Newark startup may be next big thing in video streaming

Kevin Free loves watching movies with his friends.

But class schedules and study demands often meant he and his college buddies couldn't be in the same room together.

So the computer science major at Frostburg State University began developing a software application in 2012 that would allow remote users to watch the same movie or video in real time.

"You can play video games together online, but for a variety of reasons, the technology didn't exist for watching movies or YouTube videos," he said. "My goal was to change that."

The software Free developed became the subject of his senior thesis and the core technology with which he later founded the tech startup Revmatek – a play on the Greek word for streaming.

Now Cinema-Sync, the latest version of his college project, is poised to become the next major innovation in mobile live streaming.

And if everything goes right, the 25-year-old Newark resident could turn his fledgling startup into a multi-million dollar company, almost overnight.

"We definitely think it's going to happen," Free said last week. "But for right now, it's just me and a handful of other guys programming out of my house."

Free's team of a half dozen programmers have developed a fully functional prototype and are now working to complete a beta version of the software.

The next few months will be critical in determining whether the new company can fulfill its promise of becoming the next big thing.

In an effort to introduce consumers to the app, Revmatek will release a free preview version of Cinema-Sync on Google Play and the Apple Store later this summer that will allow users to live stream video through their mobile devices.

Meanwhile, Revmatek is hoping to generate $50,000 through a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to bankroll additional development of a full-scale commercial version.

At the same time, Free and his mentor Coley Brown – a business development advisor and member of the Philadelphia-based angel investment firm Robin Hood Ventures – are shopping the software to potential investors.

The goal, Brown said, is to secure a sizable cash infusion that will help the company grow into a future rival of live streaming powerhouses like Periscope and Meerkat, both of which launched earlier this year.

"With this technology, there is certainly a market for, say, a grandfather in Florida who wants to watch a video along with his grandchildren in Delaware," Brown said. "But with the growing popularity of video streaming apps, we think what people really want to do is to capture live videos on their smartphones and share them with people around the world."

While live streaming apps have yet to achieve the broad popularity of Facebook or Twitter, they have attracted considerable interest from investors.

Meerkat, a spin-off of Israeli tech firm Life on Air, raised $12 million in venture capital in March, a mere month after its launch. Meanwhile, Twitter purchased Periscope for a reported $100 million the same month.

Other apps like Kik, Stre.am and Tarsii also are vying for attention in the video streaming space.

While those apps have recently garnered some negative attention for their potential use in pirating, Free says Cinema-Sync can effectively block copyright-protected material from being shared.

And that versatility could provide the answer to a long-standing problem faced by subscription-based content providers like HBO, Netflix and Amazon.

Those services currently stream their shows directly to subscribers, which requires considerable Internet bandwidth. Netflix alone accounts for more than a third of all broadband traffic in the U.S. and Canada.

By partnering with content providers, Cinema-Sync's peer-to-peer application could significantly reduce their reliance on expensive bandwidth by streaming video through secondary sources – basically acting as a universal Slingbox without the need for any additional hardware – while regulating who can and who can't view the content.

"I've spent my entire life in the tech space and I see Cinema-Sync as a potential game changer," said Howard Lubert, a regional president of the Keiretsu Forum, the world's largest private equity angel investment network.

"For the last 20 years, people have been trying to figure out how they can get video through the pipe faster and compression has gone about as far as it can," he said. "This might finally be the answer."

Lubert has yet to see Cinema-Sync in action, but he's already agreed to let Free and Brown present their company to the network's 1,400 investors, based on its promise alone.

Brown said the company also exhibited at this year's Angel Venture Fair in Philadelphia, an event billed as the largest gathering of angel investors and entrepreneurs in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Revmatek has started preliminary conversations with content providers, but is holding off on finalizing any partnerships until it's acquired the funding it needs to develop the software on its own.

"Cinema-Sync's strategy to openly partner with enterprise content providers has the additional potential for an acquisition if one of these partners wants to lock in exclusive access to the technology," he said. "There is also a market for companies like Sling to use Cinema-Sync as a software-only alternative for their current hardware."

In the meantime, Free said he's focused on churning out the code that could turn his former college project into the biggest app of the decade.

"I didn't plan on this at all," the young inventor said. "I just like creating software and I wanted to watch movies with my friends."

Contact Scott Goss at (302) 324-2281, sgoss@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ScottGossDel.