Our customers asked for it and we delivered. One of our most popular new products, the Ingest Service, now supports Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) for Watch Folders. This means that Watch Folders can now be deployed in even more places for our customers, including within secure networks that are behind corporate firewalls.

About the Ingest Service

The Ingest Service offers a faster, easier, and more flexible method for ingesting content into thePlatform’s system. You can use one of two methods with the Ingest Service:

• The Feed Reader, which connects to your content feed and ingests content automatically, along with all its corresponding metadata.
• Watch Folders, FTP locations into which you place files for automatic ingest into mps, along with a file that contains all the corresponding metadata to be applied to the content in the folder. Files can be in nearly any format including XML, XLS, and MRSS.

Adapting to Your Workflow

The Ingest Service can be used for ingesting new content or updating existing content in your system. It is a highly scalable service for which we build Adapters that will map to customers’ metadata schemas. With its error checking and bulk uploading features, it provides added peace of mind for the ingest process. And now that Watch Folders supports SFTP, it is deployable in even more scenarios.

Contact your Account Manager if you would like more information about the Ingest Service.

If presenting video content to your online audience is the core of your business model, then chances are you are using a traditional web content management system (CMS) and a video management solution (VMS) in tandem. Both systems are highly specialized for what they do, but until recently they haven’t been well integrated, leading to overly manual processes, sub-optimal workflow, and degraded consumer experience.

Typically, the CMS is not even aware of the video content that is managed in the VMS. The CMS stores and manages articles and images while the VMS manages video, and never the twain shall meet. This situation results in problems for both content editors and the audience.

From a content editor’s perspective, lack of communication between the CMS and VMS creates a more complex workflow:

• When a content editor adds video through a VMS that is entirely disconnected from the web CMS, they can’t access individual video objects for integration into article-based content. Although the published videos will appear in the embedded players, content editors must copy and paste the VMS embed code into the article WYSIWYG editor.
• Content categories are crucial to managing online video content. Using unintegrated systems, content editors might not have the option to add, edit, or delete categories via the CMS interface and have those changes reflected in the VMS as well.
• Content editors need the ability to easily append a video to a story or blog, whereby the video is placed in a sidebar adjacent to the text without needing to copy and paste embed code. Unintegrated systems might not allow for this.

Apart from being clumsy and time consuming for content editors, lack of integration also poses an issue for the visitors. Because the video content does not live in the CMS, it’s generally unavailable via site search and requires a video-specific search tool in the player itself. Wouldn’t your audience prefer to discover related textual and video content in a single, all-site search function?

A fully integrated CMS-plus-VMS lets editors ingest video content through either system’s interface. References to the video objects are placed into the CMS database so that the videos could be attached and formatted automatically into article-based content. Given the presence of the references in the CMS database, the videos could be indexed for search. The integration streamlines the workflow for the content editor, removes the requirement for a federated search mechanism, and enhances the experience for visitors.

The convergence of web CMS and VMS is still in its infancy, but with the increasing need for immediacy in web publishing, you’ll want to ensure that your tools play well together so that all of your content (text, images, and videos) can be seamlessly managed by your team and consumed by your audience.

To find out more about how Platformic has integrated their CMS with thePlatform’s online video solutions, see the Platformic partner page on thePlatform’s web site.

Claudio Canive is the Chief Executive Officer of Platformic.

thePlatform wanted to make the mobile development process easier by providing something that our customers could use to get their feet wet delivering mobile content without having to build a traditional iPhone custom application themselves.

Using our Feeds Service, a little JavaScript, and the iPhone’s built-in web browser, we built a sample web application that saves our customers time and effort. Customers can use the sample code (provided by thePlatform) combined with the iPhone’s user interface Framework (iUI) to deliver a clean and customizable viewing experience. Visit our Technical Resource Center where you can download a package containing the following:

• Two separate examples to get you started building your own app. Each example uses custom JavaScript that interacts with our Feeds Services’ JSON interface and the iUI library.
• A browser-based (sample) web app. Since it is web-based, your customers do not need to download anything in order to make it work on their iPhones.
• An iPhone-like user experience that is based on the native iPhone app look and feel. To customize it further, you can change the CSS for different colors and background images.
• Template iPhone transcoding profile. The media files will be formatted and encoded specifically for iPhone viewing.

Log in to our Technical Resource Center today to learn more about our iPhone web app sample code. To see a working demo, type this URL into your iPhone browser:

http://theplatform.com/iphone/index.html#_home

• View our policies on sample code here.

business

Including video in your email can be a great way to increase audience engagement with your content. Streamed video in email enables true multi-channel digital marketing, where marketers can mix the web “pull” and the email “push” video tactics to drive more user interaction.

But adding video to email can be problematic. One particular challenge of embedding video in email is that, because many security attacks can be carried through JavaScript and Flash and harm the client, ISPs often ban video from email. To overcome this challenge, you’ll need a secure sending mechanism that works across varied ISPs and webmail providers. Goodmail Systems, a newly integrated partner of thePlatform, offers a solution that can meet that need.

Goodmail’s CertifiedVideo delivers messages with thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK) players directly to the recipient’s inbox, without ISP restrictions. Your video plays when the email is opened, and just as with any other HTML email message you send, message content is completely configurable.

With thePlatform and Goodmail’s combined solution, you can use your existing CDN, ad-servers, and analytics solutions, without making any changes to thePlatform’s media publishing system.

Why video in email?

Reusing existing video assets. You’ll want the implementation to dovetail with your broader platform solution so that the existing Flash-based video assets can be used “as is” within the email properties.

Using existing infrastructure. The video-in-email solution should be interoperable with your existing CDN, ad-servers, and analytics solutions, without requiring any changes to the existing enterprise video infrastructure.

Multichannel planning flexibility. Enterprise marketing organizations who are deploying video solutions can integrate video into email as part of their workflow process.

Expanding existing monetization. Video can be a great way of monetizing email campaigns. Any existing sponsorship or advertising strategy can be easily extended into email campaigns.

To find out more about how Goodmail Systems and thePlatform can help you deliver video via email to your audience, see the Goodmail Systems partner page on thePlatform’s web site.

Gal Chanoch is the Vice President of Product Management at Goodmail Systems and has over 20 years of experience in engineering, marketing, and business development in Fortune 100 and startup companies.

partners, syndication

a) Find more revenue opportunities when ad servers are unable to fill an ad positions due to timeouts, category mismatches, or missing inventory.
b) Reduce the extra costs of integrating with multiple ad servers and ad networks, maintaining those integrations, and getting them to work within their player(s).

A complete advertising management solution

We now offer Acudeo ad policy management tools through our partnership with Tremor Media, a leading online advertising network. With the Acudeo ad policies service, we help customers increase their revenue from advertising while decreasing the headache of setting up and managing a vast ecosystem of advertising partners.

Acudeo Benefits

• The service provides tools that let you experiment with different ad servers and ad networks. To maximize the monetization potential of your content, you can even switch to different networks or set primary and failover ad sources in order to ensure uninterrupted ad delivery.
• Acudeo is pre-integrated with most of the leading ad networks and ad servers, saving you time and effort by allowing you to take immediate advantage of its benefits.
• Set ad pattern policies for pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads at the player and video level, which saves time and reduces ad playback administration. In addition to Acudeo’s standard Compatible Ad Source format, other supported ad formats include iFrame Banner Ad Tags, PointRoll’s TickerBoy, and the Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) format as distributed by the IAB
• An ever-evolving list of integrations helps you future-proof your ad platform. Supported ad networks include Tremor Media, Advertising.com (LightningCast), BrightRoll Video Network, Google AdSense for Video, ScanScout, SpotXchange, ValueClick. Supported ad servers include DoubleClick DART for Publishers, Doubleclick InStream, Open AdStream (OAS), Atlas Ad Manager, Atlas Media Console, AdTech Helios IQ, and more. For a complete list, contact your account manager.

Customers have the option to easily join the Tremor Media Video Ad Network to further monetize their video inventory. Learn more about the Acudeo ad policies service on our web site, or contact your Account Manager today.

business, advertising, partners

1. Ad avails: the amount of inventory you have to sell to advertisers

2. Ad Fill rate: the percentage of ad avails filled by actual, paid advertising

3. Ad format mix: the combination of interstitials (pre-roll, mid-roll, etc.), overlays (lower-third, bugs, etc.), and companion banners (static, rich media, etc.) that is right for your site

4. Ad targeting: two types a. Contextual targeting: leveraging metadata about your content to select and serve ads that are contextually relevant, and/or, b. Behavioral targeting: using information that you know about your general audience (or individuals) to select and serve up ads (targeting ads to specific audience members)

In this post, we’ll just focus on the first three and how they relate to each other, as comparing the two types of ad targeting is an interesting topic by itself.

Ad avails

Lets start with ad avails, which are the intersection between fill rate and format mix. Aside from adding more ad slots, you can also add more ad formats (i.e., variations of interstitial and overlay) to the mix, which would, of course, increase your ad avails. Keep in mind the other rather obvious result which is that your fill rate will initially drop until you sell the new inventory. Each publisher must strike a delicate balance to not alienate their audience with too frequent or too repetitious an ad pattern, but, in general, having more ad inventory to sell is a good problem to have if you subscribe to an ad-supported business model.

Fill rate

Fill rate directly affects a publisher’s effective CPM (eCPM), which is ad earnings divided by streams multiplied by 1000, or basically, the revenue earned per one thousand streams. If your fill rate is low – if you’re not populating those ad spaces – then your video isn’t working as hard as it could. thePlatform has a number of fantastic ad network partners like ScanScout that can help you fill those ad spots, and we also have several ad technology partners like LiveRail and adap.tv that can help you manage multiple ad sources.

Ad format mix

Publishers understandably want to know which formats garner the best responses from viewers. Pre-, mid-, or post-roll? Overlays or companions? Once again, there’s no fancy magic bullet. Use a mix, and see which formats drive click-thru rate. Experimentation is allowed., and, as ScanScout explained to us, there are other ways that an ad can engage your audience, such as directly asking for demographic information or the answer to a product question. If your content is short-form and pre-rolls are your only ad format, then you can literally double your ad avails simply by adding a lower-third overlay to the mix.

So what is effective?

There’s a new Google and MediaVest “neuromarketing” study that does attempt to evaluate ad effectiveness based on viewers’ brainwave activity, eye-tracking, and skin response. If you’ve wondered about the efficacy of overlay ads in terms of audience engagement, it’s worth a read. And even more recently, Will Richmond wrote about MTV Networks’ recent study on the same subject in this article.

The path to the greatest ad revenue is multifaceted. We encourage you to review all relevant data and options available to you to make the best decision for your online video business. And we encourage publishers to work with their advertisers to develop a mix of ad creatives and formats that generates the best audience response.

On our web site you can get more information about how our partners’ ad solutions are integrated with thePlatform’s Player Development Kit and how they can help publishers generate greater ad revenue. For an explanation of how thePlatform integrates advertising technologies, read our Advertising White Paper.

business, partners, advertising

For the last several years, the online video world has focused on solving the challenges of how to get content digitized and distributed. But there’s been a lack of focus on figuring out how to increase consumer demand for your video.

Making every single video in a catalogue available is a good start, but that by itself will not increase the likelihood that your audience will watch more of your videos.
The question is: How to digitize as much of your catalogue as possible (i.e., supply) and offer individual users the content they are most likely to enjoy watching at that right moment in time (i.e., demand)?

The answer: It’s all about relevance. The more relevant the content choices (recommendations, charts, navigation, search) the more likely the user will engage and consume.
The proof that relevant recommendations drive consumption and engagement: Two-thirds of Netflix movie rentals and 35% of Amazon sales are driven by recommendations, and even YouTube has been talking about the need for smarter recommendations to drive consumption. My experience at The Filter is that online video publishers see an immediate and significant lift in video consumption, dwell time, and return visits when they replace editorial recommendations or popularity lists with more relevant recommendations using our algorithms.

How to make content more relevant to me, here and now

The key to relevance is data. Every single video-related service has two types of data: (1) catalogue-related data (description, metadata) and (2) consumption-related data (viewed, shared, rated, saved, commented). The more data there is, the better, but even modest amounts of data will deliver more relevant content to your consumers.

Capturing and logging catalogue and consumption data in a meaningful way is one of the best investments any video service can make today, because it makes relevance and personalization easier in the future. Luckily, data about consumers’ ever-changing preferences in video has never been easier to capture and understand. And more importantly, it’s never been easier to use this data to increase engagement, traffic, and revenue.

Sure, there is a lot of data and you need to use clever algorithms and have an acute understanding of how to use the math and data to deliver the best possible results. But there are companies like ours that focus on this every day and have built solutions for you to choose from.

Recommendation services like The Filter offer a lightweight and simple beaconing service to capture and analyze every bit of interaction with the content. Once this data is properly identified and logged, it can then be used by a recommendation and relevance engine. Using A.I techniques, the engine grinds through the catalogue and consumption data, and then works out the connections between every single piece of content in the catalogue based on individual audience members’ behaviour and consumption. This mathematical model delivers a list of relevant recommendations that go together in order of most-likely match based on consumption data from all users.

For example, if you watch a video of a kitten falling off a sink (yes – aren’t they funny…) on YouTube, the list of relevant videos that sits on the right would typically have lots of other kitten-related videos. This is because in simple terms, this list is a popularity chart using keywords as a filter. This type of recommendation leads to “kitten fatigue,” as there are only so many kitten videos you can watch in one session. Using the relevance model based on consumption and behaviour, however, the list of related videos includes those that have the highest probability of being watched after the kitten video, thereby offering more relevant rather than just similar content.

So presenting lists of recommended content that are more relevant to the consumer is better than an editorial- or popularity-based approach, but it is just the first step. Recommended content can be filtered to match the end user’s tastes and activities, can remove videos that he/she has already watched, or suggest video topics that he/she has a propensity to watch.

A fully personalized video service that takes into account tastes, past activity, and context is seen as the nirvana of relevance right now. It is very achievable as long as video services take the following steps to get there:

1. Identify and log catalogue and all types of consumption data as soon as possible
2. Plug in a proven and robust recommendation and relevance service and deliver more relevant content recommendations
3. Measure the increase in video views by individual consumers
4. Filter the list to offer personalized recommendations
5. Measure the increase again!

David Maher Roberts is CEO of The Filter, a recommendations & relevance platform for digital media content. The Filter is backed by music legend Peter Gabriel.

partners, syndication

When customers first start using thePlatform’s services to develop players, many of them begin with our Player Designer. The Player Designer provides customers with:

• A quick way to get started without requiring any coding ability. All you need is to know is how to use a web browser and to have a general idea of how you want your player to look.
• A complete WYSIWYG player development environment that lets you see your player as you build it.
• The ability to customize the look and feel by setting the player’s color scheme and design skin, player details, layout, feed information, and much more.
• Plug-ins and other components to take advantage of our expansive partner network. Player Designer plug-ins include the ability to work with analytics, advertising, CDN, and many more partner companies and services.
• A player that can be published to multiple locations with a single URL.

When you reach the limits of the Player Designer, export it to the PDK

At some point the options available in the Player Designer may no longer fulfill all your needs. Instead of starting all over from scratch, we make it easy for you to take your existing Player Designer player, export it, and start customizing it with the PDK. To export a Player Designer player:

1. Click Players to see the list of players.

2. In the list of players, click Get Link for the player you want to export.
The live player appears in a new browser window or tab.

3. In the browser menu, click File, and then click either Save As (Internet Explorer) or Save Page As (Firefox).
The Save dialog box appears.

4. Choose a location and name for your player, make sure that the Save as Type box shows Web Page, HTML only, and then click Save.

Freely customize your PDK player

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to download and install the PDK. Once your player has been exported into the PDK, you have a lot more options available for customizing it, including the following:

• Remove or reposition player components.
• Add multiple copies of a single component to a canvas at one time.
• Add custom features using JavaScript
• Use Akamai and Limelight live streaming.
• Group components within a canvas with event scopes, which define limits for event handling between components.
• Configure the control rack in the player by updating the layout XML data file.
• Change the names of the Most Popular and All automatic categories.
• Add plug-ins that integrate third-party functionality not available in the Player Designer.

To learn more about the Player Designer and the PDK, check out the mpsPresent section of our web site.

For more information on how to download and install the PDK, check out our Player Development Kit documentation. You can find out the full details and required player modifications for exporting your Player Designer player into a PDK player in the article entitled Exporting a player from the Player Designer to the Player Development Kit.

player designer, player development kit,

Better ad tracking and counting

We’ve increased the flexibility of our advertising selection logic. You can now set the Flash cookie that stores ad counts to be unique per site, per player, or even per user. You can also reset the ad count in custom code at run time. This lets you track ad patterns based on a particular viewing session at a more granular level.

We’ve also added a new tool to track impressions separately from the source URLs. Send information back to third parties with as many impression URLs as you want so that your ad providers know whether or not an ad has actually been displayed.

New companion ad plug-in

To support HTML companion ads within the player region, we’ve created a new plug-in type and a sample plug-in that take HTML banner links, parse them into an image, add a hyperlink and an impression URL, and then render them.

Robust VAST support

thePlatform leads the industry with some of the most complete support for VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) standards available. We now support the VAST metafile standard, which is an International Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard format for ad servers that covers video, banner, and overlay ads. VAST also provides standards for tracking events and wrappers which point to other ads. You can find more information about the VAST standard on the IAB web site.

SEO-friendly embeddable URLs

We make it easy to include search-engine-friendly titles in your player URLs. When viewers share your video, these links are ranked more effectively by search engines, which can drive more customers to your content. You just need to add “{title}” to your player URL, and we’ll automatically substitute the video’s title using standard SEO rules.

Support for Google AdSense for Video

Our new plug-in for Google AdSense for Video supports any of Google’s ad formats including videos, overlays, and end-caps displaying ad text, images, or videos.

Google AdSense for Video pre-roll

Google AdSense for Video overlay

For more details on the release and instructions on implementing these features, see the release notes in our Technical Resource Center. Visit our help site to download the latest PDK.

Improved live streaming error recovery

The PDK already supports Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 (FMS 3.5), but we’ve added a new feature that automatically helps the player recover from any adaptive streaming errors. If the preferred stream is unavailable or fails, the failover function switches to the next available best fit for a smooth viewing experience. If you’re using FMS 3.5 for live streaming, you’ll see your videos’ error recovery greatly improve.

More control options

When a user hovers over the playback (scrubber) bar, they’ll see a tooltip that shows the corresponding time in the video. You can also have this tooltip always appear, and remove the time read-out in the controls, for optimal use of horizontal space. The look and feel of this tooltip is completely customizable.

In addition, you can now set a hovering period for floating controls when the video first loads, and can set how long the controls are displayed after the cursor leaves the video region.

API updates for more feed parsing, URL tracking, and video region events

We’ve added more control of the video experience with improved feed parsing, URL tracking, and the ability to better capture video region actions:

• You can now parse Feeds Service responses within a plug-in, for either releases or categories
• You can add your own custom “beacon” tracking URLs to any video set, to fire based on percent complete, absolute time, or playback events.
• We’ve added more control over actions on the video region. You can now capture when a user clicks, rolls over, or rolls out of the video region.

For more details on the release and instructions on implementing these features, see the release notes in our Technical Resource Center. Visit our help site to download the latest PDK.