Product Enhancements
Posted by Bismarck Lepe on 2010-03-18
It's been an exciting couple of weeks. In addition to releasing a handful of useful features like the Loading Status Indicator in Backlot and Support of High Quality live streaming, we also announced the development of Backlot TV-E, our TV Everywhere platform for cable and broadcast networks. And you may have noticed that our site was refreshed with an easier to use look and feel. We'd love to know what you think.
Backlot TV-E: Backlot TV-E is a new video platform that was specifically designed and built for broadcast and cable networks. In addition to providing more detailed metrics and the ability to deliver video directly to a TV with Boxee and Roku integration, the new platform has integrated support of PayPal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout paywalls for content. To learn more, visit the TV-E section of the site.
Loading Status Indicator: For customers who have tens/hundreds of thousands or even millions of videos in their accounts, we've now exposed a library loading indicator in Backlot.
Related Content: Under the publish tab, you can now sort the order of the videos that are recommended to your viewers based on when they were created. This will help increase engagements, especially when the feature is used for dynamic channels.
Live Streaming Enhancements:
- Live streaming now supports 2Mbit adaptive bit-rate live streams. There is a direct relationship between quality and the amount of video people watch, so start taking advantage of this enhancement.
- When creating a live stream, Backlot will now automatically populate the IP address field with the Backlot IP. You can edit the field as you wish, but this should facilitate the process of getting a live stream up and running.
Please contact your account manager if you have any questions about these enhancements.
TV Everywhere Comes to Ooyala
Posted by Bismarck Lepe on 2010-03-03
Today, we announced the development of a new video platform for Broadcast and Cable networks. The platform provides publishers of high quality long-form video with a new way to deliver and monetize their content. We’re integrating with PayPal, Google Checkout and Amazon Payments to make it very easy for a publisher to setup a content paywall window as part of their syndication strategy. The new platform includes a number of other features like improved Quality of Service reporting, better data around consumption of video, the ability to deliver HD quality video over secure HTTP and most importantly, all of the other features that are part of the Backlot platform that you know and love.
So why offer paywall functionality??? Well, there are two main reasons:
1. We believe that the continued creation and delivery of high quality content will require a hybrid monetization model that includes both paid and ad-supported syndication. There is a lot of waste in advertising today. As advertising becomes more transparent, advertisers will move more of their budgets away from areas that don’t perform... and this shift will require that consumers pay for the content they really want to watch. We are aware that paid content isn’t going to work for all publishers, but it will be the only way a large number of publishers are able to maximize their revenue.
2. Most of the TV Everywhere models that are being bandied around feel like more of the same -- operators giving subscribers access to more of the same content they’re not interested in watching. We don’t believe that operators are going away, but we do believe that they will play a lesser role when it comes to connecting consumers with content that is interesting and relevant to them.
The paywall integration is the first step in our development of more sophisticated and personalized video monetization models for online video syndication. In the coming months, we’ll be releasing more ways for consumers to access high quality content and for the rights holders to maximize the revenue opportunity of delivering video content online.
Learn more about Backlot TV-E.
2/22 Product Enhancements
Posted by Bismarck Lepe on 2010-02-23
Last week, we released new features to make it easier for consumers to share the content they care about across the web. We also pre-populated new accounts with how-to videos to make it easier to get up and running with the Ooyala platform.
New sharing enhancements:
Share clips: You can now give your consumers the ability to share dynamic clips by allowing them to deep-link to a specific point in a video. This enhancement will allow your consumers to share that unbelievable goal, the point when a person falls out of a tree or the inspiring line in a speech.
Share videos from channels (playlists): Consumers are now able to share a specific video from a channel. Before, if someone wanted to share a video that was included in a playlist, they would have to share the entire channel.
Social Networks: We've made it easier to share to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Digg. Later this week, we will also add Google Buzz to the list of networks we support.
New How-to Videos: Under the subscribed content section of Backlot, new accounts will find videos that will help them get started with video publishing.
We hope you find the new enhancements useful.
New Sharing Features
Posted by Jessica Mink on 2010-02-22
Wouldn't it be nice to share only the most interesting part of a video you are watching? Let's say you are watching a soccer match and want to capture that magic moment when a goal is scored. Or, you are watching a news program and want to focus on a particular story in that program. Our new sharing launch allows you to do just that. Viewers of content on Ooyala players can now share only a particular part or snippet from a video.
Our player has always supported sharing to popular social networks sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Ooyala now supports deep linking which allows a viewer to share only a particular video within a playlist or a specific scene within a video. These deep linking sharing options are available for our player embeds, our sharing links to social networking sites, as well as the newly released URL link, also available in the player. What's great about our solution is that it does not require any custom development work. A publisher can easily enable the various sharing options in Backlot for all their viewers.
As part of our sharing release, we have also enhanced and added new sharing options to social networks. When sharing content to Twitter, we now include the title of the video and a shortened URL in order to ensure that the tweet conforms to the 140 character limit which Twitter imposes.
Rate of Innovation & Recent Enhancements
Posted by Bismarck Lepe on 2010-02-14
The Online Video industry is evolving and changing at an extremely fast rate. In order to stay ahead of the changing needs of consumers, we've adopted a very aggressive product development and launch schedule. It's not uncommon for us to have months when we release new and exciting features every week. In an effort to keep you better informed of the product enhancements, we will start publishing the weekly product launches on our blog.
And to kick things off on the right foot, here's a summary of the enhancements we released this past week. If you have any questions, please contact our account management team, if you're a customer or sales team if you're not.
2/11/2010 Product Enhancements
Yahoo Webmaster Site Explorer Support: In order to make it easier to include your videos in the Yahoo video search results, we've now added "Yahoo Webmaster Site Explorer" support to our MRSS feeds.
Advanced Syndication Feeds: The new feed makes it easy to use hyper-syndication platforms that allow for the syndication of your videos to hundreds of video sharing sites.
MP4 Feeds: The new MP4 feed gives publishers the ability to offer download-to-own video functionality on their sites.
Bring Your-Own Akamai for Live Streaming: Ooyala has allowed publishers to use their own CDN commits (Akamai, Limelight, CD Networks, ATT...) for VOD content for over two years. We're now offering publishers the ability to use their own Akamai commits to deliver live streams.
Video SEO SDK v1.4: We just announced our Video SEO SDK a couple weeks ago and we're already iterating on it... The enhancements give publishers the ability to use their labels in addition to the titles, descriptions and custom meta data fields. Additionally, we are now caching the results on Akamai to increase the chances of videos getting indexed by Google and other search engines.
I hope that this update was useful. Please let us know how we can improve the distribution of this information.
ReelSEO/Truveo/Ooyala Video SEO Replay
Posted by Shalini Gupta on 2010-02-14
Increasing your search engine rank has a direct impact on the number of visitors you get to your site. Earlier in the month we co-hosted a webinar on Video SEO and how it can be implemented on pages that are heavy with video embeds. Here's the replay of the video for those that missed it. If you have any questions, or would like help implementing your own Video SEO strategy, drop us a line: support@ooyala.com.
Roundtable Event @CBS Interactive on 2/24
Posted by Jeanette Elliott on 2010-02-06
An impressive group of media professionals will be joining us for the the Beet.tv roundtable on monetization on Feb 24th. We'll be live streaming the event directly from CBS interactive headquarters in San Francisco.
Brian Buchwald, EVP, NBC Integrated Local Media
Gregg Colvin, VP of Business Development, Fox Interactive
John Evershed, Co-founder and CEO, Mondo Media
Karin Gilford, SVP, Online Media, Comcast Interactive Media
Jeff Jordan, Product Manager, Video Analytics, Omniture
Jayant Kadambi, Co-founder and President, YuMe
Jim Louderback, CEO, Revision3
Keith Richman, CEO, Break Media
Grant Ries, Chief Revenue Officer, BlueKai
Marc Ruxin, EVP, Chief Innovation Officer, Universal McCann
Anthony Soohoo, SVP, Entertainment & Lifestyle, CBS Interactive
Jennifer Taylor, Director, Flash Content Creation + Distribution, Adobe
Tania Yuki, Director, Product Management, comScore
