• thePlatform and Adobe Partner To Accelerate Multiscreen Video Delivery

    Two key infrastructure players in the digital video ecosystem, thePlatform and Adobe, are announcing a strategic partnership to help accelerate major media and pay-TV operators' plans for multiscreen video delivery. The companies have integrated Adobe Primetime and thePlatform's mpx video management system to form a complete solution, which the companies will jointly sell.

    In a briefing, Ian Blaine, CEO of thePlatform and Ashley Still, director or product management at Adobe, told me that the companies have been collaborating for some time, most recently on NBC Olympics' multiscreen delivery of the 2014 Winter Olympics. The new integrated solution is meant to productize these prior collaborations and provide customers with faster time to market, better viewer engagement and lower total cost of ownership.

    Specifically, customers will be able to manage their entire workflow using mpx's web-based console. The key touchpoint here is the Primetime player SDK, which has been integrated with mpx's Player Development Kit, enabling custom video players to be created for multiple devices and have content published to them.

    In addition to all of mpx's standard ingest, management and publishing capabilities, customers will now have full access to Primetime to manage authentication, DRM, ad decisioning and ad insertion. Quality of experience monitoring and full analytics is provided as part of Primetime.

    The partnership is another indicator of how critical multiscreen delivery is becoming for content providers and pay-TV operators as OTT providers have conditioned viewers to expect these types of experiences.

    Separately, Adobe announced Primetime 2.0 which allows cloud ad insertion into live, linear and on-demand content across devices. Adobe also unveiled a concurrency monitoring feature to manage and monitor active video streams per user account. Preimtime also announced support for 4K, MPEG-DASH and Xbox 360 and Roku devices.

    (Note: thePlatform is a VideoNuze sponsor)