A tiny snippet we missed while we were taking our summer break was the acquisition by Rawflow, the UK P2P video streaming pioneer, one of the first in the world to offer Flash video streamed over a peer to peer network, of online content company Aggregator TV.
London-based Aggregator was offering a handful of paying subscribers online video services but was bought by Rawflow primarily for its micro-payment system, publishing platform, and billing system. No details were given of the transaction.
Aggregator was offering things like native Russian programming to the ex-pat Russian London community, but although its software was highly thought of, its business model attracted very few subscribers. It claims 50,000 subscribers, but if that was true, then it would not have been put into receivership, a form of UK bankruptcy not unlike Chapter XI, two months ago.
On the back of the Aggregator software Rawflow has introduced Selfcast, a system for anyone to automatically load video assets into its system and broadcast them live for free using just a web cam, a PC and an internet connection, using a downloaded Selfcast client. Selfcast has attracted around 500 beta testers during June and has just broadened its beta to anyone.