The Me Channel

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As SplashCast shows go, however, my slide show is definitely on the dull side. Highlights from SplashCast's first week in service, collected in a blog entry by SplashCast community director Marshall Kirkpatrick, include an audio tour of Italian-opera history, a Celtic folk-music podcast, a graffiti-art slide show, a video podcast from the creators of the technology blog Technically Speaking, and a collection of 30 Superbowl commercials.

Berkley and his employees haven't had time to create some obvious--and needed--features. One is a central SplashCast catalog, so that people can browse through the fast-growing corpus of shows and channels without having to stumble across them on the open Web. Another is a desktop SplashCast widget that would allow Windows or Mac users to watch their favorite broadcasters' channels without having to open a Web browser.

For the moment, SplashCast's service is completely free, and there is nary an advertisement to clutter up users' channels. But Berkley says several revenue-generating strategies are in the works, including a subscription-based "pro" version of the service and a system for adding advertisements to channels. (The company plans to share ad revenues with channel owners.) "We're also looking at 'white-labeling' our technology to the social-networking platforms," says Berkley, meaning that companies like MySpace might offer SplashCast's broadcasting services to members under their own brand names.

"We offer a universal media platform to take care of audio, video, pictures, and everything in one location, and that's very appealing to the social-networking companies," Berkley says.