely credited as the first mobile-live experience that worked. kyte had shipped the same idea seven years earlier on hardware that was not ready and through carrier partnerships that turned out to be a dead end. by the time the category was real, kyte was a piksel asset and the original team was scattered across google and the next wave of startups.

daniel graf went on to run google now and then product at uber and then at warner music. erik abair stayed in video infrastructure. the kyte name disappeared from search results within two years. the san francisco wave of 2006-to-2010 video startups produced ustream and justin.tv as cautionary tales of platforms that had to pivot, and kyte as the cautionary tale of a platform that did not pivot fast enough and got rolled into a public-company fraud instead.

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