Posts for 'Technology'

Adobe announced last evening that the BBC will be using the company's "Project Primetime" video platform to deliver live and VOD streaming coverage of the London Olympics, which start tomorrow evening. The BBC win follows news from 2 weeks ago that Adobe is also powering NBC's ambitious NBC Olympics Live Extra app, which will offer 3,500 hours of video. If all goes well from the NBC and BBC efforts, Project Primetime will gain significant credibility from the Olympics, helping position Adobe as a major player in the intensely competitive online video platform space.

For its Olympics coverage, the BBC is using "Primetime Simulcast" which allows it to live stream events across the web, mobile devices and connected TVs. Specifically, a new HTML5 app has been developed using Adobe PhoneGap, a cross-platform toolset. Video is prepared and delivered by Adobe Media Server for both HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) adaptive bit rate streaming formats. The video player uses the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF).

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Dailymotion, the 2nd-largest video portal in the world, is re-launching its Dailymotion Cloud service this morning, bringing further competition to the already crowded online video platform space.

Dailymotion Cloud has been enhanced with features like DRM support for Adobe Flash Access and Microsoft Playready, syndication between it and the consumer-facing Dailymotion.com platform, customizable player designs and streamlined file uploading and encoding. Underscoring that all these features are table stakes for OVPs, in a briefing earlier this week, Roland Hamilton, managing director of Dailymotion US and product head Florent Pajani emphasized that pricing and an all-inclusive approach will be Dailymotion Cloud's main differentiators.

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Back at the Cable Show, I got a demo of what has to be the coolest product (err, prototype) I've seen in a long while: "Surfaces," a wall-sized interactive TV created by pay-TV technology provider NDS. Consisting of six huge LCD screens, running entirely in a HTML5 on a Chrome browser with 4K resolution video and controlled via an iPad, Surfaces is unlike any TV experience you've ever seen.

In addition to recording the demo, I interviewed NDS' CTO Nick Thexton about the Surfaces prototype, when consumers might actually be able to buy one, and what NDS' goals were in creating it. It's a pretty remarkable glimpse into what TVs in the future could ultimately look like. Enjoy.

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It's no secret that billions of videos and photos are created and uploaded to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, flickr, Facebook and others every day. The proliferation of digital capture devices and online hosting sites has triggered an explosion of digital creativity. What's been missing however, is an economy around these digital content assets - a simple way for content creators to list and license their videos and photos, with a corresponding mechanism for buyers to discover and buy those they desire. This massive opportunity is what Paya (pronounced "pay-ya"), being introduced today by T3Media, is addressing.

As Craigslist and eBay did mainly for physical goods and services, Paya is trying to put the necessary structure around digital assets to create a thriving marketplace. A couple of weeks ago, T3Media's CEO and Founder Kevin Schaff and VP of Marketing Dan Weiner walked me through how Paya works. I think it's one of the most impressive, well thought out ideas I've seen in a while.

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If you've ever used video-on-demand from your pay-TV operator, you no doubt agree that trying to find and then navigate to what you'd like to watch feels like a Soviet-era experience. The problem is the set-top box's processing limitations have hamstrung pay-TV operators from delivering a more web-like VOD experience.

The company looking to change all that is ActiveVideo Networks, and yesterday it got a big boost as Comcast, the largest pay-TV operator in the U.S., licensed ActiveVideo's CloudTV H5 platform for a trial in its Chattanooga, TN market. If the trial goes well and Comcast rolls CloudTV H5 out nationally, the VOD experience is going to dramatically improve for millions of viewers, in turn making it more competitive with web-based OTT VOD providers.

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Online video platform (OVP) provider thePlatform, which has primarily served larger-size media companies and distributors to date, is looking to broaden its market appeal by launching "mpx Essentials," targeted to small-to-medium size businesses (SMB) and agencies. As Tim Sale, program leader for mpx Essentials explained to me, the move is a bet that all organizations will need to have a video presence in the future, just as they've all come to need a web presence.

Tim said thePlatform has been receiving inbound calls from prospective SMB customers for a while, but hasn't had an appropriately priced or featured service to offer them. As a result, it's been in the position of often referring callers to competitors like Brightcove, Kaltura, Ooyala and others. Recognizing that SMBs pursuing video need more than what a getting-started platform like YouTube offers, yet not all of the features that big media companies need, thePlatform decided to launch mpx Essentials.

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Online video advertising platform provider Mixpo is announcing this morning that is supporting Microsoft Advertising's deployment of the VPAID standard on MSN, MSNBC and other properties in its network. VPAID is an IAB standard for video players and ad units that enables market efficiencies for in-stream interactivity. VPAID helps make ads more engaging to viewers, more effective for advertisers and more monetizable to publishers. Here is a sample ad for Nordstrom Rack using the Mixpo ad platform that offers interactive elements to shop, see social media updates and find the closest store.

(Note: Mixpo is a sponsor of the June 19th VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit and will have a team on hand doing demos and answering questions.)

If you watch TV programs via VOD from your pay-TV operator, then you've probably had one or both of two curious experiences I've had: either the same, untargeted ad plays repeatedly at the breaks, or no ad (and therefore no monetization for the content provider) plays at all. With over 600 million monthly VOD views occurring these days, the lack of dynamic, targeted ad insertion in VOD diminishes the user experience and leaves lots more money on the table.

There are multiple reasons to explain all of this, but one of the main ones is that there are very hard technology problems involved to solve it, as the pay-TV infrastructure (notably the set-top boxes) vary widely in their capabilities. Creating a platform that runs across pay-TV operators' different infrastructure, at scale, to enable advertising, has been a very tall mountain to climb. Now, after years of hard work and investment, BlackArrow, the company that decided to address the situation, looks like it has finally arrived at the summit.

In this interview at the recent Cable Show, BlackArrow's CEO Dean Denhart explains that the company now has agreements covering 30 million subscribers, with Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Rogers, which are all rolling it out. He walks me through a handful of slides that explain exactly how the BlackArrow system works and the progress programmers, advertisers and pay-TV operators are making. And importantly he discusses how the online video and on-demand TV worlds will converge over time. Watch the interview (15 minutes, 18 seconds)

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Audio has always played a big part in the entertainment experience and DTS, a premium audio technology provider, is looking to now deliver the same expected level of audio quality to connected and mobile devices. As Geir Skaaden, VP Products and Platforms for DTS explains in this NABShow interview, the company has been working hard to integrate with partners to raise the audio bar for UltraViolet delivery and for tablets, mobile phones and online experiences. The company had a slew of announcements at the NABShow and Geir discusses the highlights. Watch the video (5 minutes, 46 seconds)

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Ooyala's co-founder and president of product, Bismarck Lepe stopped by VideoNuze's NABShow booth last month to discuss the company's recently announced content recommendation engine. Bismarck says that an early deployment is driving up to 4x increase in overall engagement. He cites one broadcaster that is generating an incremental $70K per day just by keeping viewers engaged longer.

Bismarck explains that Ooyala's recommendations are based on behavioral analysis of hundreds of publishers' anonymous viewing data. Recommendations factor in type of device as well, so for example, shorter-form content for smartphones or longer-form for connected TVs. Watch the video below (7 minutes, 59 seconds)

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Comcast made a very big splash at the Cable Show this week, officially announcing "X1" a new web-like TV platform and user experience it has been developing for the past 2 years, along with "Dayview" a console for customers to manage all of their Comcast services.

In this video interview, Matt Strauss, Comcast's SVP, Digital and Emerging Platforms, explains the company's strategy behind these initiatives and why it believes in unification of experiences across devices (TV, online, mobile) is so important. X1 is a major step forward for Comcast as it provides a platform where product/feature cycles are dramatically accelerated from the traditionally cumbersome process of dealing with set-top boxes. X1 is scheduled for release in the Boston area shortly, with a nationwide rollout to follow. As you'll see in the demos, the experience is quite slick and sets a new standard for pay-TV operators.

In the wide-ranging interview, we also discuss how TV Everywhere rollouts are progressing (and the key challenges that persist), Comcast's new C3 measurement project for tablets with Nielsen, how Comcast views the role of programmers' own apps (e.g. HBO GO, WatchESPN) vs. its own XfinityTV app and how it decides which connected devices to support, among other topics. Watch the interview and demo (17 minutes, 22 seconds).

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If you're an agency or advertiser trying to run online video ad campaigns these days, you're encountering a fractured, laborious work flow resulting from the numerous ad technology providers you need to deal with. That's the kind of friction that impedes online video getting its fair share of ad spending. To address this problem, Adap.tv is launching its "App Center" this morning, which centralizes the process for buyers to access multiple ad technologies. Adap.tv co-founder Teg Grenager explained App Center and took me through a demo yesterday.

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At the recent NABShow, Craig Heiting, VP/GM, Media and Entertainment for Market7, stopped by for a brief video interview. Market7 offers group collaboration software for video pre and post-production, streamlining the work flow for video projects. The process starts with one team member uploading the video, with other members then alerted to the video's availability. They key is they don't need to actually download the large video files in order to begin collaborating. Craig talks about how actress Dyan Cannon is using Market7 for her new production, "Get Your Luv On" as well as other customers. Watch the video below (3 minutes, 40 seconds).

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Kaltura's Chairman and CEO Ron Yekutiel came by the VideoNuze booth at the recent NABShow and shared a detailed company update. Kaltura operates in three verticals: media, enterprise and education. Ron provides an in-depth update on customers Kaltura is working with in each vertical and the apps they're using Kaltura for. It's a very rich discussion of some the user dynamics in the video space. Watch the video below (6 minutes, 30 seconds).

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Eric Elia, Brightcove's VP, TV Solutions came by the VideoNuze booth at the recent NABShow and explained what he sees as the "third phase of TV transformation." Eric believes companies like Amazon, Netflix, Apple and others are helping make it "OK to put a dollar euro sign in front of content." Brightcove has seen a huge surge of interest from aggregators and content providers in providing paid services.

Eric also shares insight about how cable TV networks are beginning to embrace content distribution via apps, a big change from just a year ago. Eric cites the catalyst for this as the launch of apps from Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which have signaled to networks that it's acceptable to distribute this way, as long as the billing relationship, via authentication, remains intact.

At the NABShow, Brightcove announced its "paywall solution framework" and support for Google's Widevine DRM.  Sample applications for connected TVs. See video below (13 minutes, 35 seconds)

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At the recent NABShow, I interviewed Vamshi Sriperumbudur, VP of Marketing for Dyyno, which powers video services throughout the world for content aggregators, pay-TV operators and virtual MSOs looking to distribute OTT content to multiple devices.

As Vamshi explains, the  company has recently released a TV Everywhere solution that has deployed 25 different customers apps, streaming over 500 different channels from around the world and 10K pieces of VOD content (Vamshi demos an iPad app it built for IPWorldTV, a virtual MSO with 150 different ethnic channels). See video below (9 minutes, 2 seconds).

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Ben Weinberger, CEO and co-founder of Digitalsmiths and I caught up at the recent NABShow, with Ben explaining how pay-TV operators are using Digitalsmiths' technology to extend content discovery to mobile apps, second screen tablets and connected devices. Ben said operators began to recognize about a year ago, as TV Everywhere started kicking in, that they need to connect consumers to content in far more effective ways than just through traditional programming grids.

Digitalsmiths recently announced a partnership with Audible Magic for automated content recognition-based recommendations and also its "Social Discovery" feature which analyzes social activity to make recommendations. See video below (7 minutes, 23 seconds).

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For premium content providers with a paywall approach, digital piracy is one of the most pressing issues.  But there is no such thing as a "one-size-fits-all" content security approach because there are huge differences between the types of people who pirate content - from those who aim to sell and profit from it to those who are willing to pay, but aren't able to find legitimate outlets.

To help content providers better understand content security and deploy the optimal solutions for each situation, Irdeto, a global software security company, has introduced what it calls the "Piracy Continuum," a framework that segments various types of offenders. In this NABShow interview, Irdeto's VP of Marketing Stuart Rosove explains the framework, and how Irdeto is helping content providers convert content security from a cost into an asset. See video below (8 minutes, 17 seconds)

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Last week at the NABShow, Rovi's Product Marketing Director Simon James came by the VideoNuze booth for an interview. Simon talks about how Rovi is helping jump-start UltraViolet's "disc-to-digital" efforts. At the show Rovi announced its TotalCode Enterprise 2.0, which supports the downloadable UV Common File Format. Simon also describes a recent deal with Samsung that allows Blu-ray owners to create a digital copy of their discs themselves, avoiding the step of going to a retail outlet. See video below (8 minutes, 5 seconds)

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Last week at the NABShow, Kevin Schaff, CEO and Founder of T3Media (formerly Thought Equity Motion) came by the VideoNuze booth for a video interview (see below, 10 minutes, 32 seconds) .

In addition to its content licensing arm, T3Media has become an integral part of the work flow for master file storage, helping improve the economics for content archives by improving access to them. T3Media operates on the principle that there are now so many innovative use cases for content that media companies need high-availability, flexible access to it, while still also preserving a behind-the-firewall production copy.

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