Australian online broadcaster Viocorp is targeting a tripling of its revenues for 2009 as it secures more international business.
In a world first, the online video specialist has secured a coveted international contract to live stream the Catholic Church's Palm Sunday ceremony from the Vatican to millions of networked religious worshipers.
The contract win follows on from Viocorp's online broadcast involvement in World Youth Day, held in July in Sydney.
Viocorop CEO Ian Gardiner said that the small Australian company was selected due to its growing global reputation for having a robust technical platform in Viostream and proven nous in project managing quality online broadcast delivery of large scale global events.
"The selection of an Australian company to go to Rome to facilitate a live online broadcast feed on our platform also proves that it is more cost effective than provisioning satellite links. The processing, management and editing of large scale events, often live has become a skill center for us," Gardiner said. "In the last six months we have covered all the largest mainstream events from the Sydney to Hobart, World Youth Day, the 2020 Summit and the Victorian bushfire memorial service. There are not many big scale events in Australia that we have missed out on and for a lot of those the overseas traffic usually comprises 30-40%. That is a classic internet traffic long tail effect," Viocorp head of sales and marketing Nick Bolton added.
Viocorp will be working closely with the Catholic Church’s global television broadcasting unit CTV and the recently launched Catholic social networking platform XT3, branded “faithbook” by its members.
Viocorp will be incorporating social networking applications such as Twitter feeds to the live broadcast to make the experience as interactive to the global catholic community as possible for the April 5 event.
The event is forecast to garner millions of global online viewers, which Viocorp is confident will be well serviced by its Viostream platform following its World Youth Day (WYD) experience which averaged over 500,000 video hits.
Meanwhile, Gardiner has set ambitious growth targets for the year ahead claiming that Viocorp is targeting revenues of $1 million per month by year end. The company currently tracks annual revenues of $4.5 million.
The growth is expected to come from a combination of initiatives including the launch from April 1 of Viostream as a white label service for resellers as a separately branded solution. The company is poised to sign its first reseller agreement with a significantly sized web hosting company next week.
“A lot of our growth is going to come through resellers. There is a lot of opportunity in that area and it also might take us overseas. It depends on the right deals coming along,” Gardiner said.
Growth is also slated to come from the advertising agency area which will be facilitated by the recent acquisition of digital design and development agency Boom Interactive.
“They are profitable and cash flow positive and not only will they be contributing revenue but they have proved themselves in our previous working relationships to be a good strategic fit. They are already opening a lot of doors for us with advertising agencies,” Gardiner said.
