The online storage pioneer Streamload–or Media Max Powered by Streamboat, as it prefers being called these days–has just landed a major distribution deal with EMBARQ Corp., the telecommunications giant that was spunoff from Sprint Nextel in June. 

EMBARQ is basically private labeling MediaMax as the EMBARQ Media Safe and offering 25 gigabytes of secure online storage at no additional charge for all its existing high speed internet customers. That’s enough storage for 8,000 high-quality pictures or 6,000 songs but the real potential is in upgrades. For high-end users, packages offering up to 1,000 gigabytes (1 terabyte) of storage will be available for purchase.

Streamload’s own MediaMax offers the same service to anyone who signs up but the EMBARQ relationship gets it in front of millions of potential new customers.  EMBARQ is a NYSE-listed company with approximately $6.3 billion in annual revenues and the fifth largest local communications company in the U.S. based on the company’s 7.35 million access lines as of December 31, 2005.  

The announcement is extremely important for Streamload, coming just after Amazon entered the online storage space with its low-cost S3 service, the emergence of super-cheap competitors like Carbonite, which has elicted a lot of heavy breathing from Michael Arrington, and forthcoming formidable rivals like Google’s Platypus and Microsoft Live Drive. 

Steve Iverson, who started the San Diego-based Streamload in 1998 while he was still a student at Pamona College and financed it with loans from friends and family and his own Visa and MasterCard, was one of the first entrepreneurs to realize that the demand for space-hogging media files would soon send millions of people, and businesses, looking for cheap storage space beyond their hard drives.

As a student, Iverson had been awarded two research grants to study digital data compression, and eventually developed a new proprietary technology while studying adaptive data compression algorithmsfor his undergraduate thesis that can handle billions of files at 1/20 the cost of traditional storage systems. This new technology built the foundation for Streamload and has since evolved into a service that allows users  securely store any size media and digital files, (including including entire video and music collections) with the ability to easily send, receive, access and stream them from anywhere.  The company added free file backup and file synchronization when it introduced MediaMax 1.5 back in June.

Streamload got its first significant angel financing in February 2000 from Charlie Jackson, a veteran entrepreneur and investor, and achieved profitability about a year later.  With $250k in debt financing available from the City of San Diego’s Emtek Fund Streamload had grown on its own profits before getting a first round of institutional equity financing from Windward Ventures in August 2004.

Streamload’s MediaMax service offers up to 1,000 Gbytes of storage for $29.95 a month which is really cheap.  The same amount of storage on Amazon’s S3 service–probably the next least-expensive option–would cost about $150 a month.

Streamload currently has more than 4 million users and manages more than 400 terabytes of customer data.