Posts Tagged ‘Kaltura’

Brightcove and Long Tail Video get Pay Per View Micropayments via Invideous

June 9th, 2010

Online Video eCommerce is quickly ramping to become a very real and easy option for revenue generation in online video. London based Invideous, parent company Swiffen founded in 2008, recently closed a six-figure round of funding and is announcing an impressive customer list starting with Brightcove and Long Tail Video (Bits On The Run). The service offers publishers the option to charge per view for content via micropayments built directly into the video player which, according to Invideous, takes only 10 minutes to integrate. They offer subscription or pay per view via credit card or SMS with clear and easy to use menus (screen caps below). According to Jack Thorogood, co-founder and Commercial Director, larger publishers can co-brand within the video with a favicon, or logo. And they are also set to roll out two new customers at the end of the month, Kaltura and VMIX.



The Invideous service is very stratighforward which may encourage further adoption of the pay for play model but there have been others in the past that have tried with lackluster results including YouTube, and http://www.vidcompare.com/video-provider-detail.php?id=19although not entirely the same solutions. For example, YouTube tried a pay per download model charging a “personal license fee” and Ooyala’s offering is available in their Backlot allowing viewers to pay for a limited number of shows via an Ooyala branded PayPal account.

There are other interesting OV eComm solutions out there like SundaySky who offer eCommerce websites a service that will take images and product information and mash them into a product video that will dynamically update as the product does. So if specs on a particular camera change, so will the SundaySky video that is associated with it. Pretty slick.

As these services emerge making the monetization of online video easier we are still years out from a unified, standard, and widely accepted means by which to generate revenue from video. Until then, keep monetizing your highly valuable and already monetized web pages with video by syndicating your videos driving traffic back to your site,  increasing engagement, and extending reach.

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4 Vector Video Personality – Matching Your Use Case to an OVP

May 18th, 2010
This is a guest post written by Steve Rosenbaum of Magnify.Net (see below for details on Steve):

If video is going to be everywhere, and everyone is going to need it – how can you determine the best solution to fit your needs. Well,  it turns out there are different kinds of customers that fit different kinds of solutions. So,  let’s start by asking a few basic questions about YOU,  and your video needs.

1.  CONTENT

2.  SPEED

3.  INDUSTRY

4.  GOALS

So,  here’s the Video Personality Questionnaire:


CONTENT,  you are a….

A Prolific Creator.   This means that either you, your site, or your team shoots, edits, and publishes a large volume of video on a regular basis.

An Occasional Maker.   You and your team make a few videos a week,  no more than
10 or 15 videos a month.

An infrequent Video Author.   Sure,  you make a video ever now and then,  maybe an
interview with the CEO or a rare video of your team at a trade show or public event,  but
mostly  you just don’t make video.

SPEED.   How zippy are you?

Your a Speed Daemon.   You’re site’s content is changing all the time. You’ve got a twitter account – and you tweet out news often and quickly.  You post new blog posts,  upload FlipCam videos,   and expect your site to be updated in real time.

A Frequent Refresher.   You’re not a realtime publisher,  but you update your sites content on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.  You  endeavor to be topical,   keeping content fresh and perky.

A Cautious Updater.    You’re sites information is static,  and updated only when needed. You publish white papers,  and data,  but not news or changing information.


INDUSTRY –  what do  your visitors expect.

You’re a Media Site.  Your content focused on publishers, knowledge and how-to’s.  You pride yourself in Curating the best material in your area of focus – and your visitors expect topical,  timely,  fresh content.

You’re a Brand. Visitors go to your site because they are buyers of your brand.  They’re are coming to be part of your brand fan club.  Or,  they’ve got a gripe.   They want to post, share,  upload,  and engage in your brand community – both as a consumer and creator of media.

You’re an e-commerce site.   You’ve got great things for sale.  Electronics,  Books,  Shoes, Crafts,  you name it.

GOALS –  what do you want video to do for  you?

I’m looking to be the ‘it’ place to go.  I want my visitors to consume text, pictures, and video from my site.  I expect Video to increase the time visitors spend on my site,  the number of pages they view,  and as a result I want my SEO (search engine optimization)  to help me grow my page rank and search results.

Ads.  I’ve got an ad sever with DoubleClick,  OAS,  or XX,  and I want to be able to drive pre-roll campaigns with adjacent ad banners on a coherent dashboard.

Cash –  I want Revenue.   I don’t have an ad sever,  or advertiser relationships,  but I want someone else to sell my pre-roll and just hand me a check.  I don’t need to have a direct relationship or veto power over the ads on my site.


Using These Four Vectors,  Content,  Speed,  Industry, and Goals – you can determine what kind of video user you are, and therefore what kind of platform you’re looking for.


THE MAJOR MEDIA MAKER:
if you and your team create a lot of video,  then storage,  encoding,  delivery, and analytics are your core needs.  You’ve got sunk costs – and how you need to get revenue back against plays.


If your a MAJOR MEDIA MAKER your priority is going to be finding a solution that has solid storage and delivery. You’ve probably got developers on staff, or on call – so you don’t need pages,  or web dev tools,  or even ad networks. You’ve got all that.  You need a player,  customizable,  and an ad server.

Good solutions for the Major Media Maker are Brightcove,  Kaltura,  Ooyala,  or building your own solution with JW Player or Flowplayer.


THE SOCIAL MEDIA MAVEN
You’ve got traffic,  and community,  and engagement.  Now it’s time to turn that passion into action – and get your visitors to make video,  share video,  embed video,  and spread the content and the brand with the power of your social network.  Community is the driver here – and revenue comes from organic growth.  So the core tools re sharing tools,  video discovery –  video upload of UGC,  Curation,  and building the largest most contextual collection of content that  your community can share and grow.


If your a SOCIAL MEDIA MAVEN then video is driven by community.  You’re looking to embrace upload, discovery, sharing  - and of course monetization.  For this use case,  a Social Video Platform is a must.  You probably have limited dedicated dev resources – so you’d like a solution that can be managed by non-technical staff.

Good solutions for this use case might be self sever video players like Vimeo or Viddler,  or more full featured video discovery solutions like VodPod or Magnify.net.


THE BRAND BUILDING DESTINATION
Fans and friends are showing up at your site.  They’re looking for knowledge – how to’s and FAQ’s.  They want to find video that answers their questions -and they’re ready to share their product knowledge and passionate brand fanaticism with your visitors.   Here the tools are about Aggregation,  Curation,  Filtering  - and presentation layer.


Good solutions for you include solutions with integrated social media tools,  robust API’s,  a diverse mix of on-page players,  and database driven video library pages.  In addition, you may want to be looking for a Realtime Video Curation engine,  and on the fly Sponsored Video Sections for monetization of brand partners.  For an open source solution,  Kaltura offers some of these features,  as does Ooyala,  and Magnify.net powers these solutions.


THE MONETIZATION MONSTER
You’ve got the traffic. You’ve got the content.  You’ve got the costs.  You need revenue,  and fast.  This means you need essentially a video ad server,  or a player that bolts in to the best ad networks you can find.


For the hard core revenue driven site,  the number one, two and three concern is ad serving. You need both players and pages-  and you need tight integration with OAS and Dart DoubleClick ad servers.  You need to be able to run multiple campaigns at the same time,  and be able to provide advertisers with granular data about video plays, engagement,  and off site video embedding.

Among the solutions for this complex integration are Brightcove,  Magnify and Ooyala.

CONCLUSION:

Video is powerful,  important, and able to provide a measurable impact on your site traffic and ROI.  But understanding your content strategy,  and your video sources,  and then finding a video partner that can work with you to meet those goals takes some effort.  Understanding what platforms provide – and exploring both the documentation and existing implementations is essential.  Don’t assume that all whats under the hood is everything you need.  If you need Ad Serving,  take the time to set up a demo campaign and see how complex the dashboard is.  If you’re looking to add Aggregated and Curated video to your offering,  make sure that you’ve got a scalable solution that provides both sensible content and workflow solutions.

Video is here to stay.  Welcome to the Realtime video web.  It’s bound to have an impact on your business – so why not explore ways to make that impact measurable and meaningful.

About our Expert Guest Author: Steve Rosenbaum is founder and CEO of Magnify.net, a NYC-based solution that provides Aggregation and Realtime Curation of web video. He has been building and growing consumer-content businesses since 1992. He was the creator and Executive Producer of MTV UNfiltered, a series that was the first commercial

application of user-generated video in commercial TV.
Follow Steve on Twitter:  @Magnify
Read Steve Rosenbaum on CurationNation.org

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OnlineVideo.net Launches Bringing OVP Related Content

May 11th, 2010

Our friends over at StreamingMedia have been very busy bees over the past several months not only preparing for the StreamingMedia East show kicking off today in NYC but also building a new web site committed to bringing Online Video Platform (OVP) related content to the masses.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to do a video interview with Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, editor of StreamingMedia and now of OnlineVideo.net for the launch. This is their first Oovoo interview served in a new Kaltura video player for the site and I’m honored to be a part of it.

The site looks sharp and as usual is loaded with high quality content to keep users up to date on OV News, Case Studies, Buyer’s Guides, How-Tos, Reviews, and Events. Congratulations to the team and thank you for bringing more quality editorial content to our beloved space.

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Video from OVPSummit, Streaming Media West Show

January 25th, 2010

Back in November I attended the first annual Online Video Platform Summit which ran in conjunction with StreamingMedia West down in San Jose. I was fortunate enough to be asked to sit on a panel kicking off the show called Defining Online Video Platforms. It was an honor to sit on the panel with three distinguished CEOs of well-established OVPs; Bismarck Lepe of Ooyala, Ron Yekutiel of Kaltura, and Alex Castro of Delve Networks. Below is a video of the panel in it’s entirety (thank you StreamingMedia and OVPSummit):

Be sure to also check out Larry Kless’ post on the Summit and this panel specifically, he covers it well even including some popular Tweets. Larry co-hosted the OVPSummit and did a fantastic job promoting, organizing, and managing the first ever show with Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen. Here’s Larry’s piece at his blog, KlessBlog.

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2010 Predictions for Online Video

December 17th, 2009

OVP2010We’re seeing 2010 predictions emerge in the Online Video space by industry leaders and it provides for interesting reading. That being said, there’s nothing shocking being stated, or rather, there are no big surprises or prognostications of something new to come. Everyone tends to agree on what to expect in the New Year including the much hyped TV Everywhere, set-top boxes, multiple screens, and of course, mobile.

Indeed these are exciting features and products to look forward to and what’s mentioned by these smart individuals is definitely worth reading. So, I have laid out for you a few comments and links regarding aforementioned subject matter below:

  • Ron Yekultiel of Kaltura on the DIY online video solutions: “Alternatively, more publishers will opt to self-host the video management platform behind their firewall to allow for greater security, control, and flexibility. In both scenarios, the commoditized video delivery services (e.g. storage, backup, streaming, transcoding) shall be augmented by innovative high-margin digital services such as video search, metadata extraction & analysis, and syndication.”
  • Ben Weinberger of DigitalSmiths on TV Everywhere: “TV Everywhere, which Time Warner announced over the summer, is a beautiful idea: for a fee, cable operators will give subscribers multi-platform access to whatever is on cable, at any time, from any place, on any device.  This notion has caught fire, with Comcast and other major players announcing their own versions of this exciting platform.  I expect that, along with the new initiatives movie studios unleash, 2010 will be the year of TV Everywhere — especially as versions of this idea start becoming available to consumers.”
  • Ian Blaine of thePlatform on viral distribution: “Another trend that hit big in 2009 is viral distribution on a massive scale. We of course had YouTube as an early leader, and its growth in 2009 continued to stun. One billion streams a day is something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago. But beyond YouTube, the continued growth of Facebook and the emergence of Twitter as platforms for distribution of media became real, and really interesting.”
  • And Ryan Lawler of NewTeeVee on set-top boxes: “With broadband connectivity being extended to more consumer electronics devices like TVs and Blu-ray players, it will become difficult to justify buying yet another standalone box. And that’s not even mentioning Boxee’s bigger problem, which is convincing programmers and cable companies that it isn’t the enemy.“

Personally I think there is something bigger (in the sense of holistically, not enormity) brewing for 2010 which I’ve discussed at length with several OVP CEOs, and that’s the notion of specialization in our space as a result of impending commoditization. OV has come a long way in a very short amount of time and the fact of the matter is, we’re nearing ubiquity at a breakneck pace. It won’t be long until every online business has video in some way, shape, or form used to market their business, sell their product, extend their brand, and/or increase exposure.

The space will grow significantly in 2010 at the cost of a few providers, spurred by differentiation and specialization. I sound like a broken record, I know. But knowing what you do best and capitalizing on strengths is what’s going to take the leaders in OV to the next level and prevent the occurrence of commoditization. Let’s face it, it’s difficult to be everything to everyone. There’s just too much to manage and it’s just too easy to overwhelm users today especially with newer technology and services. With a keen eye on a specific niche and market segment, OVPs will be able to help the $3B small medium enterprise sector realize their goals and achieve them with assurance and confidence in the coming years.

Peace.

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Do It Yourself Video

December 14th, 2009

Do it yourself

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen asked a question on our Defining OVPs panel last month at Online Video Platform Summit that drew an interesting response from the crowd.

The question was related to whether or not YouTube was a viable solution for business and if people were building their own solutions versus using OVPs. My natural response was, “we’re at OV-P-Summit, not OV-DIY-Summit!” But when Ron Yekutiel of Kaltura wisely asked the crowd who was using YouTube, 6 hands went up. When he asked how many were using OVPs, 8 hands went up. And when he asked how many were using home brewed solutions 12 hands went up into the air. That’s roughly 15% of the audience attending the “Defining OVPs” panel who had developed their own solution for uploading, encoding, storing, and playing back their online video content.

Very interesting indeed.

So I’m curious, before I put a poll on the site. How many businesses out there have gone the OVDIY route? Not sure I have the readership yet to request input via the comments but, if you’re so inclined, let me know either in this post or via email at kdrey at vidcompare.com

Peace.

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Online Video Platform Summit Was A Good Show

November 29th, 2009

ovpsThe inaugural OVPSummit went well in conjunction with StreamingMedia West which supposedly had record breaking attendance this year. Overall, there was not a huge turnout for the OVPS portion of the show with only 47 registrants and 90-ish OVPS + SMW registrants. The bulk of the floor was occupied by OVP booths and the attendee list was mostly the same. It was basically an inside industry event which had its benefits for me as I was able to meet many of the people running the platforms which make up the VidCompare database. It was a pleasure to speak with everyone and to hear their resounding support of VidCompare.com.

A personal highlight of the show was sitting on the opening panel, Defining Online Video Platforms, with Ron from Kaltura, Alex from Delve Networks, and Bismarck from Ooyala. Following are the questions which were asked of us and my responses:

1. In 50 words or less, define what an online video platform is.

-          An OVP is typically a SaaS based business offering top to bottom video solutions including ingestion, encoding, storage, management, analytics, syndication, and playback of video.

2. What are the main functions and features customers should be looking for when evaluating online video platforms?

-          It’s important to know your use case for online video prior to getting started with your search. Identifying the purpose of your video effort be it a start-up marketer looking to extend brand reach and increase time spent on site, a large media publisher looking for content management, syndication, and distribution, or a SMB looking for an internal training solution with multiple log-ins, and administrative rights. Once you’ve identified your needs you can look for a provider who can accommodate the top 4-5 features that address your goals.

3. What about as we look down the road two or three years? What sort of features will online video platforms be offering then that aren’t available now?

-          2 – 3 years is a long way out but I think by then TV everywhere will be adequately addressed as well as the movement towards TV and OV oneness therefore OVPs will need to provide more holistic solutions to further blur the lines between them. I think OVPs will grow beyond partnerships and meld with the CDNs, search and discovery players, and the ad networks. I don’t think it’s going to be a features race but rather a movement towards ubiquity and completeness.

4. Does it make sense for some organizations to simply use free players like YouTube? And at the other end of the spectrum, does it make sense for some businesses to build their own platform? What factors go into the decision to build your own, use a free service, or invest in the kind of online video platforms that are being shown here at the summit?

-          Well, we’re attending the OV-P-Summit, not the OV-DIY-Summit so I think the argument is in favor of the Platform today. Online video, for the most part, is a strategic purchase made typically by a marketing manager with light technical skills and little to no engineering resources at their disposal. That said, the top-to-bottom solutions that an OVP can provide are invaluable to the VP of marketing with a tight budget. YouTube does not address B2B needs completely and is therefore not an option in my opinion other than to test the video waters and to get your feet wet. Today marketers need to expose their brand in new and far-reaching ways with built-in viral and social tools, they need to drive traffic to their site, not someone else’s, and they need to know exactly what their content is doing and how it’s performing at any given moment.

5. We’ve got an entire session devoted to monetization tomorrow, but what are the most effective ways for business to monetize their video? Should most organizations even be looking at video as something to be monetized directly?

-          We’re still in our infancy as an industry especially when it comes to monetizing video with very few standards, and not enough premium content to turn a profit. CNN can demand $75 CPMs but not many others can do the same without a million streams a minute. Businesses should look to their already high value web pages and rather than monetizing video directly, monetize pages with video turning 3.2 second bounces into 2.3 minute clicks to Leaderboards, skyscrapers and high-value site sponsorships.

I’m looking forward to next year’s event, Eric and Larry did a fantastic job organizing and managing OVPSummit and I’m sure learned a lot to add to next year. According to Joel, SM Publisher, SMW will be in LA next year so I guess we’ll be traveling next go around.

I’ll soon have video of the opening panel which I will post shortly along with an interview by Mark Robertson of ReelSEO.

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Success in Online Video – Looking at 2009

November 15th, 2009

supermanlogoI’ve culled together a short-list of success factors we’ve seen in the Online Video Platform space so far in 2009. Be it funding rounds, acquisitions, or product launches…these efforts stand out to me this year:

- VMIX raised $2 million in a B-1 round to grow sales and extend reach
- Ooyala hired an outside CEO, Jay Fulcher, and raised a $10 million C-round to boost product (monetization) and reach in APAC
- Kit-Digital bought competitor The Feedroom
- Brightcove extended it’s global reach and announced a 200 strong Partner Alliance
- Veeple launched new interPlay product product
- Kaltura officially launched its Open Source video platform, and created the Open Video Alliance
- Magnify.net introduced the notion of “video curation”, signed new partnerships
- PermissionTV rebranded as VisibleGains refocusing on video e-commerce
- Sorenson Media dove head first into the OVP game with Sorenson360

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Exciting Times for Online Video Platforms

November 3rd, 2009

315x100_OVPS_2009_speakYou know an industry is on a serious growth trajectory when a conference is created to support it. We’ve all seen the numbers; 41% YOY growth in online video views as reported by Nielsen last month, and more than 168 Million U.S. viewers watched online video in September, streaming nearly 26 Billion total views according to ComScore. Online Video Platforms (OVPs) continuing to receive funding, and open source and mobile video trends are making headway, just to name a few catalysts further validating the space.

In just a few short weeks the Online Video Platform Summit will take place in sunny San Jose highlighting the OVPs, and providing them with a much needed platform to demo their services, discuss important trends and topics, and to meet their users. Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen and Larry Kless, co-chairs of OVPSummit, have been working hard to orchestrate a stellar line up of panel topics and panelist. A bevy of industry thought leaders, and executives will address hot topics such as video monetization, ROI, syndication, and video analytics as well as a panel that I will be sitting on entitled, Defining Online Video Platforms with Ron Yekutiel, CEO of Kaltura, Bismarck Lepe, Co-Founder and President of Ooyala, and Alex Castro, CEO of Delve Networks.

As stated by Eric himself regarding the great need for the OVPSummit, “There have never been more people publishing online video, and there have never been more online video platform solutions on the market. But with choices comes confusion, and the new Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all types, not just those for whom video is their core business”.

The inaugural OVPSummit will be held on Wednesday and Thursday, November 18-19 in conjunction with Streaming Media West at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Be sure to register right away to save $100! If you plan on attending please let me know so we can set up a time to meet (kdrey at vidcompare.com).

See you there!

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Yes, There Are Many Online Video Platforms, But They’re All Unique

September 14th, 2009

black-sheep-brandedAt VidCompare we try to paint a high-level yet detailed picture for purveyors of Online Video solutions, offering them a place to start their research into what could be a confusing space. Our target audience is the VP of Marketing or busy CEO looking to add functionality to their web site that will increase their exposure, educate their viewers, increase site stickiness, and/or promote their services via online video. By targeting the strategic purchaser we address the top-line issues on VidCompare; what are the options, what are the categories, the use cases, the main features, and lay it out in several different UI’s to appeal to unique shopper’s preferences.

All that said, each OVP has unique feature sets, pricing, and core offerings that set them apart from their competition. Ooyala for example has a robust video content exchange where customers can upload and licence content from one another. They also have very deep analytics showing where viewers are accessing content, when they pause, rewind, or stop video playback. Very useful tools to the online marketer offering them insight into when they should pop an advertisement, or how long their content should be before users stop viewing.

Wistia on the other hand has a unique internal video solution offering businesses deep tools to control content, users, and viewership. For example, if a corporation wanted to set up video tutorials within their intranet Wistia can provide unique log-ins for everyone and expose specific content to each log-in. User can communicate with one another within the control panel asking questions and discussing the content as is plays back. Admins can control who sees what content and time the exposure of certain videos with ease.

Aside from their open source core, Kaltura has one of the most robust video collaboration tools I’ve seen. It allows multiple users to upload bits of video content which can be edited into one video which can then be annotated, tagged, and commented upon. Users can add video, images, audio of their own or choose from a group of preselected content to bolster their collaboration.

And Magnify.net provides what is proving to be an increasingly popular service, content aggregation and curation. Their users can search by key word for video and image content across the Internet that, with a click of a button will be sought out and brought into their control panel. This content can then be used to develop a channel and published to the world to view. For example, if I wanted to start a Skateboarding Dog Channel I could search for “skateboarding dog”, “Rover on wheels”, “kick-flip mutt”, etc. and have a wealth of content arrive in my admin from YouTube, Metacafe, and several other popular video sites.

While VidCompare doesn’t offer this level of detail within the site yet (working on it), you can find it here at the VC blog or you can always ask us.

Peace OV.

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