Assuming you are referring "Bonus Use case" that I mentioned, I would say it is Chromecast As A Service + Content, for your phone/tablet. That makes it more like Apple TV.
Or to put it another way, It is also a Chromecast, but with Content and without proprietory hardware.
Hey we are same Cubeit, we can say we are not 3m funded it was a wrong thing written by media. Heard from others that small seed funded companies can apply for YC.
apologies.I do understand that there might be lot of other sites where people write about without our knowledge. We try to correct as much as possible, else we usually ignore.
"I get that it doesn't use my mobile bandwidth, but I'm not usually very worried about that and that concern is decreasing very rapidly over time."
Unfortunately we (consumers in developing countries) cannot boast about same. Even while travelling, most of the time we do not even have internet connection. Even if we do, we cannot watch movies on mobile bandwidth without worrying about the aftermath on our pocket. Consuming videos over mobile bandwidth is actually suicide in most cases.
2nd point is that, watching videos in a buffering-free experience on mobile networks at affordable price is still a distant dream. That is the one of the reason Google advertised so much on Indian television about "Download youtube movies and watch without internet" - the entire of 2015. And if you know the whole saga of Facebook Free basics, you would realize that most people in India with smartphones don't have internet, because they cannot afford it.
Because the reality is that internet is limited in terms of availability and bandwidth, hence a proposed solution.
One more primary use case is watching videos in Flights. Most flights in India for example, do not have any sort of entertainment module. Even in limited international flights that I have been on like Emirates, the content on the Seat dashboards are limited, not frequently updated.
Coffee chain example might be horrible. But it can be seen as a value add for the coffee-chain. Small-time coffee-shops would be more appropriate. Other businesses can use Coffee-chains as base to set up these Entertainment hotspots.
Now about our proposed solution. Its a DIY kit, using which you can convert an existing phone into an "Entertainment hotspot" and serve people videos or any content - "without using up their data". Depending on the requirement, the "Entertainment hotspot" will sync/get data from our server to the "local Entertainment hub" and then to end user.
We are actually already working on building the entire business ourself, like providing Entertainment hotspots. But we thought if we make this kind of DIY kit available to all, people can use this Kit to come up with use cases we could not have imagined.
Frankly I don't even what people will come up with, in terms of use cases. But with my limited imagination, I think the following is possible
1) A small-time coffee-shop setup "Entertainment-hotspot" using his spare device and serve entertainment to his customers
2) High secret content streamed to group of viewers in the conf room. No uploading etc..
3) Retail shops can use this to push Catalogs, Demo/promotional videos/content
4) Restaurants can use this for entertainment and pushing content like "Menus" etc..
Just launched the 1st version of Voola. Currently you can live stream from Android (use blur optionally) and they are available as ~20 sec hyperlapsed replays.
We are adding option to stream any video on your phone. We think this feature would be an added advantage
If you like it and know someone with Apple Mac at home & IOS dev skills, who might want to help build the IOS version, do let us know
Or to put it another way, It is also a Chromecast, but with Content and without proprietory hardware.