Ooyala has been making news for its innovations in online video delivery. With clients like Bebo, Glam Media, TV Guide, National Geographic and AOL/WB the company founded by a couple of former high-ranking Google employees is on a mission to make content more personal. Ooyala, of Mountain View, California, describe themselves as "a video technology company committed to providing publishers, advertisers, and content owners with cost effective syndication and monetization solutions for high quality video." Their video management platform called Backlot, which went through a complete overhaul in September 2008, is a scalable video platform that gives users control over the delivery, organization, analytics, and monetization of their online videos. They recently announced support for ads from YuMe Networks , Tremor Media , DoubleClick Inc., AOL LLC 's Lightningcast, and Google's AdSense for Video. (See the press release below)
Here's a short video about Backlot:
According to Ooyala CEO Bismarck Lepe one of their key tenants is to help content providers build their businesses. They are responsible for real-time management of the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and has partnered with many CDNs to broker the best price. On revenue side they provide access to ad supported models to maximize across networks. Their Business model is usage based, which is different from others. Ooyala’s competitors include Brightcove, Move Networks, and Maven Networks.
In September, I got a demo of Backlot by Lepe who described the Backlot content management system with the following features:
- Built in Adobe Air – desktop application, can upload large files chop it up, make every packet as small as possible and can open up as many as 7 connections
- Enterprise and consumer side
- Transcode to H.264 stream (Quality 200 Kbps and 4 Mbps)
- Dark room editing tool to set up syndicating rules, preview images and insert ads
- API – can add additional meta player
- Syndication side – gives content owners ability to create syndication groups
(YouTube and Bebo) Flight times to push - Advertising side – hub for all video, Silverlight and VC-1 support down the line
- Can add interstitial adds like key frames, post rolls, advertising place sets and rules sets, ability to add advertising
- Help content owners to build an online business
- Ad serving – channels, placements on web sites, media lists, sets up ad queue
- Analytics – dashboard, can be customized, performance
- Displays
- Search
- Engagment – helps them optimize content and ads
On back end, there's lots of secret sauce. Ooyala gives give content owners the ability to create hotspotting and contextual advertisement through Backlot's ability to analyze the video for recognizable objects and then offer up to the viewer other clips or information about the objects. Like movies an actor has been in, or sports statistics. Targeted ads can be shown, or "baked in" into video. Ooyala takes the video, slices it up and distributes across multiple CDNs. This behavioral data can also help direct advertising to viewers based on their interests and habits. When you fast-forward through the video you can see thumbnails which enable easy access to video segments.
They launched an exclusive promotion for Brightcove customers who are affected by the announcement a few weeks ago about the closing the “Brightcove Network.”
Here's another video from Ooyala about their video platform and their recent press release:
New Capability of Company’s Ground-breaking Ooyala Backlot Video Content Management System Helps Video Owners Improve Return on Investment (ROI)
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ooyala, Inc, a leading global online video platform provider, is announcing the launch of Ooyala Backlot™ Ads. This feature simplifies the process of monetizing online video content by enabling easy ad integration with major ad servers and ad networks such as YuMe, Tremor, Doubleclick, Lightningcast, and Google AdSense for Video. Ooyala also offers access to its own, custom-built ad server, which intelligently returns key metrics for ads within the Backlot Analytics module. Ooyala's Ad module supports various ad formats such as pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, and overlays. Backlot Ads is a key module in Backlot, Ooyala's enterprise grade video platform, that provides all the tools necessary to transcode, publish, and monetize high quality content.
“Online video is moving out of the laboratory and into mainstream use,” stated Bismarck Lepe, CEO of Ooyala. “This is forcing companies to generate revenue from their content and build real businesses. By simplifying third-party ad server and network integration, we're giving publishers access to millions of ads and increasing the rate at which they can turn viewership and unique users into revenue,” Lepe added.
Fueled by the growth in broadband penetration, the total number of Internet users and overall time spent online has increased significantly. This trend has resulted in more online video sites and available monetizable inventory. According to Forrester’s report ‘What It Really Means To Watch TV Online’ written by VP Principal Analyst James McQuivey, Ph.D., in-stream online video advertising is the fastest-growing category of interactive marketing – rising from $471 million last year to nearly $7.2 billion in 2012, or 12% of total interactive marketing spend. Ooyala developed Backlot Ads to enable partners to capitalize on this opportunity, further strengthening its commitment to help businesses of all sizes generate revenue from their online videos.
Other key modules in Backlot include Content Management, Analytics, Syndication, and Player Customization. Last month, Ooyala announced the launch of new hyper-syndication controls, which enable content to be syndicated to YouTube and other distribution sites.
About Ooyala
Ooyala is a video technology company that provides an integrated platform enabling the delivery, management, and monetization of high quality video content. Committed to providing the most accessible and comprehensive video solutions to companies worldwide, Ooyala's services are easy to use, quick to deploy, and customizable. Its modular and distributed framework allows Ooyala to integrate seamlessly with existing systems and scale to millions of concurrent users. Ooyala's partner portfolio includes 1000s of media companies including Bebo, TV Guide, Glam, and Electronic Arts. Free trial Backlot accounts can be created by clicking here: http://www.ooyala.com/products/install. For more information please visit www.ooyala.com.
Ooyala is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with sales offices in New York and London.
©Ooyala 2008. Ooyala and Backlot are registered trademarks of Ooyala Inc. All other brands and product names and trademarks are the registered property of their respective companies.
Contacts
Ooyala
Shalini Gupta, 650-316-3433 (Press)
Sr. Marketing Manager
shalini@ooyala.com
JR Becko, 650-316-3437 (Sales)
Sales Director
jrbecko@ooyala.com
Forrester Research
James McQuivey (Analysts)
VP, Principal Analyst
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/ 0,7211,44201,00.html - endnote4
ooyala blog
Reel SEO:
- Ooyala Adds New Video Syndication Options - Google Video Sitemaps, Youtube, & More
- Interview with Ooyala’s Lead Video Analytics Engineer
- Ooyala Launches New Online Video Analytics Suite for Backlot
- Ooyala Video Scheduling - New Flight Time Feature
- Backlot - Free Video Content Management and Syndication Platform
- What Ooyala is Up To - BusinessWeek
- Ooyala raises $8.5M for new way to advertise in video » VentureBeat
- Roundup: Ooyala to launch, Google gobbles Greenborder and more » VentureBeat
