Early in the year, GxStream was chosen from among hundreds of companies to be one of 20 chosen to participate in the first Venture Accelerator from Tallwave.

We made outstanding progress over the course of the program, that included:

• Signing a Letter-of-Intent with an Emmy-winning executive producer to develop highlight shows for our users streams
• Signing a Letter-of-Intent with a major eSports organizer
• Finished refactoring of our platform to move from Amazon Web Services to Rackspace

Tallwave executives also worked with us to validate and tweak our financial models, our customer acquisition models, and identify a wide range of Channel Partners for user acquisition.

The team at Tallwave has generously offered continued services to GxStream as part our participation in the venture accelerator and we’re proud to have their support.

Over the last several months, we’ve been pursuing the expansion of our advisory board to help us add to our knowledge arsenal as we continue to get closer to our market launch.

We’re very pleased to welcome a trio outstanding executives to our Advisory Board.

Mr. Keith Boesky - Keith is a videogame industry veteran with over 20 years of leadership in roles that range from President of Eidos Interactive to negotiating deals as a lawyer and as a talent agent at the renowned International Creative Management (ICM).  His background and reach in the traditional videogame industry give us both relevant insight into business goals and models for the publishers, and how we make sure our service offerings add value to our publisher relationships.

Mr. Brad Feldman – Brad is an operational ninja.  In our first meeting, we were just talking about presentation deck contents and possibly pitching to the Pasadena Angels group.  By the end of our conversations, we asked him to join our board, and he agreed.  His ability to reach into a plan, insulate the risks as much as possible while pulling out every potential piece of value really impressed us.  With his experience in building operational businesses from ground up to exit, we’re very happy to have his support.

Mr. John Canning – John’s an indefatigable champion of technologies and their development.  He’s been a core contributor to adoption and product development of things like Windows Media Center for Microsoft, which later became a part of Microsoft TV.  He’s lead product development of the incredible WeVideo editing platform, and is now leading product management of 2nd screen experiences for NBC.  His experience in leveraging technology to drive better connections between audience and content gives us an edge in making sure we’re making the right product choices in our development cycles.

We’re excited about the enthusiasm and contributions these three have already brought to bear in supporting our mission of making videogaming one of the most entertaining and accessible forms of entertainment in history.

As 2012 draws to a close, we at GxStream want to wish all of you the very best in the New Year.

The year has been full of challenges for our startup; including a change in our core team, and an exhaustive search for capital that would allow us to get our services launched faster and with better support. To be frank, investors generally really don’t get gamers, or the gaming market well at all, especially when it comes to some of the newer aspects of what our service is architected to do.

We began our active fundraising search in April of 2012, and by July had been accepted into presenting at 2 of the top 4 angel financing groups in Southern California. By September, we’d successfully beat out 200 other companies to move into diligence with one of the final groups and we spent a really deep 10 weeks doing business diligence with them. We did hours upon hours of working platform demos (minus a couple of things to finish up with their capital), set up calls with alpha testers and the investors, set up calls with other gamers and the investors, went through reference checks and deal structure discussions; all to come to a final moment when their consensus said “we like you and what you’ve built, we just don’t understand this market. Maybe we’ll understand it better when you have ‘x’ number of users and you’re making money.”

We continue to move through rounds and discussions with other potential financiers, but here’s what we’ve decided to do; STOP focusing on raising money, and figuring out how to launch the service on our own. What that means is that I’ve been lucky enough to get some great work with Riot Games, and some of the cash from that work has been going into getting the remaining development done as I can afford to pay for it (which is a little at a time). In fact, most of 2012 I worked on Gx with zero salary from the company; and my work with Riot has been what’s kept it afloat. My awesome wife has been cool enough to let me take $$ away from our family to continue development, and dammit, we are going to get it done.

The State of the Platform itself is this: we have put several thousand development hours into it, and it works. There are 3 key features left that are 80% complete, and need to be finished.  We also just got accepted into the Rackspace Startup Program, which gives us a great way to get launched once we get moved off AWS and over to RSP.

If anyone is interested in working with us on finishing it so we can get this beast launched, please reach out to me at jon [dot] lawrence [at] gxstream.com; specifically, here’s what we have left:

• Chat system (custom built Python/Tornado backend, front end has UI and game mechanics requirements that use Javascript, PHP and some RoR tie-in’s as well).
• Cloud management – help us move applications off of existing service providers, and over to new ones associated with Rackspace.
• Video application management – Wowza expertise and security would be really awesome.

We’re pretty bootstrapped right now, but for the right developers or engineers, we can figure out a way to work together.  One way or another, we are going to launch this service next year!

We also owe some serious thanks to our awesome social media managers (volunteers) who have made an active difference in these early days of the GxStream community; y’all rock!

Personally, I also really want to say thank you to all of you who have enthusiastically supported our goals and dreams in building the next generation of the gaming broadcast platform.

We believe in all of you, and the power of your gaming; and in our shared goal to connect you with your fans and your favorite gamers in a way that makes game streaming way more awesome.

Here’s to a fantastic 2013 ahead!

I’m pleased to welcome the latest addition to the GxStream team, our new Consulting Chief Technology Officer, John Shiple.

John has helped build successful companies by leading the development of innovative products for businesses and investors, including Geocities, Mota Motors, and HotWired.

He brings expertise in scaling businesses while concurrently building, training, and mentoring development teams. His work for GxStream will focus on getting the most mileage out of our technology in support of our company objectives.

He has a special expertise in working with emerging and disruptive technologies, which of course, is what we’ve been working on at the core of our service.

John’s enthusiasm for building great teams, and great company cultures is just as important and inspiring, and we’re excited about having him on our team.

At the same time, we are sad to announce that founding CTO John Bland will not be continuing on with us.

John B’s contributions to the early stages of the company are deeply appreciated, and we wish him the very best in the future.

Startups are nothing, if not an adventure.

I know a lot of you are (im)patiently waiting for us to open our doors and let loose your streaming goodness on the world, and we’re really grateful to have your enthusiastic support.

We’ve made a lot of progress on our Alpha platform, but it still needs some work before we’re ready to take it to a staged beta. More importantly for us as a business is that prepping and releasing the staged beta for use means that we have to be properly capitalized before we commit to date for the release.

I’m just guessing here, but I think you’d all be kinda upset if we opened up the platform, you loved on it, and then we got it shut off by our service providers because we didn’t pay a $xx,xxx bill for the streaming;)  I know some of us have seen that happen to other video startups in particular, and we’re gonna choose to not make that same mistake.

Our current second round of fundraising for us is likely to close sometime in September (all a part of investment negotiations), which probably puts our beta closer to October.

If any of you want to help us spread the word among investors, feel free to point them to our AngelList or our Gust page and help make it happen. The faster we can get investors subscribed to the round, the sooner we can start giving you a better way to build, and connect with your friends, fans, and viewers!

Last night, GxStream launched it’s official MVP to our first user group.

This is how I feel about that.

We just sent Einstein 1 minute into the future.

Soon, we’re going to send Marty.  And we’re gonna  see if this thing “can do 90,” as Marty once said.

I’m immensely proud of the work that John Bland and his team have done getting us to this point.  In less than 8 months, and with less than $200k, we’ve done customer development, product discovery and wireframing, and massive infrastructure development.  All coming together today, in quasi-public for the first time.

Now we get to start ironing out the kinks in the DeLorean, on our way to that glorious Mr. Fusion version, and the Hover Conversion.

As Doc said at the end of BTTF 1 – “Roads? Where we’re goin’, we don’t need roads.”

Here at GxStream, it’s time to take things to the next level!

First and foremost, we are officially letting our MVP/Alpha group start banging away on our platform!  We appreciate our A Teams patience as we decided to add a bit more MVP (minimum viable product) to our Alpha specs so we could start off with a more complete platform experience.

We’re getting closer to being “Beta Ready” every day, and we’re lovin’ the Twitter sentiments y’all are throwing out there.   Over the last few weeks, we built our own from-scratch chat system that should be rock-solid and blazing fast.  While the UI and front-end features will be evolving a lot over the next month or so, our focus on stability and scalability should make chatting on the GxStream platform a great experience.

Lastly, a few folks have joined us in building the GxStream Community that I’d like to give a shout out too:

• Mike.Anderson – community lead
• SourNotHardcore – community manager
• Surge – community moderator
• Coltrane – community moderator
• RadarGaming – community moderator

Thank you to all of you guys who are laying the groundwork for an awesome community; and start watching for more community development coming soon!

I wanted to add a note to my earlier more detailed post about what’s coming up for GxStreamer’s – in that we *will* be sharing ad revenues with streamers after we launch to the public.

We are still working out the details of the minimum payout levels, as well as making sure each of our streamers get good metrics that make sure we all know how many ads ran, what the payouts are, and at what point ad splits get paid out, as well as what ratio of splits we do with streamers.

One really important thing to note, is that as you grow your stream, the more audience you have, and the more “brand-friendly” you are as a streamer, the more opportunity you will have to get higher ad buying rates on your shows or across your network of shows.

If you want our help, GxStream will be very active in helping you make the most of your streams as we grow together; and it’s gonna be awesome.

As we get closer to launch, we’re excited to start sharing some more details about what we’re doing that’s different, and why.

We’re psyched about the game community, and one of our core motivations for starting GxStream is to enable game streamers to create better connections with their audiences, and in doing so, create more opportunities for earning money doing so.

We are not going to start off doing ad splits right away.  To be honest, advertising revenues only add up to a lot of money in aggregate across an entire site – at the individual stream level; the CPM’s are really low.

For example; let’s say you’re *really* popular, and have 1m views across all your videos.  Let’s assume that each viewer watched one ad.   Ads are priced as a unit called CPM – which means “what we pay per 1000 viewers of this ad.”

Current prices on a 30 second video ad for user-generated video is about $5.00.

So, for every 1,000 viewers, the site earns $5.00, and if we split 50/50 with you, the streamer, you’d make $2.50 gross (and so would we, except we’ve got some costs to cover with that:).

Multiply that across your 1m viewers, and you’ve earned $2,500 total, for your stream.

There are some ways to get higher CPM’s – but that’s a topic for another post soon.

This brings us back to building better ways for you to make money streaming your gameplay – but it’s going to take some work on your side too.

We think there’s a better way to measure how much you engage with your audience, and give them better ways to engage with you if they like your video stream.

Your audiences will be able to reward you directly with ways to upgrade your stream, or go ad free.

But  you will have to earn that from your audience.

We also think there’s a better way to rank streams than just by how many viewers or how many likes each video has.  So we’ve built a new way to rank streams that will help even the smaller streamers have a better shot at breaking into the top ranks.

But again, you’ll have to earn it.

That’s where our core difference lies; we’re mashing up a bit of StackOverflow, a little bit of Reddit, a little bit of Foursquare, and a little bit of Twitch. Our platform measures every time you talk to your audience and how engaged they are with your stream and rewards you for that.

So if you’ve got a hundred fans you love, who love talking with you and watching you, you will rank higher than someone who has a 1000 viewers but they’re not interacting with their audience.

It’s not just about about badges, it’s about community-building game mechanics that make live video streaming a better experience for both the streamers and your audience; and we’re pretty damn excited about it.

We’re also adding in some features you’re going to love, and we’ll have more details on those coming out soon as well.

One last thing about GxStream, is that we are not just a website.  We could have pushed up a live streaming website a couple of months ago, but we wanted to go bigger than that.  We spent about 2 months building a robust, from-the-ground-up API that will be public, and built our own site on top of that foundation.

So if you want to build your own channel app for iOS or Android? You’ll be able to sign up for our developers program and do just that (and oh yes, we’re already testing video streams on iOS – they look great even over Airplay to the big screen!).  If you want to be able to pull your GxStream achievements onto your own site where you can show them off along side your videostream?  Hit the API.

We’re excited to encourage, support and see what kind of things get built on our core services, and we felt strongly about getting that right before building the site itself.

We put up our beta signup page back in October, and started coding in December – so we’ve knocked out quite a lot of code in less than 4 months, and very soon y’all will get to start checking it out in more detail.

GxStream is really looking forward to giving all our streamers the best tools and the best service out there.

If you’re not already signed up for our beta list, hit it up at http://signup.gxstream.com and we’ll see you soon.