Posts for 'Ooyala'

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Online video platform Ooyala is announcing this morning that its HTML5 video player is now supporting dynamic ad insertion for IAB-standard ads. This means that content providers using Ooyala's Backlot platform will be able to monetize video consumed by iPads and iPhones.

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Online video platform provider Ooyala unveiled a partnership yesterday with NTT SMARTCONNECT that expands the company into Japan. Under the non-exclusive deal, the two companies will collaborate to create a localized and co-branded version of Ooyala's Backlot platform. Marketing and sales are set to begin in February.

As part of the announcement Ooyala also provided some 2009 updates: contracted customers grew from 30 to 300, self-serve customers grew five-fold, the Ooyala player now delivers hundreds of millions of streams/mo to 50 million unique users/mo, it transcodes 60K hours of video/mo and the company now has 70+ employees.

Ooyala also said that 50% of its customers are marketers, and outside of the traditional media space. The company cited Electronic Arts, for which it powers video on 30 different properties, General Mills and Cerner. The non-media focus parallels what Brightcove recently told me, that over half its business now comes from non-media customers (e.g. business, government and education).

As I wrote recently, despite all the growth in the online video platform space, it's still relatively early days. To be in the top tier as the market matures will require providers to scale their operations, including international expansion and serving customers outside the core media market. It looks like Ooyala understands this as well.

What do you think? Post a comment now.

Surely one of the most enduring questions I and others who watch the online video industry are asked (and in fact often ask ourselves) is: How can video management and publishing platform companies continue to launch, even as the space already seems so crowded?

Personally I've been hearing this question for at least 6 years, going back to when I consulted with Maven Networks, whose acquisition by Yahoo was one of the few industry exits (and likely the best from an investor ROI perspective, regardless of the fact that it was shut down little more than a year later as part of Yahoo's retrenching. With yesterday's launch of Episodic and the recent launch of Unicorn Media, plus last week's $10M Series C round by Ooyala, it's timely to once again try to make sense of all the activity in the platform space.

The best explanation I offer traces from my Econ 101 class: supply is expanding to meet demand. Over the past 10 years, there has been an enormous surge of interest in publishing online video by an incredible diversity of content providers. Importantly, interest by content providers has intensified in the last few years. I can vividly recall 2003 and 2004, trying to explain to leading content providers why online video was an important initiative to pursue. Still, their projects were often experimental and non-revenue producing. Contrast this with today, where every media company on earth now recognizes online video as a strategic priority.

But even as online video's prioritization has grown, many media companies don't have all the strategic technology building blocks in place. In fact, many continue to use home-brewed technology developed a while back. The range of video features needed continues to grow and evolve rapidly. Consider how requirements have expanded recently: live, as well as on-demand video; long-form programs as well as clips; paid, as well as ad-supported business models; mobile, as well broadband distribution; multiple bit rate, as well as single stream encoding; in-depth analytics as well as top-line metrics; widespread syndication as well as destination-site publishing; off-site, as well as on-site ad management. The list goes on and on.

As media company interest has grown, technology executives and investors have taken note. Venture capital firms continue to see online video as a high-growth industry (even if the revenue model for content providers is still developing, as are many of the platforms' own revenue models), with significant macro trends (e.g. changing consumer behavior, proliferation of devices, improved video quality, etc.) as fueling customer interest. Another important factor for platforms is rapidly declining development costs. As Noam Lovinsky, CEO of Episodic told me last week, open source and other development tools has made it cheaper than ever to enter the market with a solid product. With ever lower capital needs, a new video platform entrant that can grab its fair share of the market has the potential to produce an attractive ROI.

Of course all the noise in the platform space means media executives need to do their homework more rigorously than ever. I'm a strong believer that the only way to really understand how a video platform works, how well-supported it is and how well-matched it is to the content provider's needs is to vigorously test drive it. Hands-on use reveals how comprehensive a platform really is, or how comfortable its work flow is, or how well its APIs work. While I get a lot of exposure to the various platforms through the demos I experience and the questions I ask, I'll readily concede this is not the same as actually living with a platform day-in and day-out.

Another complicating factor is that while there are some companies purely focused on video management and publishing, there are many others who offer some of these features, while positioning themselves in adjacent or larger markets. When I add these companies in, then the list of participants that most often hits my radar would include thePlatform, Brightcove, Ooyala, Twistage, Digitalsmiths, Delve, KickApps, VMIX, Grab Networks, ExtendMedia, Cisco EOS, Irdeto, KIT Digital, Kaltura, blip.tv, Magnify.net, Fliqz, Gotuit, Move Networks, Multicast Media, WorldNow, Kyte, Endavo, Joost, Unicorn Media and Episodic (apologies to anyone I forgot). Again though, this list combines apples and oranges; some of these companies are direct competitors, some are partners with each other, some have a degree of overlap and so on.

There's a long list of platforms to choose from, yet I suspect the list will only get longer as online and mobile video continues to grow and mature. At the end of the day, who survives and succeeds will depend on having the best products, pricing the most attractively and actually winning profitable business.

What do you think? Post a comment now.

This morning Kaltura takes the wraps off its "Community Edition" open source video platform, available as a free download, thereby threatening to disrupt its established proprietary competitors (e.g. Brightcove, thePlatform, Ooyala, Digitalsmiths, Fliqz, Delve, VMIX, etc.). Yesterday Kaltura's CEO Ron Yekutiel explained open source and Community Edition's opportunity. Later in the day I spoke to executives at many of its competitors to get their take what impact open source will have on the video platform market.

As a quick primer, open source isn't a novelty; it's a standard way that certain kinds of software are now developed. Successful companies like Red Hat have been built around open source. In fact many of today's web sites run on the open source software stack commonly known as "LAMP" - Linux (OS), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and Perl/PHP/Python (scripts). Kaltura has been pioneering open source in the video platform industry which has been dominated by proprietary competitors. Ron believes the video platform industry is ripe for open source success because it has too many proprietary companies offering minor feature differences, all using a SaaS model only and competing too heavily on price.

Kaltura Community Edition's three big differentiators are that it's free for the base platform and offers greater control through self-hosting which can be behind the customer's firewall. Ron also believes that by tapping into the open source community, CE can offer more flexibility and extensibility than its competitors.

As with all open source options though, free isn't "free," because if you're interested in support and maintenance, professional services for customization and certain features like syndication, advertising, SEO and content delivery, these all cost extra. And you can't forget about the costs of the internal staff you'd need to run the video platform or the costs of the infrastructure itself (servers, bandwidth, storage, etc.). In the SaaS world, many of these costs are borne by the provider and then reflected in the monthly fee. Determining which approach is more cost-effective depends on your particular circumstances and needs.

When it comes to features, clearly the ability to download CE and self-host is a big differentiator, and will be valued by segments of the market. As Ron pointed out, there are government agencies, universities and others who have mandates to self-host. He also noted that by customers' gaining access to CE's code, their ability to integrate with other applications and customize is enhanced (though again, not without an additional cost).

Other industry executives countered that unless you have to self-host, these advantages are diminished by the fact that in this capex and opex budget constraints make SaaS more appealing than ever, especially for smaller customers with less in-house technical expertise. They added that they're rarely asked about self-hosting options (though that could well be due to self-selection).

Further, many of the leading video platform companies offer a slew of APIs, which open their platforms to 3rd party developers without needing to be open source per se (examples include Brightcove's and thePlatform's robust partner programs). Another industry CEO noted that while there's a gigantic and highly active open source community in the LAMP world, it remains to be seen just how vibrant it is in the video space. And it's important to remember that the intense competition among today's video platforms have already driven the feature bar quite high.

So the question remains: will Kaltura's CE open source approach truly disrupt the video platform industry, causing rampant customer switching and gutting today's pricing models? My sense is no, or at least not immediately. Instead, Kaltura will definitely grow the market, creating new video customers from those who have been dissatisfied with current choices or have not yet jumped into video, but inevitably will. CE will likely peel away some percentage of existing proprietary customers who have been eager for a self-hosted, open source alternative. For many others though, they'll be keeping an eye on open source and will successfully push their existing providers to adopt similar capabilities if they're valued.

What do you think? Post a comment now.

Today Ooyala is officially releasing its updated video player, named "Swift," with a lighter-weight, more modular design intended to deliver faster loading/playback for users and improved integration of advanced features for its content provider customers. Sean Knapp, one of Ooyala's 3 co-founders, and head of technology shared more details of the new player with me last week, and also provided a perspective on the coming entry of Adobe's Strobe video player framework, which will undoubtedly impact all of the video player/content management companies.

A key focus of the Swift's development has been modularizing its code, so that only what's required for that particular user experience is downloaded to the user. Faster response times and better playback are critical drivers in the user experience, as we've all no doubt endured the wait for a video, only to end up clicking away. It's no surprise that Ooyala - with a cadre of people from Google, where cutting milliseconds from the time to deliver search results is an obsession - should be focusing on response times.

Playback quality is another focus of the new player, with improved bandwidth detection that supports Ooyala's adaptive bit rate ("ABR") or "dynamic video" delivery. ABR/dynamic video has become a competitive battleground lately, with companies like Move Networks (an ABR pioneer), Microsoft, Adobe, Brightcove and others all touting ABR delivery.

ABR delivery detects on a moment-to-moment basis the user's available bandwidth and computer processing capability so that an appropriately encoded video file can be dynamically delivered. Sean said that via an HTTP delivery workaround it created over a year ago, Ooyala has been able to offer ABR in Flash, thereby preceding Flash Media Server 3.5 (FMS 3.5 was released last November as the first Flash server to support dynamic streaming; it has only recently been deployed by CDNs).

Sean explained that the new player's design approach aligns with the coming entry of Adobe's "Strobe" video player framework later this year, which he welcomes. From his perspective, Strobe has the potential to address a lot of the core video functions that Ooyala and other video player companies have had to develop themselves. If successful, Strobe will provide a standardized foundation layer ("getting us out of the muck" as Sean happily said) that would free up Ooyala to focus on supporting higher value components such as advanced monetization (e.g. micro-payments, subscriptions). Ooyala has not yet announced support for Strobe, but it plans to.

This is basically how Adobe itself would like Strobe to be perceived. In a recent conversation with Sumner Paine, Strobe's product manager, he explained to me that Strobe's tools and frameworks are intended to accelerate the development of custom Flash players, to better support content providers' specific objectives (and of course reinforce the Flash value proposition).

Key to Strobe are third party plug-ins from the growing video ecosystem meant to replace the duplicative process of each video player company having to integrate with each third party. Sumner sees video player companies with freed-up resources being able to move up the stack, for example, to provide tighter integrations with customers' content management systems.

Strobe's Q3 entry is going to be another milestone in the ongoing maturation of the broadband video industry. Adobe is trying to create additional industry scalability and drive further customization while defending its turf against Silverlight and other potential entrants. If Strobe is successful, the bevy of video players on the market will need to find new ways to innovate to differentiate themselves, such as Ooyala's trying to do here with Swift. With so many moving parts this is going to be a closely watched space.

What do you think? Post a comment now.