Context
Back to the 2014 mid-year when neither Snapchat stories nor Instagram nor Facebook existed. To broadcast a video, you had to download it to your favorite platform online account, wait, and then tell your community to go see it.
We met Jean Michel Reynoird at that time. He suggested the brilliant idea of creating a media where users’ lives would not be immortalized on an online platform, but rather broadcast live to all their communities. These videos would be backed-up nowhere and would remain an individual property.
Our intervention
In 2014, it was difficult for us to convince investors to bet on a technology that was far away from the current democratization. There was also no reference “killer app”. It was therefore necessary to design and develop a first fully functional prototype in iOS to enable our interlocutors to project themselves into the final use stage.
Having examined the existing live streaming solutions, we made up our mind to design our own platform. Hence, we needed a high processing power, a stable and scalable development and especially the production of a functional prototype in a restricted time. Based on an AWS infrastructure and an mBaaS under Parse, we designed an iOS app in Objective C that allowed USERS to launch a video, and choose whether to broadcast it to the public or to specific individuals of their choice. In the latter case, each user received a push notification and could catch the current live. They could even interact directly with all viewers through a real time messenger.
Findings
Plenty of positive reactions occurred in a record time. The first news was a 500 000 $ investment by EDM Record Label. Source: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tizr
This sum was sufficient to finance the Android version that was successful as well: Alcatel has embedded the app in all its brand new phones.
The app was also promoted by the very serious Tech Crunch: https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/tizr/
Things went even better when David Guetta broadcast some of his concerts live through Tizr.
Next ?
Back then, we were grateful and proud to take the lead in designing a live streaming app that was hugely successful! However, it was a short-lived feeling. A few months later, Meerkat was launched, followed by Periscope who killed the game. Much more funding resources and especially the ability to use the entire Twitter community contributed to our great story.
Nevertheless, the founders managed to make a turning point using their technical legacy to design a real-time flow distribution backend. Their mission is to enable the new Meerkat, Periscope and Tizr to easily emerge. And guess what? They switched to the YCombinator that represents the largest start-uppers accelerator around the world (AirBnB, Stripe, and MixPanel – no less).
Tizr is a successful initiative just like Clicher, MySam or Toulouse-Blagnac Airport with whom we were proud to work.
The resultant of Tizr’s pivot was rebranded Firekast and is already in perfect working order.
Aren’t we good at creating priceless success stories 😉