Posts Tagged ‘open source’

Online Video Platform YouReview – Kaltura

August 15th, 2011

By special guest blogger, Charlie Davis. This post originally ran on his blog.

In the jungle of OVPs, Kaltura is one of three open source video platforms according to our trusted resource,VidCompare.com.  Among the experts and journalists in the U.S., Kaltura holds rank among the most popular OVP providers, sharing press with Ooyala, KIT Digital, and Brightcove.  And, you’ll find Kaltura sharing industry insight into hot topics like DRM, mobile, and tablet delivery, as well as being a founding member of the ‘Open Video Alliance’ (www.openvideoalliance.org).

So, what makes Kaltura’s OVP stand out?  Well, from my review of their 30-day trial SaaS offering below, Kaltura offers more flexibility than most OVPs that will likely appeal to the technically saavy user or service provider.  With a role-based content management backend that provides batch processing of media files, content moderation, and insight into content origin, activity and usage, this OVP should be on the short list of anyone who wants more granular control over their content, their contributors, and the software that supports it all.

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A Different Approach for an Online Video Platform

January 3rd, 2011

We recently published our 2011 predictions for Online Video (Platforms) with input from 8 OV leaders, one of whom was co-founder Luke McDonough the CEO of new comer RealGravity. Luke’s no stranger to the online video space, he was the founder of several video-related businesses including Thinking Pictures back in 1996, IFILM (sold to MTV Networks), and Sportnet (sold to Grind Networks). His latest OV venture was founded with long-time partner F Sid Conklin, co-founder, President and CTO of RealGravity. Sid was the mastermind behind the massive unified platform of multiple video portals for the action sports site Sportnet where he and Luke met.

In 2008 Luke was well aware of how crowded the OVP space was when he founded RealGravity, in fact he saw the space quickly becoming commoditized and realized that all the standard services that came with most OVPs were not going to generate the revenues the SaaS-based businesses where hoping they could in licensing fees. Luke and Sid figured the real value in online video was distribution and monetization, not in “me too” services like customized video players, content management, and analytics. So they set out to build an “all in one” service allowing customers to easily syndicate and monetize video within a complete OVP solution built on open source technology including branded video players, a robust CMS, detailed analytics, adaptive bit rate streaming, HTML5 (and Flash) along with deep ad targeting, ad ops, content programming, and geotargeting services down to latitude/longitude…all for “free”.

Their approach was fairly straightforward:

Problem – Premium content, distribution, monetization (built in sales team, inventory, ad network deals), recession

Solution – Give away full featured commodotized part for free, rev-share on advertising, all in one bundled approach with CMS, player, ad network

Approach/Technology – Tracking (ads served with players for full data analytics), rights management, ad sales, sophisticated data warehouse and reporting, monetizable embed codes, open source + ruby

They began to prove out there business model within a few categories at first starting with travel and music signing Tribune Company, Vibe.com, Universal, and NBC Corporate whom were previously with two other high-profile OVPs and whom decided to uproot their video businesses to give RealGravity a try. The goal was to make it drop dead simple to deploy fully monetized video from the onset whether content owners had internal sales teams or not.

Following is a question and answer session from several phone calls and email exchanges with Luke digging into the details of their service offering, and the methodology behind their approach.

VC: Describe your syndication services and what makes them unique.

RG: We provide two kinds of syndication, and content providers can choose to do one or both:

  • “Private” syndication: An example of this would be NBC, who uses our platform to syndicate their sports content across an affiliate network which NBC controls, and which they sell, exclusively.  NBC strikes whatever business deal they want with their affiliates, and RealGravity provides NBC with contract management tools and real time analytics that allow NBC to track, report, and pay their video affiliates.
  • “Public” syndication: Howcast is an example of this type of syndication: Howcast uploads their content to the system, and then any publisher who uses our tools can search and access Howcast content, and add it to their pages at will.  RealGravity tracks all usage of Howcast’s content, and Howcast gets real time reporting on where it runs, with detailed analytics down to the page level.  Howcast can also “turn off” access to any publisher in our network, if they do not want that publisher to use their content, for any reason.  RealGravity charges each publisher that uses Howcast content a flat CPM fee for use of the content, which RealGravity then pays to Howcast, less our transaction fee.

We also support hybrids: For example, many of our content providers are also publishers, and vice-versa.  The system allows them to keep some content exclusive to their site or affiliate network, while allowing other content out into the public content market.

VC: There are some very high profile OVPs putting forth big efforts and money to build world class video monetization tools like Ooyala. What do your monetization tools include?

RG: There are two kinds of monetization:

  • Direct sales: We provide dedicated, integrated account access to Yume’s ACE platform, at no additional fee, for each publisher that has their own sales team.  This integration supports direct sales, but we also provide real time integrated analytics which combine ACE revenue data with the traffic data from the publisher’s players, in a simple, unified UI.
  • Ad network sales: We have integrated Yume, Tremor, TidalTV, DBG, Brightroll, and Adconion into the platform. At publisher discretion, we will solicit bids from these ad networks for any portion of a publisher’s unsold inventory.  We inform publishers of the highest bid, and if the publisher accepts it, we traffic the campaign, and pass through the revenue.

We work hard on monetization and yield optimization, because we only charge our higher transaction fee for “sold” streams.  This pricing structure aligns our interests with that of our publishers, and it is what makes us a “media” service, rather than a software vendor…we give the software away for free, and we focus on providing content access, content syndication tools, and ad sales optimization.

VC: You say you give your OVP services away for free, but there are fees associated with the streams. Can you explain the details?

RG: All of our OVP functions are FREE:

  • Upload as much video as you want, which we will transcode and store for you at no cost
  • You will get a dedicated login to our full-featured OVP, which will allow you to:
    • Build as many custom players as you like, with total freedom on branding, including many pre-designed skins, along with tools to customize every aspect of player design to your own spec
    • Deploy your players on as many sites and pages as you like, whether you own or control those sites or not
    • You can set up as many admin users as you like, with a multi-tier, drag and drop hierarchy system that lets you easily set application, reporting, and content permissions for all admin users across your site(s)
    • All publishers get full access to all features:  Analytics, variable bit rate, HTML5, etc…

This is all FREE:  No set up fee, no minimum monthly fee, no support fee, no max bandwidth cap, and a month-to-month contract.

Here is what is not free:

First, bandwidth is not free.  This may be splitting hairs, since we do charge publishers once they actually run a stream through our free system, but we charge only for bandwidth, at less than $0.10 per GB, which is much, much less than any of our publishers were paying on their own for bandwidth alone, never mind OVP software.

To make an apples-to-apples cost comparison, we have to convert their pricing into a CPM equivalent: If the publisher uses exactly the amount of allocated bandwidth in his package, (which never happens, and which is extremely favorable to the OVP in terms of comparison to RealGravity). This conversion assumes that the average data transfer per stream is in the 5-10MB range, which is where the average actually falls for most of the tens of millions of streams and hundreds of publishers in our network…remember that this is not “file” size, but the actual data transfer average, which takes into account the fact that some people watch only a few seconds of some videos, while others are long videos, and it also takes into account variable downstream bit rates…it equates to a couple minutes per view, on average.

Now keep in mind that if the standard OVP publisher uses less than their allocated bandwidth, then the effective CPM goes up: So if a “40GB” package user only uses 20GB in a given month, then his actual CPM cost for that month doubles. And if the same publisher uses more than the 40GB allocation, then they get penalized, usually at a higher rate, for the bandwidth overage.

Before we compare this to RealGravity, we must also stop to note that it is impossible for a small publisher to make money on this: Even if the ad networks sell out the inventory, this is still a money-loser, by a wide margin.  Also, most OVPs don’t plug publishers into the ad networks: They provide plug-ins for integration, but it is up to publishers to get those deals done, and to manage ad ops.  We provide access to six ad networks, including all ad ops, from day one, for free…we sell out inventory when publishers ask us to sell for them, and and we pas through 100% of the revenue from the ad nets: 100% of our current publishers, including all of the small ones, make money on their video with us.

By comparison to another well-known OVP’s standard package, here is what RealGravity charges:

  1. Bandwidth: For streams that run without ads, we charge for bandwidth only, at a $0.50 CPM…that is 95% less than what the other OVP charges for their cheapest edition.  Furthermore, they are limited to 1 user, and 50 videos at the low end, and it is 3 users and 500 videos at the high end, with limited functionality, and a player that carries the OVP’s logo. Ours is for unlimited videos, unlimited users, all functionality, and a white label player.
  2. Ad-serving: For streams that run with an ad, (whether it is sold by the publisher, or by one of our ad networks), we charge $2.50 per thousand streams for sites who run fewer than 500,000 streams per month, and this rate discounts for volume down to as little as $1 per thousand streams for customers who run tens of millions of streams per month. Even at our highest, $2.50 rate, RealGravity costs 75%-87% less than what the other OVP charges, with or without ads.
  3. Content: Unlike all other OVP’s. Our system comes loaded with on-demand access to over 500,000 professional videos from dozens of branded content providers. If a publisher uses content from one of our network providers, we charge the publisher an additional $1 CPM, out of which we pay the provider. So the most that a publisher can be charged is $3.50 CPM, and that is for small publishes that run fewer than 500,000 streams, and it includes the content itself, and yet this is STILL 60%-80% less than what other OVPs charge for the software and bandwidth alone.

We also provide a dedicated account with an enterprise ad-server, (currently Yume’s ACE platform), at no additional fee, to any publisher that wants to sell their own inventory.  This typically costs $0.50-$1.00 additional CPM, depending on which video ad server you use, and we provide it for free.

RealGravity is growing as they just closed their first round of $3.2 million in venture funding. The Series A round was led by Kohlberg Ventures, and was joined by Transmedia Capital, individual investor Peter Boboff, and RealGravity’s founders, Luke McDonough and Sid Conklin. They will use the funds to further develop their technology and grow the team in the areas of sales and engineering. One of the most interesting aspects of their video monetization strategy is the notion of monetizable embed codes allowing them to target at the site and domain level. This allows publishers great flexibility as they can add or remove players by site, and control ads by site.

We are clearly nowhere near a standardized approach to monetizing online video which has put a damper on publisher’s ability to significantly grow revenues with video content, so it’s refreshing to see a new angle playing out which could open more doors especially for those with constricted engineering resources and small budgets.

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2011 Online Video (Platform) Predictions

December 14th, 2010

Another year has past and Online Video has certainly grown out of its infancy well into toddlerhood having kicked the training wheels yet still a bit wobbly on its feet with many years ahead to grow and learn. My first predictions piece went out last year at this time just a month after officially launching VidCompare to the public. We too have grown considerably over the months now boasting a roust directory of 85 online video platforms of various flavors and specialties.

The goal of VidCompare at launch was to two-fold, to help the platforms market their business and generate qualified leads and to help publishers and businesses wade through hoards of options to find the right OVP for their specific needs. I think we’ve succeeded in helping many businesses do just that, and we’ve certainly sent our share of new customers to the OVPs. We’ve helped some very large brands find video solutions as well as small businesses just getting off the ground with exciting new video-based properties.

This year I’m taking a different approach to my annual predictions. Last year I offered up some opinion and aggregated some thoughts from across the web from people in the space who I felt were making some noise. This year I will again offer up my insights but this time I’ve personally asked several thought leaders to contribute to the piece by sending me three thoughts on what they see coming in the new year for online video.

Based on what I’ve learned from running VidCompare over the past year I think we’re going to finally see the OVP space thin as M&A activity ramps up and those with lesser business models begin to wither away. We saw some of this in 2009 with Google gobbling up Episodic, Kit Digital acquiring Multicast, and LimeLight Networks acquiring Delve. And along those lines, if OVPs want to survive and avoid commoditization providers will have to specialize as several OVPs already are, like Kaltura owning the ‘open’ space, Ooyala firing on analytics and monetization, Unicorn and Twistage owning workflow management, and DigitalSmiths dominating metadata management (who recently acquired fellow metadata-centric OVP, Gotuit). We will also see multi-device delivery and adaptive bit rate become table stakes as opposed to a competitive advantages. Social outlets will continue to drive mass amounts of video delivery and adoption. And my biggest prediction for 2011 is that more high-quality content will become available and easier to access allowing for further monetization via advertising with more inventory streaming about.

And without further ado, here are the 2011 predictions from thought leaders in Online Video. Pay close attention, you will definitely see some themes emerge below as these OVP leaders speak.

Jeff Whatcott – SVP Marketing, Brightcove

1. Device platform fragmentation puts the heat on DIY initiatives and makes OVPs all the more attractive.

2. Dramatic increase in social viewership drives innovation in social sharing techniques and measurement.

3. Continued consolidation as players that are failing to achieve profitable scale are forced to exit the stage.

Steve Rosenbaum – CEO, Magnify.net

1. 2011 is  the year we Connect. No longer will web video be trapped on desktops or laptops. CES in January will be the starting bell in a massive race to the flatscreen. Google TV will make the most noise, and consumers will find that more and more devices will come with GTV chips from intel already on board. But don’t think that means Google wins – there are nimble and passionate competitors who are going to break out in 2011. Roku and Boxee will battle it out as the kind of the insurgent devices. Apple TV will  remain a hobby. And Netflix and Hulu will find that more and more content companies break out their own ‘over-top’ software offerings. Cable’s decline will accelerate as consumers find that they can get everything they want, and more from broadband.

2. 2011 is the year that Content = Commerce. Back in televisions early days – advertisers were content creators. Remember when ’soap operas’ where produced by soap companies? Well,  now that era is back – and it’s going to be explosive. With content creation tools now easy to use – brands and ecommerce companies will find that they’re going to begin to tell their story in video,  and in long form. BestBuy will produce content (and gather it) about consumer electronics, Whole Foods will teach cooking,  Pepsi will empower their users to tell stories about the Pepsi Refresh campaign. And – given the newly connected world of social media – consumers will Like the newly conversation brands that they interact with.

3. 2011 is the year we Curate. The result of this massive explosion of content creation is that we are increasingly overwhelmed with choice. Too much content makes finding useful and relevant material increasingly difficult. In a world of unlimited choice,  search fails. What we’ll see is a growing category of content curators – individuals,  brands, and publishers,  who choose to be the finders and filters of what matters within their particular niche area of focus. This will force content creators to take a long look in the mirror, and realize that they simply can’t make enough content to be relevant, timely,  and valuable.  But,  creation and curation shouldn’t be in conflict, and they won’t be going forward.  Creators will curate – publications will both commission editorial and find and link to the best of the best.  Curated video channels will make their way to your connected flat screen. Advertising will follow.

Oh, and one more thing.  2011 will be the year that business models emerge for content – both creation and curation .

Ron Yekutiel – CEO, Kaltura:

1. The coming year will continue to show unprecedented demand for open-source solutions, driven by users’ needs for flexibility, interoperability, ease-of-integration, and control.

2. The video delivery space will become further commoditized, shifting focus to an application layer that shall command customized functionalities and work-flows that are tightly integrated with other content management systems.  This trend will be fueled by growing demand from non-media verticals such as enterprise, education, healthcare, and government, where custom work-flows and tight integration are paramount.

3. We shall also see most cloud vendors and service providers entering the market to offer their own online-video services.  Powered by cloud-hosted video management software such as Kaltura, they will take advantage of their economies of scale, availability, reliability, and marketing resources to overpower many of today’s dedicated video SaaS vendors.  Alternatively, an increasing amount of publishers will opt to self-host the video management platform behind their own firewall to allow for greater security, control, and flexibility.

Benjamin Wayne – CEO, Fliqz:

1. Amazon will follow Apple into the device business, producing an AmazonTV appliance to lock up the last mile between Amazon Video-On-Demand and the television set.

2. Hulu and Google will both get into the feature film distribution business, creating a four-way war between Netflix, Apple, Google and NBC to own four-screen film distribution.

3. Asia will surpass North America in consumption and monetization of online video – YouTube will fall behind Youku and Tudou as US video viewership peaks and Asia continues to soar.

Luke McDonough – CEO, RealGravity

1. Video ad nets start to feel the heat. I think 2011 will start to make 2010 look like the salad days…they have been printing money, but three factors will start to put a lid in that business in 2011:

- Video ad exchanges and DSP’s are encroaching fast, and they will start to clip ad network margins in 2011…see “evolution of display advertising” for reference.

- Adoption of VAST/VPAID has been fairly rapid already…inevitable, widespread adoption will level the playing field between “video” ad nets and “traditional” ad nets, which means a lot more competition.

- Direct sales, and ‘quasi-direct-sales,’ gobble up an increasing share of total video inventory sales. If you have your own team, and good video inventory, then you are sold out or nearly so. If you don’t have your own team, there are platforms like ours, among others, that give publishers access to something that is closer to direct sales than it is to ad network sales, and people are starting to figure this out.

2. Everyone will talk incessantly about connected TV’s in the wake of Google TV’s inevitable version upgrades, and Apple’s inevitable TV-related product and service announcements.Video ecosystem companies, (including RealGravity), will dutifully respond by spending lots of resources to develop all sorts of API connections and deals in the space, to make sure they are up to speed when customers and press ask them about this. But no one will make any money there, and the adoption of commercial web video on TV will take much longer than everyone thinks.

3. Connected TV’s will quickly become irrelevant, because mobile video, and geo-location, and mobile commerce tie-ins will all continue to explode, even faster than everyone thinks, which will buoy everyone in web video, and so no one will care that they don’t make any money on connected TV’s.

And one final thought, video publishers of all sizes and shapes will report that their syndicated video players generate more video views than their own properties do. Most will report that they also generate more revenue from their syndicated video inventory than they do from their own properties. I think this may already be true for most commercial video publishers, and so I apologize for predicting the obvious if that turns out to be the case.

Preetam Mukherjee – CEO, Marcellus.TV

1. The Eastward boom: Asia-Pacific, parts of Africa, and the Middle East are going to be the dominant mass markets consuming online video. Online content libraries are far richer than conventional TV channels in these markets, causing a massive spurt in consumption at work, and on mobile devices as well.

2. Freemium: 2011 will be the year of freemium, in online video. With the rapid increase of contextual content (trailers, previews, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, etc.), and the marginal cost associated with delivering such content, a strong case is evolving for the introduction of freemium models as a lucrative alternative/supplement to ad networks.

3. CDN wars: with online video dominating internet bandwidth consumption, expect to see competition in the CDN market flare up in terms of pricing, infrastructure buildup, new cloud infrastructure services, etc. This will be tremendous for the online video market in general: revenue models are just beginning to take shape, and better delivery + lower pricing will greatly enhance the ability for content owners globally to make the most of their online video initiatives.

Christopher Savage – CEO, Wistia

1. I think we’ll see many more sites defaulting to HTML5 first with flash backup. It’s a trend we’ve seen recently that appears to be heating up.

2. I think we’ll see a huge new swatch of SMBs signing up and embracing video for more than just their homepage, but deeper richer content.

3. I think we’ll see a slew of new video production companies servicing the SMBs and small organizations within Enterprise by helping to make the production process smoother, faster, cheaper, and more transparent.

Ian Snead – VP Sales & Marketing, vzaar

1. Much more demand for security of online video content as video producers look to monetize video through subscription as apposed to pre-roll, etc.

2. I see more consolidation between traditional CDN vendors and full service OVP’s like vzaar as the market has now started to mature with more low-end SME publishers using online video.

3. Improved content delivery methods as viewing experience is king.

And there you have it, the near future of online video defined by those whom are making waves in the space. Stay tuned as VidCompare brings you more throughout the new year from the smart people who are paving the way of our online video future.

Thank you to Jeff, Steve, Ron, Benjamin, Luke, Preetam, Chris, and Ian.

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Posted in Online Video, Online Video Platform Space, Online Video Roundup

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Panda Stream Putting Their Stamp on Online Video

July 8th, 2010

We recently had the opportunity to catch up with Panda Stream co-founder, Damien Tanner to learn more about their newly launched paid, cloud encoding solution and where they’re heading in the future. The new service, built on AWS, enters into an increasingly popular space with the likes of Encoding.com, Hey! Watch, mPoint, and others offering on-the-fly, simple encoding solutions in the could for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Panda launched an open source version of the service back in early 2008 (pandastream.org) helping people to easily add user video uploading and streaming into their applications. As they watched demand and the space grow they quickly realized that they needed to further develop their one-click solution into something that could meet large scale demand, hence the birth of Panda.

VidCompare: Tell us about the new Panda Stream service.

Damien: At its heart Panda Stream is a highly scalable cloud based video encoding service. Our technology started its life over two years ago as an open source offering which helped people get video encoding systems setup and running on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. As we developed the platform we realised that many people would benefit from a completely managed solution, which has brought us to where we are today.

VidCompare: Does the service focus primarily on encoding in the cloud or are you also offering other online video services?

Damien: Early on we made a decision to offer one thing, and do it well. We chose encoding as it’s such a fundamental part of the video ecosystem. Looking at what was already on offer, we felt that although many services provided simple solutions for video publishers, none fully addressed the need for a powerful, configurable encoding system which is cost effect for large volumes.

Although we’ve started by tackling the encoding side of things, this is only the start. Currently we are hard at work on several new features and additional products including a video manager and HTML5 video player.

VidCompare: What does the new service offer that is unique to other services today?

Damien: A big differentiator for us is the cost per video when dealing with a large volume of media. Instead of charging our customers per video, we offer plans which allow you to process an unlimited number of videos for a predictable monthly fee. This type of pricing is particularly well suited to social networks, creative agencies and anyone else who is processing a large number videos per month.

The platform is driven by our elegant REST API and offers a many encoding options. We can encode to and from a huge number of formats. But there are also are handy presets which allow you to add new output formats with only a few clicks. This means the platform is very easy to get started with, but as your requirements change you’ll find that the system is incredibly flexible and powerful.

A great example of this is the iPhone and iPad adaptive HTTP streaming presets we launched last week. With one click you can have all of your videos encoded to five different qualities and packaged to stream to Apple devices. If want to tweak something though, you can dive in and modify every single H.264 encoding parameter.

VidCompare: Panda appears to be a workflow management service allowing customers to utilize certain aspects of your services within their preexisting systems.

Damien: Correct, we started with the API, so the service is very well suited to integrating into existing web applications. Adding in the Panda video uploader plugin doesn’t take long. Once it’s in your users can upload video from within your web application, but the video uploads are in fact sent directly to Panda behind the scenes. This means you don’t have to worry about handling large file uploads. The API stays out of the way of your users, but lets you easily create a seamless video uploading and streaming experience for them.

VidCompare: What’s next for Panda?

Damien: We’re certainly keeping our finger on the pulse and always look for places to make improvements. For example when Google announced the new WebM format, we jumped into action and deployed support within a day!

There are a lot of exciting things in the pipeline. Right now we’re hard at work on a new video manager. We have a little something special up our sleeve for that. It’s going to cater for video publishers as well as people with a large number of assets to manage. Our aim is to help people and companies move their video data into the cloud and have it accessible in any format from anywhere.

We will also be doing more in the HTML5 video space with a player in the works to kick things off.

Finally, we’ve been working with the Ruby hosting platform Heroku (http://heroku.com/) to develop a Panda addon. It’s currently in private beta but will be available to everyone very soon!

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Kaltura Launches Their Own App Exchange

April 14th, 2010

Kaltura, the open source online video hosting provider has gone slap-appy on us with the launch of the “Kaltura Exchange”. This is, or will be a veritable playground for app developers who want to expand upon the open source solutions offered by Kaltura. Here, users will be able to customize their Kaltura video solution using free and paid apps made by developers in the community. This will help users of the platform shorten their time to market and provide them with functionality that may not have been within their reach previously. The Exchange will include plugins, skins, extensions, applications, and other solutions.

As described by Kaltura…

The Kaltura Application Exchange is a virtual marketplace for publishers, developers, integrators and web shops to “trade” in video applications related to the Kaltura open source online video platform. The Exchange is geared towards saving time and money for those looking to expand upon the core Kaltura platform for their own specific use case, and on the flip side to allow developers to publish and potentially generate revenue from their own Kaltura-related contributions.

Check out the Kaltura Exchange in beta and see that they’ve already got several applications from folks like Encoding.com, PlyMedia, Adap.tv, and many others laid out in a tabbed format displaying Latest Applications, Most Popular, and Staff Picks.

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Posted in Platform Provider Announcements

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