Posts for 'Wicket Labs'

Wicket Labs, whose platform provides audience insights for subscription video services, has raised a $2.8 million round, led by WestRiver Group. Existing investors Madrona Ventura group and Divergent Ventures also participated. Wicket Labs was co-founded by Marty Roberts and Ian Blaine, previously executives at thePlatform, which was one of the industry’s first online video platforms, and was acquired by Comcast in 2006.

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With online video increasingly becoming about long-form programming, viewers expect a flawless experience comparable to TV. But one of the complicating factors is that many content providers use application programming interfaces (APIs) from third-party vendors to enable multiple aspects of their experience whether online, mobile web or via apps. These could include APIs for analytics, ad serving, content management, video management, storage, CDN, etc.

While APIs enrich and enable the experience, when they fail or suffer degraded performance, the viewer is impacted and the content provider’s brand and business model suffer. Failures or reduced performance can happen for all kinds of reasons: new releases, insufficient testing, custom implementations, under capacity during peak load times, etc. Worse, given their lean staffs, content providers often don’t even know about failures, until viewers have surfaced them (many of us have no doubt been in this role, for example, tweeting about real-time problems).

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