With mpx Beta, we set about creating a user experience with the flexibility required to adapt to the different needs of today’s video content editors. mpx Beta includes tools to personalize a view, save shortcuts, and customize the details panels of every media object.

Personalize your view

The first step to personalization is to build a view around the media you want to see. An editor can start with a search of her library along any number of criteria in order to work with only the media objects she wants to work with. These criteria include titles, categories, workflow labels, or media IDs. Once the list is presented, the editor can then add and/or remove columns that she want to see for quick sorting and status identification.

Save a shortcut

Once the editor has the perfect view for her needs, she can save that view as a shortcut. In the future, the editor can quickly navigate to that shortcut and see just the media files she wants to work with, displayed with the columns she wants, all sorted in the order she wants.

Customize details panels

Finally, alongside every media object is the panels view. Panels are used to manage the different collections of content details, metadata, restrictions, and other relevant information about the media object.

This region is customizable as well. Administrators can change panels by adding, removing, or renaming any existing field or label. Administrators can also set up custom panels that include metadata or item details that the administrator wants to group and present to editors in a separate section.

Set up custom metadata fields.

Now see the new custom metadata panel on your media objects.

Together, these personalization features improve the content editor’s efficiency and effectiveness in managing video content.

Find out more about mpx Beta on our website, by contacting sales@theplatform.com for a trial account, or (for existing customers) by contacting your account manager today for access.

Engage your audience with social media

Share specific clips with your friends. Just drag the slider bars to define the start and end point of the video that you want to share, and you have created a clip that can be passed along.

We’ve also added features to share video out to social media sites including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Windows Live, Yahoo! Buzz, and VodPod. You can even add new ones.

Easily create clips by selecting start and end times

Customize even more elements of your player

We’ve added new ways to distinguish your player with more customization options for layout, navigation, and interaction:

• Group menu items into submenus to clean up navigation
• Move menu items around to right, left, top, bottom, or float them
• Define different layouts for in-player vs. full-screen mode
• Create custom cards for third-party applications and build your own forms or integration
• Add your own tabs for quick movement between the cards
• Customize any button or icon
• Use new CAPTCHA controls for more reliable form submissions
• Set closed-captioning as a floating control
• Resize the video with new scaling options to resize, fit, or stretch videos inside the player region

Customize all aspects of the navigation

Ensure consistency of shared content

Finally, along with the improved audience engagement features and new tools for distinguishing players, PDK 4.2 also provides features for ensuring consistency across the social media sharing world including:

• Inclusion of advertising and business policies with any content shared with PDK players, whether it is a full video or just a clip
• Complete control over the embedded player layout to ensure consistency with your brand while allowing more flexibility in shared spaces
• Consistent Twitter sharing with built-in support for hash tags and short URLs

Check out the features of PDK 4.2 today. To take advantage of our PDK for the first time, contact sales@thePlatform.com for a trial account with thePlatform. For existing customers, visit the Technical Resource Center or contact your Account Manager today for more information.

Video publishers have many elements to consider when publishing including:

• What file formats and settings are you starting with?
• What kind of format and settings does your content need to be in?
• What type of device or player you are distributing to?

Each of the elements has factors that need to considered including video format, thumbnail format, file location, content labels, and more. A smart publishing process understands each element listed above and provides you ability to adapt to whatever content situation you face.

Introducing Publish Profiles

With mpx Beta, we took all of our learnings into account when we developed Publish Profiles. Publish Profiles promise to save time and effort for our customers, while improving the overall quality and consistency of the video publishing process.

Distributing to different outlets

At the most basic level, you can use Publish Profiles to prepare all the media files that you need to publish media. With a few clicks, you can generate any video, thumbnail, or other files required to distribute to nearly any outlet including mobile devices, set-top boxes, and video destination sites.

An administrator can set up Publish Profiles for multiple outlets. In the example below, several Publish Profiles are available that the administrator of the account has already set up. An editor can then select the appropriate location for the selected media file(s), click ‘Publish,’ and the Publish Profile goes to work behind the scenes.

Start with the end-point

When we built Publish Profiles, we considered the end location first. We looked at what is needed by the outlet you are trying to reach and worked backwards. We built a system that programmatically processes through all the steps required to get videos ready for a particular destination including file creation, video transcoding, thumbnail generation, and file movement.

For example, in the Publish Profile below, the system will generate multiple versions of the same file for a variety of playback scenarios including high, medium, and low bandwidth situations, and then move those new files to the appropriate storage location.

Programming in adaptability

One of the keys to success in the Publish Profile is adaptability. Each Publish Profile works to deliver the desired file with the minimum amount of work (and re-work) by you and the system.

In the example below, the system looks first to see if the file exists in its required format. If found it moves that file to the right location and is ready to go. If not, the system then looks for a mezzanine file that it can be transcoded and moved to the right location. If there is no mezzanine file, then it looks for any other video file to work with. The whole process is all automatic and completely customizable by the creator of the Publish Profile.

Find out more about mpx Beta on our web site, by contacting sales@thePlatform.com for a trial account, or (for existing customers) by contacting your Account Manager today for access.

New upload tools

Uploading content into mpx Beta is more efficient. Video editors can take advantage of smart tools that get large numbers of files into the right location(s) while tracking the upload progress.

• Editors often need to upload multiple videos and thumbnail images. With the mpx Beta Upload Media tool, editors can combine multiple files together into one media object. Media objects group all of the different media formats, bitrates, metadata, etc. for each piece of content, so that you can manage each piece of content as a single entity.
  
• Editors can keep an eye on the console ingest process with the My Uploads view, which shows upload progress and completion. Editors can also see errors, clear existing uploads, track down issues, repair any problems, and then re-upload as needed.
  
• In addition, any content ingested through the Ingest Service with Watch Folders or the Feed Reader appears automatically in mpx Beta.

Manage media objects

Managing large volumes of media can be tedious. The more clicks it takes to get to the details of each media object and file setting, the more effort it takes. mpx Beta’s navigation and media management tools alleviate the tiresome work of a video editor.

• Get to specific media files and properties faster with blade navigation which helps you easily zero down to the detail you need.
• Quickly preview video and verify details for each video from inside the console.
  
• Use Advanced Search features to search across a number of criteria including categories, workflow labels, and IDs.
  
• Use preset filters for managing media you’re most likely to use each day. View specific media including new uploads, recently added, unapproved, airing today, and upcoming.
  

Find out more about mpx Beta on our web site, by contacting sales@thePlatform.com for a trial account, or (for existing customers) by contacting your Account Manager today for access.

And as you add more content, outlets, device support, and business models, you’ll increase your audience’s expectations, and you’ll have to respond quickly to new technologies to keep up with viewer demand.

What you require is a broadband video management and publishing system that supports your ability to stay flexible and scale when you need to.

An effective software architecture enables the whole business to scale during sustained growth in the number of customers, products, features, teams, and deployments. By defining a development framework for building, connecting, and reusing separately deployed services, thePlatform offers online video publishers and aggregators a reliable set of services that help them scale as their business increases in complexity, bring new services online more easily without disruption, and expand on storage resources and locations.
thePlatform meets these goals through a service-oriented architecture (SOA), in which each feature is created based upon its responsibility in the larger whole. The decision to create a particular SOA service is based on a task that has to be accomplished. The services map to business functions, working behind the scenes to orchestrate the business processes so that an organization can respond quickly to change. When built this way, you can easily ramp up any service individually when you need to.
For an overview of our core services and how they work, download our SOA White Paper.

As our market continues to evolve, the overall interest in thePlatform’s services has never been higher. While we’re proud to serve media companies of all kinds, we are especially proud to serve news organizations which play such a vital civic role in informing and educating the public.

So, on behalf of the entire team at thePlatform, we want to say a special thanks to our past client Gannett. And, we’d also like to thank all of the dedicated reporters and professionals at the Associated Press, BBC, the Chicago Sun Times, CNBC, NBC Local Media, PBS, and the many other news organizations that we continue support today. We are all indebted to the service that you provide to the citizens of the world.

With the explosive growth of online video consumption in 2009 and projected growth in 2010, content owners, advertisers, and video web sites need more than basic ad serving from their video platforms. While most web sites can run 30-second pre-rolls, they will need to do a lot more to capture a larger share of advertisers’ video spend—they’ll have to manage content-related business rules, enable multi-party sales, create new ad products, and provide metrics in real time. Following are capabilities you should look for in a video ad platform:

• Scalable, feed-based content management. Display ad servers use ad tags to target and send advertising to videos and sections (sites/zones, and keys/values) of a publisher’s network. However, manually applying asset tags adds unnecessary labor to the video management process, making it more difficult to incorporate changes, run campaigns, and account for revenues. As your media library grows, your teams will be dealing with thousands of keys and values for video assets that simply become unmanageable.

Your video ad server should be able to receive a feed directly from your content management system. A feed-based video ad server will allow you to quickly categorize and target your ads and allow you to group assets on the fly without requiring new keys and values, no matter where your video is playing.

• Multiple ad partner support. Because premium video can run on your own site or a distributor’s site, such as Fancast, MySpace or Dailymotion, your ad server must account for multiple partnerships, business requirements, revenue shares, and pricing models when making an ad decision. Having an ad serving solution that can manage and select from these rules and requirements for multiple parties will result in higher CPMs, sell-through, and overall revenue.
• Content rights management. Every premium video asset has different rights regarding distribution and sales. A video ad serving platform needs to manage these rights for you on an automated basis across all of the video’s distribution platforms. Enabling your video to be widely syndicated while maintaining all of the sales and viewing rights will allow you to maximize the value of your video assets.
• Consumer experience management. Everyone agrees that you cannot show an online viewer the same number of commercials that they’re exposed to during a similar viewing on television. So what’s the appropriate online ad load? This question has different answers depending on, for example, the genre of content, how the viewer found the clip, whether it is long-form or short-form, and the total number of videos they’ve consumed. It is imperative that your technology platform gives you the ability to experiment and measure the best ad experience for your users.

Click here to find out more information about Auditude’s advertising platform and how their plug-in to thePlatform Player Development Kit (PDK) works.

Mike Gaffney is the Chief Revenue Officer at Auditude.

First, the foundation of the online video industry continued to mature. Video quality and performance improved for both live and on-demand online video, and credit goes to our friends at Adobe, Microsoft, and Move Networks. Complementing this rise in quality is a steady reduction in delivery costs across the board. The net effect is a better experience at a lower cost. I think both of these trends will continue in the right directions throughout 2010.

These trends are also key drivers of the sudden rise of “TV Everywhere” which, as a concept, took the industry by storm in 2009 and became a rallying point for operators and cable programmers who had historically struggled to find the right online strategy for premium content. Like many people in the industry, I think this is going to be a major theme in 2010, since we’ve really just begun scratching the surface in 2009. We will see concept and trial evolve to product and scale. It wouldn’t really be possible without a great, high-quality viewing experience and the software to handle the more complex business logic of efficiently and securely extending subscriber access beyond the set top. We’re excited to be a part of that, and we will continue to invest heavily in TV Everywhere throughout 2010.

The “everywhere’ part of TV Everywhere should get more interesting in 2010, as well. With the iPhone leading the way, we finally have a critical mass of devices that enable a great, more reliable consumer experience for mobile video. This will become increasingly relevant and interesting as WiMAX begins to proliferate and content rights negotiations consider mobile as a first-class citizen. Along the way, the challenges of DRM, advertising, and dead-simple authentication will have to be ironed out, but that’s what we get paid to do.

Another trend that hit big in 2009 is viral distribution on a massive scale. We of course had YouTube as an early leader, and its growth in 2009 continued to stun. One billion streams a day is something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago. But beyond YouTube, the continued growth of Facebook and the emergence of Twitter as platforms for distribution of media became real, and really interesting. It opened the door to achieving viral scale while maintaining control of media monetization, which has been a critical requirement for premium content owners. Leveraging these platforms became part of the playbook for media companies, and I think those playbooks will become progressively sophisticated in 2010. Making this easy and fruitful for media company businesses is going to be increasingly important, and we’re definitely treating this as a high priority in the coming year.

Overall, these trends create a very dynamic, exciting market that is sure to continue evolving rapidly. I’m happy to say that we’ve never, ever taken our foot of off the R&D pedal, and that many of the longer-term projects that we’ve been investing in will come to fruition at a time when they are needed and more relevant than ever. We’ve combined our experience and our development prowess to make sure that the next decade is even better than the first.

Ian Blaine is CEO of thePlatform, and SVP of Content Publishing, Comcast Interactive Media

• What are the best video sites to reach my desired audience?
• Who is watching video on my site? How engaged are they?
• How do I compare with key competitors in terms of unique viewers, growth, and video viewing time spent per consumer?
• Do I reach the same audiences as my competitors, or is there a niche audience that is unique to me?

If you don’t know the answers to any or all of these questions, fret not because help is on the way. The stars are beginning to align for the ad-supported revenue model for online video, and there is a constellation of technologies that can measure online audience behavior just as TV audiences are measured.

New online measurement options from the world of TV

Both comScore and Nielsen can now help you track not only your web site visitors but, more specifically, the audience of your video content. Their syndicated online video measurement services combine panel and census technologies, and provide end-to-end accounting of audience size, demographic composition, engagement, and competitive activity. Both can also provide detailed demographic and behavioral data about audience members who have opted to register on the site, as well as off-site behavior via tracking cookies.

In a recent article about Nielsen’s cross-platform audience measurement initiative, Nat Worden of Dow Jones writes, “…as online video usage on sites like Hulu and TV.com is exploding with the rise of digital media…advertisers and TV network owners have voiced frustration over the industry’s inability to measure audiences effectively across media platforms.”

Ironically, the Internet lends itself to more accurate and insightful audience measurement than traditional television. And unlike traditional television, online video can provide advertisers with direct consumer engagement/interaction opportunities as well.

Considerations in selecting a measurement vendor

The right reporting and analytics partner can give you the data you need to apply to your revenue goals:

• Attract higher ad rates and increase ad-based revenue by showing ads to the highest-performing segments of your audience.
• Package your audience for maximum profitability — even audiences as small as 500 unique visitors.
• Provide media planners with detailed, easy-to-read audience profiles over which you retain complete control.

There are core capabilities you should look for that increase your likelihood of reaching these goals:

• Objectivity: You’ll want a system that is technology- and platform- agnostic so that all online video are measured in the same way.
• Accuracy: Every tagged stream should be identified and measured for total measurement and reporting precision.
• Granularity: To get reports all the way down to the level of a specific video, including program type and name, every tagged stream should be measured.
• Flexibility: Look for technology that easily adapts to changes in the industry, applications, platforms, protocols, or streaming technologies.
• Specific reports:
  • Viewers: Projected number of U.S. home/work users who viewed the stream
  • Streams: Number of videos viewed
  • Demographics: Who is viewing the content
  • Day-parting: Which periods of the day your video streams are getting the most play
  • Cached content, peer-to-peer programs, and digital rights-managed (DRM) video streams, if appropriate for your business.

How measurement and reporting tools work

Most tools for measuring online video audiences work the same way: The video publisher tags their video players or streams with a short piece of code, which triggers the viewer’s browser to ping the audience measurement server with the relevant details- such as the video’s content and origin-when the stream is viewed.

thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK) includes a plug-in component that can report media views to comScore Video Metrix. The plug-in configuration uses a combination of settings from within the player canvas and from custom fields on the content owner and media items. The PDK also supports Nielsen VideoCensus (link opens in a .pdf) via GlanceGuide’s plug-in. To learn more, contact your account manager at thePlatform.

Jordan Friedman is Senior Manager of Business Development at thePlatform.