Ooyala – Australian For Video
Posted by Jay Fulcher on September 01, 2010 | Permalink
Three years ago, we signed our first big international customer, The Times Group of India. Since then, we have continued to expand both domestically and internationally, as Backlot sign-ups have grown to over 20,000 direct and self-serve accounts.
With our expansion into Europe, Asia and Latin America – we are now proud to announce that Ooyala Australia, lead by former Adobe executive John Treloar, is officially open for business.
Australia is such an exciting market, as it has one of the highest penetrations of broadband in the world. Because their content is in english, Australia and New Zealand have the ability to market and syndicate their videos to some of the biggest economies in the world. We are very happy to welcome John to the Ooyala family and look forward to big things Down Under.
Ooyala is Heading to Amsterdam for IBC
Posted by Jeanette Elliott on September 01, 2010 | Permalink
On September 9th, Ooyala will join more than 1,300 companies from around the world at IBC – the premier annual conference for professionals who create, manage and deliver entertainment and media content worldwide. We'll be giving daily product demos in the Microsoft Lounge and taking meetings throughout the show. If you're attending IBC, are an existing partner or would just like to learn more about Ooyala, please visit us.
Join us in the Microsoft Lounge, located on the 1st floor between the auditorium and the Elicium Hall, for a product demo.
Friday, September 10
2:30pm to 6:00pm
Saturday, September 11
2:00pm to 6:00pm
Sunday, September 12
2:00pm to 6:00pm
Monday, September 13
2:00pm to 6:00pm
To schedule a meeting at IBC, please contact sales@ooyala.com
Press inquiries: please contact Jeanette@ooyala.com
We’ll see you at the show!
Why Work at Ooyala?
Posted by Andrew Heywood on August 31, 2010 | Permalink
Is it the talented people, the competitive edge, the passion for video? Or is it the ping-pong and Mexican Cokes?
Ooyalans debate these points (plus how to pronounce Ooyala) in our latest Careers video. Take a look -- then come work in the future. At Ooyaaaala.
Product Enhancements
Posted by Alex Holub on August 29, 2010 | Permalink
While August is typically a vacation month, the Ooyala team used the Summer lull to launch a dozen or so features that will make Backlot easier to use and more useful.
We’re getting ready to launch a couple of products in the next few months that are going to completely blow your socks off... But in the meantime, here are some of the bigger enhancements we released in August:
JAWS Integration: The Ooyala player now has native support for Section 508 compliant.
iPhone ABR Feeds in Backlot: A publisher can now set an iPhone feed with ABR directly from Backlot. This feature is important because Apple requires ABR for all iPhone and iPad apps that are submitted to the app store.
Facebook SDK: The Facebook SDK, which can now be found under the developers sub-tab in Backlot, will make it easier to enable Facebook video embeds.
iPhone/Ipad Delivery Support: All Standard, Professional and Enterprise packages now get iPhone and iPad delivery support.
Ad Frequency Controls: The Ad Frequency Control, allows a publisher to set the number of times a viewer will be exposed to an ad in a row or during a specified period of time.
VAST Ads for the iPhone and iPad: Ooyala’s flexible ad insertion platform, now supports ad serving on the iPhone and iPad.
OoyalaDirect: OoyalaDirect is an iPhone app that allows you to capture and upload videos directly to your Backlot account. Search for OoyalaDirect in the app store and you will find it. Once installed on your iPhone you can begin recording and uploading video into your Backlot account. This is a wonderful feature for blogging and news sites.
Improved WMV Support: We made some enhancements to our processing pipeline to better support Windows Media files. It should improve the rate of processing for these files.
We hope you find these enhancements useful. If you have feedback, please don't hesitate to contact the product team at: product-feedback@ooyala.com
IPADE Stops By Ooyala During Silicon Valley Tour
Posted by Jeanette Elliott on August 27, 2010 | Permalink
On Wednesday, we hosted 65 executives and academics from Mexico for a talk about innovation in Silicon Valley and how local companies get work done. The group, organized by IPADE, Mexico's leading business school, is on a five-day tour of Silicon Valley with scheduled stops at Apple, Google, Tesla Motors and Stanford University. We're honored to have been selected as a stop on their tour.
The Mercury News stopped by to check out the action. Read Scott Duke Harris's article here.
Jay Fulcher Connects with FierceOnlineVideo
Posted by Jeanette Elliott on August 18, 2010 | Permalink
Jay Fulcher celebrated his one-year anniversary as Ooyala CEO this month. He recently connected with Jim O’Neill, editor at fierceonlinevideo.com, to talk about his past year, the changing landscape of online video, and what the future holds for Ooyala.
Here are a few choice excerpts. You can see the full interview below.
FierceOnlineVideo: What's the biggest change or evolution in the company over the past 12 months?
Fulcher: I think the biggest change for us has been both the size and scale of customer that we're working with. The company had done a really good job in its first year or so in terms of getting off to a fast start and really using a lot of our self-serve product to learn a lot, both how to deploy this kind of product, and how to make sure that we were going to have the right internal processes to make sure the products could scale and be supported properly and that sort of thing. But in the subsequent year, because we've been selling our product now for about seven quarters, this last three or four quarters has really been about testing our mettle with some of the largest, most demanding customers there are. I think that's been the biggest area of growth for us. First of all, we've discovered that our technology not just stands up, but it does a great job at scale, and certainly that's been something that's been gratifying to us and something that were certainly going to be leveraging going forward. And then I think the other thing is that we've continued to use these big customer situations to validate our product roadmap. And to validate the fact that the things we see as being priorities for this category of software is exactly the way that the customers see it. That's been the big thing we've learned from this last year.
FierceOnlineVideo: Having a roadmap during periods of rapid growth is critical...
Fulcher: Exactly. This is one of those situations where this market is changing very quickly. There are a lot of parties involved, a lot of people have a very vested interest and an agenda around online video and you have to have a well-put together plan of attack around what you want to accomplish over the course of a couple of years, and then be able to modify, adapt and respond to the things that happen as they happen. We're in good position from that standpoint.
FierceOnlineVideo: What's one accomplishment from the past 12 months that you're particularly proud of?
Fulcher: Maybe the one thing that kind of stands out, as a company that we've accomplished, the number one thing, would be that we as a team have developed a good, long-term plan. We might not be precisely right in all of the decisions that we've made and all of the assumptions that we've made about the growth of our business, but we're not confused. For companies that want to accomplish big things, it starts with a great plan. We have a great plan and a great team that's executing to it and, from a personal perspective, that's probably the thing that I feel best about. Basically, your success starts with that.
FierceOnlineVideo: Jay, right after NAB, you launched some big global expansion, to Europe, Asia, Latin America. How's it gone?
Fulcher: We're excited that today we have more than 500 customers in more than 100 countries, across more than 5,000 websites. By definition, our business, although it's still a relatively small business, and a relatively young one, is absolutely global, and it requires a global footprint from our perspective to be able to market, sell, support, and, over time, deliver the kinds of value that we want to in those various market places.
Read the full interview at FierceOnlineVideo.com
Facebook SDK: Sharing Videos to Facebook
Posted by Luke Dyer on August 04, 2010 | Permalink
Since we released the Sharing Report for Backlot analytics
many of you have learned more about how your videos get shared across the social landscape on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg. We've noted that Facebook is one of the more popular sharing destinations for your videos and we wanted to make it even easier to share content directly into Facebook.
Enter the new Facebook Sharing SDK. It creates a framework you can use to share videos directly into Facebook, where friends can watch the video in news feeds, on wall posts, and as shared items. Not only does the SDK allow you to share individual videos, but it also lets you share whole channels and channel sets directly into Facebook. Our early tests show that this is a great way to increase viewership of your video. Visit our Facebook Sharing SDK page
to learn more.
By the way: while you're on Facebook, visit Ooyala on Facebook
and add us as a friend, won't you?
