Caffeine, a new social broadcasting platform and toolset for games and entertainment, has secured $46 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners.
Co-founded by former Apple execs Ben Keighran and Sam Roberts, Caffeine is pitched as personal, real-time, and safe one-click broadcasting solution with games at its core.
The platform doesn’t require the installation of any third-party software or plug-ins, and lets users broadcast using either the Caffeine iOS app, a webcam from a Mac or PC browser, or the Caffeine PC game broadcast platform.
It also places a focus on the social, and Caffeine users will primarily find content because of the people they follow. On paper, that means there won’t be any endless feeds of meaningless comments, but rather personal conversations between friends and creators.
“Stronger relationships mean deeper engagement with their content, and ultimately, better ways to monetize that content,” explains the company.
“The PC game streaming app provides in-game overlays which creates a single screen experience for interacting with audiences, and because video is in real-time all the interactions are natural and as though you are in the same room.
“We created built-in tools that allow broadcasters to instantly share their show on Facebook and Twitter, which allows broadcasters to quickly reach existing audiences with new content and build their Caffeine community even faster.”
It currently unclear as to how exactly content creators will monetize, but Caffeine has promised that a “re-imagined, easy to use monetization system” will be coming to the platform in early 2018.
You can find out more about the platform, which is currently in pre-release, by clicking right here.