Posts for 'JW Player'

Welcome to this week’s edition of Inside the Stream, the podcast where nScreenMedia’s Chief Analyst Colin Dixon and I take listeners inside the world of streaming video.

Yesterday, JW Player announced a $100 million financing from LLR Partners. On this week’s podcast, we’re privileged to have JW’s CEO and co-founder Dave Otten joins us as a guest for a wide-ranging discussion.

Dave provides an update on JW and its competitive differentiators including its ease of deployment and focus on the “monetization layer” (i.e. helping its publishing partners drive revenue from their video assets). Importantly, Dave dives deeply into JW’s data strategy, and how being the video player for such a massive range of publishers gives it critical insights into usage and provides contextual data that can then be leveraged for improved monetization. Dave also gets into why he’s bullish on live, subscription-based models, connected TV, where the industry is heading and much more.

Dave explains the new financing round and how JW decided to go this route instead of doing a SPAC/IPO which are both very popular (just yesterday Innovid and Buzzfeed announced SPAC deals, here and here).  

It’s a fascinating interview, which I highly recommend for anyone interested especially in the role of data, and what’s ahead for the video industry.

Listen to the podcast (31 minutes, 8 seconds)

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JW Player and SpotX recently announced a new header bidding solution to drive improved video ad monetization across JW’s huge base of content publishers. Dubbed “Video Player Bidding,” the solution is meant to radically simplify and accelerate JW publishers’ implementation of header bidding, while exposing their inventory to SpotX’s deep pool of demand sources. I caught up with JW’s co-founder and SVP, Strategic Partnerships Brian Rifkin and SpotX’s CRO Sean Buckley, to learn more.

For those not familiar, header bidding is a way for publishers to increase yield on their ad inventory, by simultaneously accepting bids from various demand sources, with the highest bid winning. The approach contrasts with the traditional “waterfall” model, whereby bids are sequentially evaluated. As programmatic buying has gained in display ads, header bidding has become widely used.

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Aiming for simplicity, popular online video platform provider JW Player has introduced JW Live, a cloud-based, live streaming service for content providers. JW Live is meant to be an out of the box service that is integrated with the JW player and platform, enabling content providers to easily power up live streams for their audiences.

JW Live is the latest effort to popularize live streaming, a category receiving a lot of attention these days, primarily because Facebook is aggressively pursuing it with Facebook Live. JW Live is another example of how technology providers are positioning themselves to assist content providers in powering their own businesses, as opposed to becoming solely reliant on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and others which offer large audiences, but risk undermining control over revenue generation and loyalty.

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Popular online video platform JW Player now supports virtual reality and 360-degree video. With over 2 million publishers using its platform, the new capabilities could help further fuel VR and 360-degree video which have become key priorities for large companies including Google, YouTube, Samsung, Facebook and others.

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Everyone knows that video viewing is exploding, but for content publishers and creators, figuring out how to monetize all that usage is an ever-present challenge. This question was the focus of our Video Ad Summit session, “Unlocking Video’s Value in the OTT Era,” which included Jarrod Dicker (Head of Ad Product and Technology, Washington Post), Nathan Guetta (VP, Product and Technology, Conde Nast Entertainment), Shaun Koiner (Chief Product Officer, Perform Media), Brian Rifkin (Co-founder and SVP, Video Sales, JW Player) and Mark Yackanich (CEO, Genesis Media), with Tom Herman (CEO, DashBid) moderating.

The panelists addressed a number of critical issues including how to deliver world-class user experiences that combine both content and advertising, why it’s critical to distribute content to as many places as possible, how to help advertisers capitalize on emerging opportunities like vertical video and other new formats, the role that data is playing in their monetization strategies and what important trends are going to play out over the next year, among other things.

It’s a dynamic discussion with lots of insights for anyone involved with content creation and monetization.

Watch the video now (34 minutes, 52 seconds).

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JW Player announced yesterday that it has added Univision as a new enterprise customer in the first quarter, a significant win for the company. JW Player’s platform is being used in part to support Univision’s streaming of the high-profile Copa America Centenario matches this month, including on its mobile apps.

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As wireless carriers ramp up promotion of unlimited data and video viewing, mobile is poised to account for a bigger share of video viewing. As a result, understanding how mobile video will be fully monetized is becoming a more critical topic. The recent SHIFT // 2015 Programmatic Video & TV Ad Summit featured a session on programmatic’s role in mobile video advertising.

As the panelists explained, programmatic is a really good fit for mobile in a lot of ways, including that mobile generates a lot of actionable data, mobile inventory can be volatile due to unexpected viral hits or weather events rendering traditional upfront sales sub-optimal, and that there’s a long tail of publishers that don’t necessarily have direct sales teams. The session explored all of these topics and others such as the technical challenges of delivering mobile programmatic video campaigns, the impact of VAST 4.0, how data is being used to drive improved campaign results and more.

The panelists included Jeremy Hlavacek (VP, Programmatic, The Weather Company), Brian Rifkin (Co-founder and SVP, Video Sales, JW Player), Chip Schenck – VP of Programmatic Sales and Strategy, Meredith), Frank Sinton (CEO, Beachfront Media) and Gavin Dunaway (Editor, US, AdMonsters) as moderator.

Watch the session video now

Online video platform JW Player announced a $20 million Series D round today from existing investors Greycroft Growth, Greenspring Associates, Cueball Capital and e.ventures. JW Player’s CEO and co-founder Dave Otten told me that with the new round the company has raised a total of $46 million, though approximately $11 million of the Series C round was used to buy out prior shareholders.

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More evidence today that viewers are turning to their mobile devices to watch online video. However, it appears that monetization is lagging.

A new report from JW Player finds that 36% of viewing is done on mobile devices (30% on smartphones and 6% on tablets). Despite this, JW found that just 10% of video ads are delivered in an HTML5 mobile-compatible format. JW believes the key issue is that 60% of ads are delivered using VPAID, which is Flash-only and not  supported on iOS devices.

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In a bid to grow its market share among independent online video publishers, JW Player is announcing this morning that it is making the Pro version of its video player free. Important Pro version features include full control over player branding, 9 pre-built skins, social sharing, related video overlays, 5 GB hosting and 25 GB streaming, analytics and player/platform APIs.

Over 1 million organizations currently using the free JW version will be upgraded to Pro. The move applies for all new Pro customers. Existing Pro customers will receive a complimentary upgrade to the JW Premium tier.

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JW Player has raised a $20 million Series C round, led by existing investor Greycroft Capital and Greenspring Associates, with participation from Cueball Capital and e.ventures. The company intends to use the proceeds to drive global growth, expand sales, marketing, product and engineering, and further develop its SAS platform.

The company said its player delivers almost 5% of all streamed video, with 900 million people per month using JW Player to watch video on over 2 million web and mobile sites. An enterprise side of the business now serves 200 companies in the Fortune 1000. Sample customers include POPSUGAR, Zynga, Fujitsu, Thomson Reuters, Philips and many others.

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The march of content providers into the living room is getting yet another boost as JW Player, whose video solution is used by thousands of content providers, will support Chromecast. JW Player's CEO Dave Otten and creator Jeroen Wijering told me yesterday that the beta is underway with 5 different content providers implementing JW Player with Chromecast support, which will go live over the next several weeks.

JW Player will support VAST-compliant advertising, so that video ads will be viewable on TVs when playing through Chromecast. As this demo video shows, JW Player has also enhanced its ad implementation by enabling companion banners to appear on the device driving the Chromecast, so users can engage with the advertiser as their video ad plays on the big screen.

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When your flagship product's name becomes far better known than your company's name, it's likely time for a corporate identity makeover. That's the logic behind LongTail Video's official name change today to "JW Player" as company CEO Dave Otten told me last week. JW Player is the company's hugely successful video player, now used by over 2 million sites. The company has also changed the name of its online video platform, Bits on the Run, to "JW Platform."

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