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Ooyala Lands Yahoo! Japan In Big Customer Win
Online video platform Ooyala is announcing this morning a big customer win, with Yahoo! Japan. Under the multi-year deal, Yahoo! Japan will standardize on Ooyala across all of its hundreds of sites and will also sell and support the platform to its ecosystem and to the broader Japanese Internet market. Yahoo! Japan is majority-owned by Softbank and is affiliated with Yahoo!.
The deal is significant to Ooyala because of the size of the Japanese Internet market and the fact that Yahoo! Japan, with 80 million monthly unique visitors, is the dominant player. Ooyala's CEO Jay Fulcher brought me up to speed on the deal last week.
Though there wasn't a formal RFP, Jay said that Yahoo! Japan stress-tested the Ooyala platform with millions of streams. Jay believes that while robust content management and publishing capabilities are now table stakes in big deals like these, it was Ooyala's analytics and monetization tools that were the differentiators. Yahoo! Japan is looking to take insight around consumer behavior and use it to drive monetization strategy across PCs, mobile devices and connected TVs.
Categories: International, Technology
Topics: Ooyala, Yahoo! Japan
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Join Me At The NAB Show For Great Online Video Sessions
Please mark your calendars to join me at this year's NAB Show in Las Vegas,
April 11-13, where there will be tons of great education and networking around online and mobile video.
On Monday morning I'll be moderating a Super Session at 10:30am, "Connected TV: Smart Devices, New Strategies," which will feature Richard Buchanan (VP/GM, Content Operations, Comcast Media Center), Peter Dille (SVP, Marketing, Sony Computer Entertainment America), Jim Lanzone (CEO, Clicker), Wilfred Martis (GM, Retail CE Products, Digital Home, Intel Corp) and Jack Perry (Founder and CEO, Syncbak). We will explore all angles of the connected TV wave: what content/apps are popular, how they're impacting the market, what's ahead for adoption, and more.
Then on Tuesday, I'm hosting a full day of back-to-back sessions in the "Broadband Pit," a special area of the show floor devoted to broadband and mobile education and networking. Executives from the following companies will present on these topics, followed by audience Q&A:
FreeWheel - "Best Practices in Profiting from Professional Content"
Digitalsmiths - "Connecting Consumers to Content Through Video Metadata"
Microsoft - "An Overview of Microsoft's Media Technologies"
Signiant - "Protecting Media Assets in the Digital Age"
Akamai - "Content, Consumers, Complexity and the Cloud"
ActiveVideo Networks - "iVOD: Using Intelligence in the Cloud to Drive Next-Generation, On-Demand Navigation"
Taboola - "Too Much Information = No Information At All. Video Discovery."
Encoding.com - "Vid.ly - The Universal Video URL Platform. One Video, All Formats."
Combined, the companies will offer a 360-degree perspective on many of the key issues in the online video ecosystem today. It promises to be an exciting day of learning. Of course, beyond the activities I'm involved in, there are many other sessions, exhibits, panels and networking.
Click here for a FREE exhibit pass ($150 savings) which will allow access to the Broadband Pit session. To attend the Super Session (and other sessions), check out other NAB Show package prices.
Feel free to email me if you have any questions (wrichmondATvideonuze.com)Categories: Events
Topics: NAB Show
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5 Items of Interest for the Week of Feb. 14th
Happy Friday! Below is VideoNuze's end-of-week feature, analyzing 5-6 interesting online/mobile video industry news items that we weren't able to cover this week. Enjoy!
Categories: Miscellaneous
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Disney Has Religion on Digital, ESPN Is At the Core
Disney held its annual investor day yesterday, and as usual, technology, and the opportunities it creates for the company, was at center stage. Disney
introduced a new initiative called "Disney Studio All Access" providing a central location for consumers to securely access the company's range of content. Though details were sketchy, key to the plan is more flexible consumer ownership and multi-device playback. For paid, downloadable video, that remains the holy grail.
Aside from the company's digital initiatives on the entertainment side of its house, the most important asset that Disney is trying to re-imagine digitally is ESPN. Just yesterday, the company announced a new distribution deal with Verizon, which emphasizes live online streaming of ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and ESPN Buzzer Beater. The deal is similar to one inked last September with Time Warner Cable, the country's 2nd-largest cable operator. No doubt others will follow.
Categories: Cable Networks, Cable TV Operators, Sports, Telcos
Topics: Disney, ESPN, Time Warner Cable, Verizon
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Comcast's Q4 Subscriber Gains Dampen Cord-Cutting Chatter
Comcast reported a strong Q4 '10 this week, and in particular, by cutting its basic subscriber loss to 135K, from 199K a year ago, bolstered the argument that cord-cutting has been over-hyped. Lost in some of the coverage is the
fact that Q1 is a traditionally strong quarter for the pay-TV industry and so some reversal of the last few quarters' losses was fully expected. In Comcast's and other pay-TV operators' favor was the improving economy. which Comcast and other operators have pointed to as the main driver of subscriber losses, not emerging over-the-top options.
Categories: Cable TV Operators
Topics: Comcast
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Redbox Subscription Still Coming
Redbox's president was talking up his company's upcoming subscription video service this week, though no launch dates or partner were identified. Redbox has big-time Netflix-envy and clearly believes it can compete. That will be easier said than done.
Categories: Aggregators, FIlms
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Netflix Gets Apple Subscription Exemption As CE Industry Love Continues
Speaking of Netflix (and who's not these days?), check out how Apple granted it an exemption from its 30% fee for its new App Store subscription model this
week. Publishers were rankled this week that the long-awaited subscription support fee was pegged so high, and Google seemed to seize on it, by introducing its "One Pass" service right on the heels of Apple's announcement, with a lower 10% cut and more flexible rules.
Categories: Aggregators, Devices
Topics: Apple, Google, Netflix
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Addressable TV Advertising Struggles To Keep Up With Online Video
An article in Multichannel News this week, "Online Video May Force TV To Pick Up The Pace," discussed how online video advertising is raising the bar on addressable TV advertising (i.e. ads delivered through set-top boxes against VOD streams and the like). That's an understatement to say the least. From everyone I talk to, and from following the activity in the market, online video advertising has lapped addressable TV advertising and then some. From every perspective - investment, innovation, brand adoption, distribution, interactivity, online video advertising is the place brands want to be. And I see this actually accelerating; every week I speak to an executive or two whose company is delivering another exciting online video innovation.
Categories: Advertising, Video On Demand
Topics: VOD
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