As viewing video on devices gets easier for consumers – your job gets a lot harder
Let thePlatform guide you through the difficult channels of device compatibility.
Just outside our office here in Seattle is a body of water, the Puget Sound. If you climb the top floor of our building you can see one large mass of land across the bay take on the shape of many islands. Nobody knows exactly how many there are, but some say it’s close to 200. I can’t imagine the early explorers had it very easy, navigating through the maze before there were charts to guide you around them. It’s easy to take for granted all the trial and error done to make something that was once so complex, so simple.
So what does this have to do with video?
Today there are more and more media devices entering the market. They’re spread throughout the consumer landscape like an ever growing archipelago. iPhone, iPad, Android, Roku, Xbox, TiVo, Smart TVs, and the list keeps growing and growing. The good news is that with these new devices, consumers have even more incentive to view your content. They’re easy to use and provide a seamless viewing experience. They’re sexy. The bad news is that with each new device, content providers must figure out how to properly format their videos for each of these devices for the best user experience. That’s a lot of islands to navigate. Fortunately, people are already mapping out the waters for you.
Keeping Your Workflow Simple
Formatting can go from zero to complicated very quickly. With so many variations of codecs, formats, wrappers and encryption schemes, it’s challenging to find an optimal and cost-effective workflow. It sounds cliché, but you don’t want to reinvent the wheel for every device.
thePlatform does all the heavy lifting for you. mpx contains pre-defined encoding profiles that can be set up for you based on your target devices and outlets. It automatically accounts for such things as operating system, supported video and audio formats, screen size, and recommended bitrates. It’s constantly evolving—adding more encoding profiles with each new device, and you can always customize them or add your own.
Publish Profiles Makes it Simple
One of the components of mpx that makes this process so simple is Publish Profiles. At the most basic level, Publish Profiles prepare all your media files as needed for your target devices. With a few clicks, you can generate any video, thumbnail, or other files required to distribute to nearly any device, outlet or online channel. When we build Publish Profiles, we consider the intended publish location first. We look at what is needed by the outlet you are trying to reach and then work to ensure that the media conforms to the specifications for that outlet, while rendering the highest quality video and richest set of metadata. We have built a system that programmatically automates all the steps required to get content to a particular destination; including file creation, video transcoding, thumbnail generation, metadata conformance, video encryption, and delivery. Profiles can generate multiple versions of the same file for a variety of playback and device compatibility scenarios, including support for today’s dynamic multi-bitrate HTTP streaming formats.
Take advantage of mpx
Will there ever be a standardized video format across all desktop, mobile and OTT devices? I don’t see it happening anytime soon. For now, the best way to simplify the process of getting your video played on all devices is to incorporate our simple Publish Profiles into your workflow. We’ve already chartered these waters so you don’t have to.
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