RAMP Mobile Unveiled for Mobile Content Optimization

At the NAB Show today, RAMP launched "RAMP Mobile," a clever solution for taking existing web content - text, images, audio and video - and completely optimizing it for consumption on mobile devices. RAMP mobile addresses a critical pain point created by the rapid growth of mobile web users trying to access web site content  formatted for online use. Last week, RAMP's CEO Tom Wilde walked me through how the solution works and what the user experience looks like.

The best way to understand RAMP Mobile is that it essentially deconstructs existing web sites down to their core content objects, and then reconstructs them into mobile-friendly apps. In this respect, the traditional "container" of a web site becomes unnecessary for the mobile web. This is a theme that RAMP has been emphasizing for a while now, with its content optimization focus.

RAMP Mobile relies on the company's underlying MediaCloud technology, which ingests all of a web site content to create a full index. RAMP Mobile then dynamically optimizes the content for the user's particular mobile device with a set of HMTL5 "apps" - for video, publishing and search that present the content without requiring any download.

The video app transcodes the video for viewing on iOS or Android tablets or smartphones including familiar touch-based interfaces and portrait/landscape orientation. The publishing app reformats articles and resizes images, allowing swipe-based previews. Last, the search app provides dynamic search across the content publisher's index including keyword suggestions, results filtering and swipe-based results scrolling.

Search is particularly valuable because as Tom explained searching across sites on mobile devices is infrequently done because results pages haven't been mobile-optimized. Now with RAMP mobile they are and will therefore lead to more intensive use.  All of the apps can be fully customized with publisher's branding, and also allow dynamic insertion of mobile standard ads.  


RAMP is also announcing four charter customers of RAMP Mobile - B2B publisher PennWell, financial media company Morningstar, NBCU property Petside.com, and radio broadcaster Entercom. While the improved mobile access is a clear boon to publishers, I wondered whether publishers - who have invested untold amounts of time and resources in perfecting their web sites, brands and navigation - might flinch at having their content poured into RAMP Mobile's apps. Tom responded that given the explosive growth of mobile use and the difficulty publishers have in keeping up, RAMP Mobile is a welcome solution to the alternative of not having their content be easily accessible by mobile users.

What do you think? Post a comment now (no sign-in required).

Note: Tom will be showing RAMP Mobile, plus some further video-oriented enhancements he gave me a sneak preview of, at ELEVATE: Online Video Advertising Summit on Tues., June 7th in NYC. Early bird discounted tickets are now available.

Categories: Mobile Video, Technology

Topics: RAMP Mobile