Riverside.fm comes out of stealth with cash and mission to join audio and video podcasting

Riverside.fm is announcing its emergence from stealth mode with $2.5-million of seed investment from Oren Zeed. Riverside.fm is a video+audio recording and livestream platform for podcasters, with a specialty of hi-rez recording of audio and video in separate tracks.

Zeev Venture, Oren Zeev’s venture capital company, has invested in Audible, Uber Freight, and at least 28 other startups. Riverside.fm has been under the radar while reportedly being used by Hillary Clinton, BBC, Bloomberg, Spotify, Marvel, and Verizon Media. the company was founded by Nadav Keyson and Gideon Keyson.

“Founders / brothers Nadav Keyson and Gideon Keyson are coming to drink Zencastr’s milkshake.” –Riverside.fm press release

The riverside platform can live stream, but seems to specialize in recording. The audio quality is described as “lossless,” which generally means no compression which deprecates audio quality. (Worth noting that podcasting is mainly an MP3-format media category. As such, it is inherently compressed and suffers some amount of audio degradation, generally unnoticeable to listeners.)

Of particular note in Riverside’s platform is the recording of separate tracks. That applies to separating audio from video, which is convenient to podcasters who want an unedited video statement of the show, plus an edited audio version. Further, we see in Riverside’s specifications that each speaker track, audio and video, is recorded separately. That feature is tremendously convenient when editing an interview or group conversation, allowing the editor to remove undesirable noises  from individual tracks and produce a cleaner, tighter final product.

Riverside’s combination of features seems to position the company in competition with audio connection platforms like Zencastr and others, which record speakers separately. If there is a headline differentiator for Riverside in our view, it is applying that production principle to both audio and video. (We mention Zencastr specially, party because we have used  it, and partly because of this remark in Riverside’s press release: “Founders / brothers Nadav Keyson and Gideon Keyson are coming to drink Zencastr’s milkshake.” Ok, then. Competitive positioning is clear.

Riverside’s pricing has three tiers, priced at $20, $40, and $50 per month — the $50 level allows live video streaming in addition to the recording features.

Brad Hill