Monday, May 30, 2011

Brands Are Using Live Streaming Video to Engage Fans on Facebook - Max Haot, Livestream

Over the last several years live video streaming has become a powerful marketing tool for artists and brands. For Max Haot, CEO and Co-founder of Livestream, it's been interesting to watch the growing trend of brands adopt live streaming to market their products. I caught up Haot at NewTeeVee Live 2010 where Livestream announced its new Livestream For Facebook application that allows anyone with Facebook pages to launch a live broadcast within Facebook. Livestream launched this service based on the demand they were seeing from the market and developed an easy way to integrate live streaming into Facebook. Livestream and its competitors had previously provided this service for a fee, but Livestream decided to launch it in a DIY way so that anyone could launch a Livestream channel and embed it in their Facebook page.

Facebook launched its own channel, Facebook Live, in August 2010 powered by Livestream, and has hosted numerous live video and chat with Hollywood celebrities, musicians other high profile Livestream events. Most notable is a recent Town Hall meeting with President Barack Obama that was streamed live from the Facebook headquarters.

comScore noted in a September 2010 study, that the amount of time American audiences spent watching video for the major live video publishers (USTREAM, Livestream, Justin.tv, LiveVideo, and Stickam) had grown 648% since 2009 to more than 1.4 billion minutes. While that's just a fraction of the amount of time Americans spent overall watching online video content, comScore said that the sharp growth indicates viewers’ growing comfort with watching live content. Additionally, the comScore report indicated that live video sites have not only been successful in building audience, but also keeping them more engaged, with the average live streamed video view is 7% longer than the average on demand video view.


"What's interesting for brands to realize," Haot notes, "is the engagement time is on average twenty to thirty minutes, versus if you post a trailer, it's only two or three minutes… and then they have a chance of really creating a viral buzz on Twitter and Facebook, and get a lot of eyeballs coming to the live stream because it's trended on Twitter."
Content brands like movie studios, use Livestream to market the release of a new movie within social networks like Facebook and Twitter through a live broadcast of the red carpet premiere. TV networks like HBO are taking advantage of the Livestream's ability to host live video Q&A sessions with celebrities and show exclusive behind the scene previews. Other brands like Ford used Livestream to launch its 2011 Ford Explorer and hosts regular live events on its Facebook pages with Q&A sessions with customers and fans. Restaurant chain PF Chang hosts a live cooking show to market its Pei Wei Asian Diner brand and takes questions from the audience.

Haot says that working with brands and content owners drives content quality and revenue and is core to Livestream's mission to build a next-generation live cable operator. But the bigger goal of Livestream is to unlock every event around the world, from major events like red carpet interviews at the Oscars or the Royal Wedding, to prosumer events from a church, a small baseball game, or even a smaller conference.
"If you look at the world of events today," Haot says, "a very small percent of these events are being live streamed, so we offer the technology, the tools and promotion to hopefully increase the amount events owners that realize that they can use Livestream to extend their event online and connect with audiences on Facebook and Twitter."
Another goal Haot says, is to increase the production quality and reach across the various platforms by offering HD quality and enhancing the mobile offering by live streaming to the popular mobile devices, and on the web by enhancing it with multi-bit rate encoding and HD. Haot says that connected TVs are another growing platform that event owners can reach and that 80% of all TVs sold today are "connected" TVs.

In a related post on Beet.TV today, Andy Plesser spoke with Kevin Delaney, Managing Editor of the WSJ.com, about the value of live video streaming at the Wall Street Journal. The news organization is creating value in process and audience by connecting with viewers through daily webcasts. This is yet more evidence that live streaming has become a mainstream tool for publishers to extend their reach beyond traditional outlets. As more content creators, publishers and broadcasters develop their mobile and OTT offerings, and with YouTube finally getting into the live streaming business with selected YouTube partners, it's clear that live video streaming has become an integral tool for artists and brands to connect with fans and that demand will continue to grow.



About Livestream
Livestream offers brands a complete solution for your live streaming project on Facebook - Including : Custom Facebook application development with integrated live streaming that gives you everything you need to launch your own 24/7 television station (including Like to watch), Live video platform (including CDN bandwidth from Akamai, social enabled chat and player) and on-side production/encoding services if needed. Livestream streams more than one billion video minutes each month to a growing community of 20 million monthly viewers (with some 50,000 watching at any given time) to audiences on the web, mobile devices, and connected TVs. Notable content partners include Facebook, The New York Times, ABC News, CBS News, Associated Press, HBO, AT&T, IBM, Burger King, Nike, The Academy Awards, The Foo Fighters, Maroon 5, Ralph Lauren, and Diesel.

Livestream was cofounded in 2007 by Max Haot, Dayananda Nanjundappa, Phil Worthington, and Mark Kornfilt, and has received $13 million in funding from private angel investors & Gannett Co. It now operates with over 50 full-time staff members in 3 offices - in New York, Los Angeles and Bangalore (in addition to a globally-available production team). The service is available for free (advertising-supported) or as a feature-rich, monetizable, premium subscription for business. In May 2009, Mogulus re-branded as Livestream. Become a fan of Livestream on Facebook and follow Livestream (livestream) on Twitter.

About Max Haot
Max Haot is CEO and co-founder of video streaming company Livestream. Max is an expert in user generated content, broadcast technologies and workflow. He previously founded ICF a media asset management platform which was sold to Verizon Business in 2005. He held positions as VP of Digital Media at Verizon Business and Senior Vice President at IMG Media - the television and interactive arm of the sport marketing giant (www.imgworld.com). Max is a recognized digital content industry pioneer and is regularly invited to speak and contribute at industry events/forums for the broadcast, broadband and mobile industry. Max is a Belgian national and lived in London, UK between 1995 and 2005 before moving to New York. Follow Max Haot (maxhaot) on Twitter.


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Thursday, May 19, 2011

blip.tv: "We're Building the Next Generation Television Network" - Mike Hudack, CEO, blip.tv


Blip.tv was founded six years ago in May 2005, by a group of five friends who love web series, and has grown to become one of the Internet’s largest independently owned and operated video properties. CEO and founder Mike Hudack says that what they've doing all along is building the next the generation television network. Since it's founding, New York City-based blip.tv has cultivated some the world’s top web series producers, advertisers and video distribution platforms with the mission of making original series both profitable and scalable. This past week, blip.tv relaunched its new blip.tv destination site to better curate and promote the best original web series on the site and make them more discoverable. Additionally, blip.tv announced that it's reached more than three billion views to date, and on pace to reach one billion views per quarter.

I caught up with Hudack at NewTeevee Live 2010, where he discussed the founding of the company, its vision and where he sees it going. Hudack says the world has fundamentally changed since the early days of NBC in the 1940s, which was originally founded to sell TVs, and that we've gone from an economy of scarcity where you can only put out one show at a time, to a world where you can put out any number of shows. He attributes this to the less expensive production costs, which has given rise to a new generation of stars and producers.


"There are more independent show producers today than there have ever been in history," says Hudack, "and that will keep happening, and our job is to make those shows sustainable and profitable over the long term, and scalable – help people go from 10,000 people watching to a 100,000, to a million people, and some people really make money."
Thousands of shows are using the platform and distribute to most of the video Internet, including YouTube, AOL, MSN, iTunes, and to the TV set through partnerships with Roku, Google TV, Boxee, Verizon FiOS, TiVo, Sony TVs and others. Blip.tv works with advertisers to associate brands with the targeted audiences of web series and shares all advertising revenue with producers on a 50/50 basis. Top show producers on blip.tv have made over $500,000 in revenue in 2010, with largest check paid out to a producer at $143,000 in Q3 2010.

Some of Hudack's favorite web shows include, The Philip DeFranco Show, Old Jews Telling Jokes, Big Book of Lies and Status Kill, all of which he says are some of the best examples of what you can with web television today. His advise to anyone interested in producing a web show is to pick something that you are fanatical about, and that the best shows are the ones people make for themselves.
"The other thing that's so important is need to pick white space," suggests Hudack, "so if you make another police procedural drama people are going to say, "oh, I can watch CSI, NCIS, Law & Order", you name it. But if you make a show for an audience that is not being served well by the traditional entertainment system and it's something you're passionate about – you will be successful, I promise. You gotta work hard too."
Just a year ago blip.tv raised $10.1 million in funding and has been growing very quickly building out the platform, adding global sales teams all over the US and in London, and in the last year rapidly transitioning to HTML5. For Hudack, it's been remarkable to watch this industry grow into an industry, because it wasn't here before and he says it's not there yet, but getting there. Right now there are a number of sustainable web shows and more and more people are consuming web shows as their prime time viewing as they shift from television to the web.
"The Internet is a very different place than television," Hudack says, "and we are literally building a television network for the Internet, instead of a television network for television."

About blip.tv
Blip.tv is the place to discover the best in original Web series from both professional and up-and-coming producers. It gives viewers free access to a wide variety of dramas and comedies, series about sports, videogames, food, fashion and more, and makes it easy to find what you want when you want it. The company currently distributes series to iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, roku, Verizon FiOS, TiVo, Sony TVs and elsewhere. Blip.tv hosts more than 300 million video views per month and shares all advertising revenue with producers on a 50/50 basis. Please visit http://blip.tv for more information and follow blip.tv (bliptv) on Twitter.

About Mike Hudack
Mike Hudack is a co-founder of blip.tv and serves as the company's president and CEO. He is responsible for blip.tv's overall business strategy, focusing in particular on community relations along with syndication, distribution and advertising partnerships. Prior to blip.tv, Mike worked as a developer and administrator for the National Hockey League, where he managed the team responsible for one of the biggest IT projects in the history of the League — consolidating and re-developing the NHL's internal applications, which serve hundreds of employees using dozens of technologies. Mike also developed the content management system for NHL.com and redesigned the software used to bring scores and statistics from dozens of simultaneous hockey games to fans in real-time.

Mike has spoken at SXSW, Streaming Media West, Beyond Broadcast, the Open Media Developers Summit, TelcoTV and dozens of other conferences and has served as a guest lecturer at NYU and elsewhere as an expert on video, blogging and citizen journalism. He has created and maintained more than a half dozen independent media projects, including warstories:CC, warblogs:CC and the Index of Evil. His independent projects have been covered by the Washington Post, USA Today, the PBS Newshour, NPR and Forbes, among others. Follow Mike Hudack (mhudack) on Twitter

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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Creating Branded Video Experiences Using the Kyte Platform - Curt Van Inwegen, LEVEL

I caught up with Curt Van Inwegen, VP of Client Services at LEVEL Studios at last year's Online Video Platform Summit where he was part of a panel on the topic of how to choose the right online video platform for your business. Van Inwegen offered his insights on what you should consider for selecting the appropriate OVP for your business. LEVEL Studios is an independent digital agency based in San Luis Obispo, California with additional offices in San Jose and El Segundo, California that provides user experience, digital media, and application development solutions.

Van Inwegen suggests that when you're choosing an OVP you need to look at several things. You're not just looking at the technology, you're looking at the ability to gather data on who is looking at your content, what devices they are using, desktop or mobile and what type of mobile, iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry. The other piece of it is, looking at whether your content can actually play on those devices or can it be produced from those devices.



With everything going mobile, Van Inwegen, notes that the ability to ingest that content and view it on a variety of different platforms is really what's critical and an OVP will help you distribute your content to all those platforms and devices within the complex and fragmented video landscape. Those are but a few of the key factors he and his team at LEVEL look for in the solutions they provide to their clients.

Van Inwegen says:
"A lot of our clients aren't just looking to post their video up and generate a bunch of ad revenue, they're looking for what we call, branded experiences."
LEVEL's choosing of the Kyte platform was based on the idea that they can have complete control of customization of the video player. Everything that wraps around the video can represent the brand in way that he says isn't available in other platforms. This offers great flexibility in a white labeled solution for any viewing platform whether it's a TV, website or mobile device.

Van Inwegen spoke with Beet.TV last year about how on LEVEL has helped their client Monster Energy Drink create an interactive branded video experience for their loyal fans using the Kyte platform. He says that the flexibility of Kyte's 360° application is incredibly powerful for producing content, both professionally produced or user-generated, and distribution on platforms on mobile, desktop and the social web. Other key features that offer the brand more control and insight are with the moderation tools and analytics suite. Read more here: http://t.co/u3C9tS1

About Curt Van Inwegen
Curt Van Inwegen is the Vice President of Operations at LEVEL Studios, an independent digital agency headquartered in San Luis Obispo. With offices in San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles and San Jose, LEVEL has about 150 employees (more than 100 based in San Luis Obispo) and a client list that includes Apple, Disney, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, among many others. Prior to joining LEVEL, Curt served as a member of the Orb Networks, Inc. executive team and managed strategic partnerships with companies such as Sprint, Intel, AMD, Hutchison 3 Group, Nokia, Vodafone and Virgin Digital. Curt earned his MBA degree from Loyola Marymount University and his Bachelor’s degree in Business and Accounting from the Loyola College, Maryland.

On a personal level, Curt, his wife Martha and daughter Cyprus live in Atascadero and enjoy all the region has to offer from outdoor activities to wine tasting to the various farmers markets. He’s an active cyclist and enjoys passing mountain bikers on 27-speed bikes uphill with his single speed. From a historical perspective, his Grandmother on his mother’s side was Melba Branch, of the long-standing Branch family in Arroyo Grande.

Follow Curt Van Inwegen (LEVEL_CS) on Twitter


About LEVEL Studios
LEVEL Studios is an independent digital agency that amplifies global brands by innovating across desktop, web and mobile environments. LEVEL provides user experience, digital media, and application development solutions. Its solutions include user experience design and research, brand promotion strategy, and marketing research and planning; enterprise application design, Web services development and integration, content management implementation, technology architecture consulting, and hosting and managed services; J2EE, .NET, PHP, and ColdFusion-based systems engineering; and intranet, extranet, and portal solutions. The company’s services also include brand and campaign development, social media, information design, and search engine marketing; and 3D design and development, Web and application interface design, video and post production, Web production, and database engineering. LEVEL Studios was formerly known as Web Associates, Inc. The company was founded in 1995 and is based in San Luis Obispo, California with additional offices in San Jose and El Segundo, California. As of September 20, 2010, LEVEL Studios operates as a subsidiary of Rosetta Marketing Strategies Group, Inc.


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Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Why Every Brand Should Hire a Professional Video Producer - Bruce Alfred, Cobblestone Inc.

Video is well on its way to becoming the dominant medium for communication. In the past, text had been the main vehicle for communicating within the business, entertainment and news and information worlds, but that has changed dramatically in recent years with the rise of low cost video production tools and distribution platforms. The explosive growth of user-generated content on YouTube has spawned a new generation of amateur video producers which has, in turn, made it more acceptable for lower quality productions. It's true that anyone with the right tools and know-how can shoot and edit video. And, to some degree we are all able to craft an interesting or even compelling story. But what about the art and craft of producing a professional video production? Does knowing how to use a Flip camera make you a video professional?

Bruce Alfred, Principal of Cobblestone Inc., is asked over and over, how important is it to create high quality video? Can I just use my consumer HD camera to make something and put it up on my business website? As professional video producer and web video consultant, Alfred's answered that question many times and his answer is no, that's not the best idea.



Alfred says,
"When you're putting your own video on your site you want it to increase and raise your image. You don't want it to join the YouTube, user-generated, quickly shot and thrown up on the web type of video because there's so much of that. You want to rise above the noise. So, in short, make sure that you hire a video producer or a video production company that knows how to tell stories, that knows how to connect with any audience, that can learn your goals quickly and be able to interpret those goals into a message that calls people to the action that you need."
Certain content requires high production value and other content may not. It all depends on your audience. But for brands, you want to make sure you're above the fray and not just another low quality YouTube video. While there could be places on your site where you have user-generated video, when it's your creation you want it to reflect well on your brand.

With text, anyone can write, but that doesn't make you a great writer. Alfred says that a professional video producer is an expert that every brand should hire.
"Any good producer will really be a visual storyteller. They are going to know how to build your story and your story is how we as humans connect to others. What you want to do with your video is build some kind of loyalty, bring people into whatever your organization is. A professional video producer will help you reach that type of goal by using storytelling, by building emotion, perhaps by humor – all things that draw the users in."

On the Cobblestone Inc. blog Alfred answered The Top Seven Questions About Web Video, and expanded on why brands should invest in professionally produced video.
"Video is your public face to the world.  Make sure you don’t have egg on it. The less cheeky answer is more nuanced: it depends on your goals and the expected shelf life of the video.  If you’re producing video to build brand awareness, or generally promote your organization it makes sense to produce a high-quality professional video. In most cases, the same applies to any evergreen subject that you will highlight on your website for the foreseeable future. The video needs to not only convey information but your professional image as well.
If you are providing product details or how-to information to potential or existing customers, the production still needs to be professional.  But in this case, viewers are looking for specifics, and don’t need bells and whistles.  Here simplicity, clarity, and brevity are the elements that count most. When you want to create a community around your product, an event, or your business as a whole, it is worth asking your users to upload relevant videos. User generated content is an excellent way to deepen engagement, and allow users to inform others."


About Bruce Alfred
Bruce Alfred is an award-winning producer/director/writer, and web video consultant. During a career which has spanned 25 years, Alfred has produced non-fiction works for clients of nearly every size and stripe -- for broadcast, web, corporate, governmental, and non-profit. Alfred’s video projects have taken him from the operating room to the board room, from a Somali immigrant community to the south of France. Yet, all of his programs have one basic commonality: Alfred’s work speaks to his audiences in ways that are at once informative, understandable, and engaging.

One of his better-known documentary projects was a four-hour mini-series on the group of French impressionist artists. Alfred led all creative processes on The Other Revolution: The Impressionists, which became one of A&E Television’s most sophisticated and successful Biography programs. The series continues to sell well on DVD, and has been rebroadcast multiple times.  Projects prior to his establishment of Cobblestone include his role as coordinating producer for Ken Burns' Baseball, the 18- hour series for PBS.

Alfred has long embraced emerging technologies when such technologies lower costs, increase efficiencies, or allow new opportunities. As streaming video on the web became practicable, Alfred saw the challenge and opportunity in delivering a highly satisfactory results-oriented web video experience. After in-depth web-video related research and much testing of software and hardware, Alfred now serves as a consultant to organizations interested in optimal video delivery to internet connected devices, as well as video SEO, monetization, and analytics. He also works with clients on instituting best practices for integrating video into websites, social media, and video sharing sites.

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Sunday, May 8, 2011

Making Magic with Online Video - Austin Brooks, Professional Magician & Internet Marketer


Austin Brooks is vice president of an internet marketing company and moonlights as a professional magician performing for some of America’s top corporations such as Pepsi, Warner Brothers, IBM and Sony. He uses online video as a  marketing tool because video is the best way to demonstrate his magic act and full range of what he can offer to potential clients. For Brooks, it was important to have a professional looking website to showcase his magic act and having high quality video was definitely a trick he wanted to have up his sleeve. I caught up with Brooks at last year's Online Video Platform Summit where he spoke on a panel about "How to Choose the Right Online Video Platform for Your Business", that comprised of a cross-section of online video platform users in entertainment, business, and education who discussed their decision-making process and the features they looked for to help them advance their goals speak and best fit their needs.

Brooks says:
"For a small business, if you really want to push your services you need to start working on some kind of video strategy. It's not just about shooting a video and putting it up on YouTube and embed it on your website, it goes much further into using it as a credible tool for your business."
Brooks uses Brightcove to power some of the video on his website, but the path to finding the right online video platform manage and distribute his videos took some time. Troy Dreier, spoke with Brooks about his search for an OVP which is highlighted in the post, Case Study: The Magic of Affordable Video Delivery on Onlinevideo.net.


After some experimentation with YouTubeVimeo and several OVPs he came upon a Brightcove ad while leafing through an issue of StreamingMedia magazine and decided to give Brightcove a try.  After about 5 months as a Brightcove Express customer Brooks noted on his blog,
 "In my opinion, Brightcove is THE killer app for anyone wanting to market with video online. It has helped me increase sales in my business and made it easier to do so."
According to Brooks, Brightcove has several key advantages for small business video publishers, which he wrote in his own review of the platform. His favorite features include, smooth playback with no buffering, embed once and future updates are reflected, awesome analytics, professional grade video players, and the best customer support in the industry. Brooks uses analytics to grade the performance of his videos and as an editorial tool to both reshoot and recut his videos based on viewer engagement and drop off rate.

He has since moved to LongTail Video for his online video needs, with Bits on the Run as his OVP of choice to handle video management, transcoding, analytics, distribution, streaming and incorporated the JW Player 5.6 for a seamless cross-platform video playback experience on the web and mobile devices for Flash and HTML5.  This solution has offered him even more flexibility as well as more affordable pricing for content delivery.

Brooks says:
"If I could pass on any advise I would say, if you are a small business and you're looking to establish yourself online, you really need to look at video and figure out a way to constantly publish content on a regular basis; and if you do that you'll start to get a lot of followers."
Read his review of Brightcove Express here: http://www.austinbrooks.com/brightcove-express-review
Along with this post: Austin Brooks Magic Touts Brightcove Express | Brightcove Blog



About Austin Brooks, Independent Magician, Austin Brooks Magic
Austin Brooks is vice president of an internet marketing company and moonlights as a professional magician performing for some of America’s top corporations such as Pepsi, Warner Brothers, IBM and Sony. He began his magic career at the age of 17 when he was accepted to the famed Chavez College of Magic. After two years of intense training, Austin was the youngest person to ever graduate from the college and ranked top in his class. At the young age of 19 Austin took his show on the road and performed all over the country. He performed for companies like Pepsi, Arm and Hammer, Virgin Records, numerous colleges and nightclubs and even spent 18 months in Las Vegas performing for various Casinos and Corporate events. While on the road he wrote his first book “Making Magic Art” and quickly sold out it’s first printing, becoming a must-read for magicians everywhere. The book was proclaimed the bible for “alternative thinking” in magic.

Always wanting to learn more, Austin set out to earn the rare title of Master Magician. To earn the title Master Magician is not an easy task. Not only must you master all of the styles of magic such as illusions, street magic, sleight-of-hand, comedy, and mentalism, you have to be able to perform your craft across all demographics and events. Austin Brooks is one of the few individuals in the world that have been given the title of master magician. Currently, Austin performs for America’s top corporations and elite parties. He develops products for other magicians and consults for feature films and television shows when they need a magic effect created for their project.

Updated 5/9/11 - Note on LongTail Video.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics

Without detailed information on who’s watching—not to mention where, when, for how long, and on what devices—it’s impossible to prove the business value of your video communications initiative. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach.  At the Online Video Platform Summit, this all-star panel that examines what is the important data you should be collecting and how to use that data to improve the effectiveness of your video and increase your ROI.

Paul Riismandel, session moderator, started the discussion by asking the panel, "What is the data that is most important for online video publishers? What drives ROI?"

Dan Piech of comScore, says that the most important metrics are the ones that differentiate you. What can you provide that is different from your competitors? You might have a different service, then prove it. What makes your viewers different from other viewers? Are they more engaged, in one thing more than another? That's where data helps show you those differentiation points.

According to Dan Berra of Unicast, engagement is primary metric they focus on in the advertising space. They are tracking how much are people interacting and spending time within that video environment to prove ROI to advertisers. AJ McGowen of Unicorn Media adds that the most important metrics are actionable, and helps you make good business decisions. It's not just about quality of service and did the video have a fast start of buffer, it's about the quality of the content and did people find it engaging – and for publishers it's about how to make the content better.

For Bismarck Lepe of Ooyala,  it really depends on the business case you're trying to solve to define how you measure success. Brett Wilson of TubeMogul says that in general, publishers that sell ads should care about the metrics that their advertisers care about, which is reach, audience and performance. Brand marketers aren't as interested in the real-time metrics as much as they are interested attitudinal metrics – what's the brand lift, what's the purchase intent, or recall? – and the industry could do a better job at creating standard metrics they understand.

The panel all agree that while the industry has similar measures for engagement and reach, it still needs to come together and agree on true key measures of success, even down to what is counted as a view. Data has to be meaningful for publishers to deliver the best possible viewing experience, and at the end of the day it's about a creating that personal experience with great content. It's the social nature of online video that makes it uniquely powerful.

Watch the video below for more of the discussion and to hear where we are going with video analytics, and how publishers can better track their metrics across the different screens.


Speaker bios:

Paul Riismandel, Director of Curriculum Support, School of Communication, Northwestern University (Moderator)
Paul Riismandel has been working in online educational media for fifteen years, specializing in audio and video production designed for streaming. Paul is active in the educational media community as an advocate for online video and encouraging greater collaboration between the education vertical and the larger industry. He writes about these issues in the Class Act column for Streaming Media magazine. Paul is also a radio enthusiast, serving as advisor to student-run WNUR-FM at Northwestern University, and blogging about the future of radio at RadioSurvivor.com. He also blogs and podcasts about other media stuff at mediageek.net.

Brett Wilson, Co-Founder, CEO, TubeMogul
Brett leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first three years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable e-commerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired. Brett is undefeated at Risk, is the reigning Foosball champion at TubeMogul and a lousy (but aspiring) windsurfer, sailor and investor. He is also married and has two beautiful children. Brett received his MBA from the UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.


Bismarck C Lepe, Co-founder and President of Products, Ooyala
As an Ooyala co-founder and founding CEO, Bismarck Lepe raised $10 million in funding and signed many of the company's early media partnerships before passing the baton to Jay Fulcher in 2009. Currently, as President of Product Strategy, he is responsible for marketing and driving Ooyala's product development vision. Bismarck sits on the Ooyala Board of Directors. Before co-founding Ooyala, Bismarck worked at Google as a Senior Product Manager, developing and managing new products for the company's AdSense network. He launched more than 25 different Google AdSense products, including Click-to-Play video ads and Google's Intelligent Ad Server, which brought the company over $1 billion dollars in new annual revenue. Most notably, Bismarck managed the early growth of AdSense display and video advertising. Business Week named Bismarck one of its Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. Bismarck has a B.A. in Economics and a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University.


AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media
AJ McGowan is responsible for engineering the cutting-edge architecture that will deliver high-quality audio and video via a highly intuitive interface. Prior to Unicorn Media, AJ spent five years at Limelight Networks where as director of solutions engineering, he assisted the company's marquee customers with implementing their content delivery networks, developing best practices, and capacity planning. With a remarkable combination of intelligence and drive, AJ started his first company building high-end custom computers while still in the 8th grade. By age 14, he was an IT manager, and in between high school classes completed a highly technical token ring/mainframe to Ethernet/NT-Unix network upgrade and answered pages from distressed employees.

Dan Berra, Vice President of Business Intelligence, Unicast
Dan Berra leads Unicast’s Business Intelligence division focused on providing robust research, reporting and in-depth analysis of all Unicast-generated advertising campaigns. Under his leadership, clients gain greater insight into campaign results and the effectiveness of rich media and web video against other forms of online advertising As a respected industry veteran, Berra brings more than 12 years of experience spanning financial and marketing analysis at Dell Corporation and T3 (The Think Tank). Most recently, Berra served as the Vice President of the Customer Insight Group at T3, where he built media and search analytics teams from the ground up and created data integration process and databases tying together ad server data, web analytics and client-side data into one interface. Previous to T3 Berra served as transactional marketing manager, at Dell Corp, where he headed the development of segment-level online metrics, created forecasting models and managed transactional marketing. His expertise is in  media and web analytics and measurement,  rich media and online video, next generation web, online media planning and buying, ROI, online advertising and Third Party ad serving.

Dan Piech, Senior Product Management Analyst, comScore Inc.
Dan is a Senior Product Management Analyst at comScore, Inc. and President at Piech Productions. Previously, he was anInteractive Strategy Intern at McKinney, Project Manager at HG Media, Inc and Advertising Intern at Success Communications Group. comScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses.

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all t>ypes, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with
Streaming Media West in Los Angeles, the Online Video Platform Summit is designed for video publishers of all types and sizes, whether small businesses looking to publish content for the first time, independent entertainment content creators, large media organizations, or anywhere in between.

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