Forrester's Five Rules to Drive Video Traffic
Posted by Shalini Gupta on 2009-06-17
Seventy-one percent of those online already watch Internet video; the number of streams consumed should more than double by 2013. Independent users, professional studios and marketers are the forces driving this growth. Forrester Research has identified five best practices that will drive Web traffic to videos. Click here to read their article entitled, “The Five Rules to Drive VideoTraffic”, written by Bobby Tulsiani, Senior Forrester Analyst.
Announcing the Launch of Swift, The Next Generation Player
Posted by Phil Crosby on 2009-05-29
Today we're proud to announce the launch of version 2.0 of the Ooyala player, codenamed Swift. It's an exciting time for us as a company and our new player is a big part of our excitement. The Ooyala engineering team has gone to great lengths to ensure that the player is rock-solid, modular, beautiful, and will meet the ambitious and diverse goals of our growing customer base in the years to come.
For the engineers, this product has given us an opportunity to refine our development practices and to sprint forward while steadily increasing the level of quality and robustness of our product. We've come together as a team over these past months, squashing bugs during numerous late nights, vigorously writing code for great new ideas, and breaking up the long hours with intense ping-pong matches.
For our customers, this new modular player platform is already starting to bear fruit. In just a few short weeks, we've been able to develop solutions for exciting new areas in online video at a breakneck pace. The FAQ for Swift has more details, but here are a few examples:
* Live streaming playback
* Seamless integration with Visible Measures
* Support for many new ad networks, including VAST-based ad systems
And there is more to come - much more. We know it's going to be an incredible year in online video for Ooyala and our partners.
The Relay
Posted by James Nielsen on 2009-05-14
We met at Ooyala headquarters early Saturday morning to load up the vans and drive up to Calistoga -- the starting line. Everyone was full of nervous energy. Those of us who had in previous years run The Relay, knew that they had signed up for 24hrs of aches and pains, exhaustion and fun. Those who had never done this, questioned the sanity of those who were returning for more.
Once the starting gun went off, it was 199 miles of non-stop chaos. Each person ran a 3-9 mile leg -- starting in Calistoga – past the Napa Vineyards, through beautiful Marin, across the Golden Gate Bridge, along the streets of San Francisco, down the Bay Area's Peninsula, among the giant Redwoods, next to Santa Cruz, and finishing on the coast in Davenport.
I've competed in a lot of fun races but these long relay events always stand apart from the others. However, this experience was quite unique since it was my first time running on a corporate team. We had a number of runners who had not only never run The Relay, but who had never competed in any kind of race, before. One of the highlights for me occurred at 3:00 am. It was cold, dark and raining and I couldn't see anyone out there on the roads. All of the sudden a van pulled up next to me with a bunch of screaming teammates cheering me on. I couldn't help but smile, just as I am smiling now remembering the moment.
After 36 hours of non-stop racing, we all came together in Davenport to run with - and cheer on - the final runner as he rounded the corner to the finish line. It was great feeling having the whole team running side-by-side for the last few steps.
And if you think the running was hard, the drivers had it harder. A huge thank you goes out to them, as they didn’t get a drop of rest the entire time. Also, thank you to The Relay staff and to all the volunteers who stood out there in the rain telling us where to turn -- and cheering us on in the process. It was great to be able to have this much fun at an event, all the while raising money for Organs R' Us, a nonprofit that promotes the need for organ donations.
You can check out the results, here. I can't wait until next year.
Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs
Posted by Alexa Lee on 2009-05-01
We are thrilled and honored at having made BusinessWeek magazine's list of America's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009 (under age 30). The publication features our CEO, Bismarck Lepe, who co-founded Ooyala along with Sean Knapp and Belsasar Lepe, in April 2007. In all, twenty companies are featured, including three other startups founded by three fellow ex-Googlers: Cloudera , WeatherBill , Mechanical Zoo (Aardvark).
Click here to read to find out more. There are a lot of exciting things happening in the world of technology.
Ooyala: Coming To You LIVE
Posted by Ilya Sukhar on 2009-04-19
Things move pretty fast here at Ooyala. One day I'm working on putting the finishing touches on video playback in our new player and the next I'm told "let's integrate live streaming." Fast forward two weeks and we have two partners using our player to stream live events this weekend. How did I get from customer request to live product in two weeks? Well, our new player is modular from head to toe. That means integrating live streaming is as simple as building a small module that conforms to our APIs. Everything else -- from analytics to ads to shiny controls -- gets hooked up seamlessly. We're really proud of this and we can't wait to let our customers build their own modules of all kinds very soon. As for live streaming, we're excited to let our customers deploy live streams with the same ease and elegance they've come to expect from Ooyala.
You can check out our new player streaming live video in two places this weekend:
- The 2009 AVP Cross Tour Riverside Open Volleyball Tournament. See the full schedule and watch the competition live on AVP.com.
- The Green Apple Festival -- America's Largest Earth Day Celebration on the National Mall. Watch the speakers and music acts (including The Flaming Lips) live on EarthDayTV.net.