Video Publishing Platforms and the Value They Bring to the Market

This video is from a panel session I moderated at Streaming Media East 2010 on, Media Framework: Video Publishing Platforms, and features a diverse panel from the online video world, including Bismarck C Lepe, President, Products, Ooyala; Krish Melon, CTO, Synaptic Digital; Ron Yekutiel, Chairman, CEO, Kaltura and Jason Liebman, CEO, Co-Founder, Howcast. The goal of the session was to describe what publishers need and how much they should expect to play for managing content, what are the process and main features of publishing platforms, and the viability of build vs. buy. In the presentation, each speaker shared customer use cases that demonstrated how businesses are using online video, along with capabilities and new features available from their platforms.

I conducted separate video interviews with Ron Yekutiel and Bismarck Lepe, which you can watch for a demonstration of the new product features available from both Kaltura and Ooyala. I also spoke with Jason Liebman, in this Qik video interview, who gave an overview of Howcast, where it is within that market and why every company should be a media company.


A103: Media Framework: Video Publishing Platforms
Moderator: Larry Kless, Founder, President, OnlineVideoPublishing.com
Bismarck C Lepe, President, Products, Ooyala
Krish Menon, CTO, Synaptic Digital
Ron Yekutiel, Chairman, CEO, Kaltura
Jason Liebman, CEO, Co-Founder, Howcast


Session description: A number of vendors offer video publishing platforms, the features and functionality-not to mention cost-vary widely. Some vendors focus their solutions on content management and monetization, while others are geared towards enabling syndication and interactive advertising campaigns. Adding to the confusion is the fact that different platform vendors have different metrics for billing, and costs rise as content owners become more successful. This session will lay the groundwork for content owners to better understand what type of publishing platform they need and what they should expect to pay for managing content.

While the description of this panel session focused primarily on the cost perspective of video publishing platforms, the panel session took a different course, and the speakers described more of the core components and value that platforms bring to the market and shared customer use cases. The following is a summary of the highlights of the panel discussion.

What is an online video platform? What are the components and what are people asking for?
Ron Yekutiel pointed out video is becoming an integrated portion to everything on the web, and companies any size need video tools for the variety of business, training, marketing and e-Commerce applications. The core components of a platform that are needed to publish video for online and mobile experiences include tools to upload, encoding, manage, syndicate, monetize and view analytics. Important aspects of online video platforms are the ease of integration and flexibility to scale and customize the feature sets for specific customer needs.

Krish Menon spoke to the importance of businesses having delivery methods that best fit the communication need. He said that for his clients it's key to "create once and deploy many" and the overall platform serves the purpose of getting your content out to the right audiences in the right way.

Bismarck Lepe also emphasized that video platforms make it easier for customers to build businesses with online video, and that it's not just about on-demand content but also live streaming. He noted that video platforms are on the forefront of the market and better understand the consumer's video viewing patterns, and are best suited to help businesses better innovate with video.

Jason Liebman shared a different perspective with Howcast, and how they have built their own platform to help third parties tap into their ecosystem to create high quality content and syndicate it in a lot of different environments. Howcast thinks more of the video end-to-end video life cycle, and uses data on what people are searching for and viewing to drive creative and business decisions.

How do I get started? What's it going to cost?
Bismarck Lepe said that first and foremost, you need to ingest your content into a system and transcode it, then add metdata, apply permissions, syndicate it, monetize it using ad networks and analyze the viewing data. Ron Yekutiel pointed out the Kaltura has both a SaaS offering that is a good fit for smaller companies and you pay a monthly service cost but they also have a completely free Community Edition that you can download and put behind your own firewall. Overall, there was consensus among the panel the costs are varied, and can range from a few hundred to several thousand a month. Yekutiel also noted that all the platforms have a full featured 30-day free trial.

How about cost savings for using a video platform?
Liebman noted that analytics are key and getting accurate viewing data has helped drive their business decisions. Lepe acknowledged that not having to build out your own encoding and analytics clusters are huge cost savings to businesses – but we're getting to the point where it's not just about cost savings, but adding value. It's about creating more revenue using analytics and monetization tools, as he said, this has to be about the creation of a value center and not just about a cost center.

To see more videos from Streaming Media East, go to: http://www.streamingmedia.com/ConferenceVideos

Elemental Delivers GPU-Accelerated Video Streaming Solutions

Last month at Streaming Media East, Sam Blackman, CEO and Co-Founder of Elemental Technologies, demonstrated Elemental Live and Elemental Server, two enterprise-class video processing systems for live and on-demand streaming. The Portland, Oregon-based software company, has pioneered the use of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and other massively parallel chips for video processing capable of handling multiple simultaneous tasks with much higher performance than CPU (central processing unit)-based transcoding. Blackman says that Elemental is the first company to take advantage of GPUs for video processing and that their solutions help lower the total cost of streaming video. Elemental Server was released in November 2009 and Elemental Live was recently launched at NAB in April 2010.



Blackman explained that Elemental Live works by taking a couple GPUs to create many concurrent real-time encoded versions of the input file. A single Elemental Live can simultaneously encode for any number of mobile handsets, either iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and more, for adaptive bit rate protocols, HTML 5 and multiple HD streams. Elemental Server takes files in and batch encodes to output files with two NVIDIA Corporation. video cards (each with two GPUs) as well as two quad-core CPUs.

The company says that through the combination of by combining GPU and CPU processing, one Elemental Server replaces up to seven dual quad core 3GHz CPU-only servers. Both products are single rack mount units with multiple inputs and outputs. Elemental says the two products are ideal for for broadcasters, studios, online video platforms and any other video transcoding application, and are much more cost-effective than other solutions. Elemental Live has a price tag of $36,000 and Elemental Sever sells for $26,000.

Demonstration Video - How the Elemental Video Engine Works

Elemental's products are targeted to large data center operations and studios that require a sturdier solution than cloud alternatives HD Cloud and Encoding.com. Elemental customers include Brightcove, CDC, Citrix, Highwinds and InQtel, and partners with Adobe, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Blackman co-founded Elemental technologies in 2006 with CTO Jesse Rosenzweig and Chief Architect Brian Lewis, who along with Blackman were former engineers of semiconducter company Pixelworks. Soon after their launch, Pixelworks provided seed funding to Elemental for initial reach and development and in July 2008 Elemental had raised a total $7.1 million Series A.

Elemental Technologies was recognized as one of 10 companies chosen for NewTeeVee’s Next Big Thing List for 2009 for their innovation in online video. Blackman was on hand to demo the GPU-accelerated Elemental Server which he debuted at the event. Other Elemental products include Elemental Accelerator for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 renders Blu-ray quality AVC/H.264 files using the GPU and Badaboom, a consumer media converter, in partnership with NVIDIA Corporation.

About Elemental
Elemental Technologies is the leading provider of massively parallel video processing solutions for enterprise video customers. Elemental's products use off-the-shelf, programmable graphics processing units (GPUs) for compute-intensive video processing tasks. Founded in 2006, Elemental is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. To learn more about Elemental, visit www.elementaltechnologies.com.

Follow Elemental (elementaltech) on Twitter
Check out the Elemental Technologies blog

Related:

• Almost Famous: Elemental Technologies CEO Sam Blackman | Drake Martinet | Voices | AllThingsD 
• NewTeeVee’s Next Big Thing List for 2009 - Elemental Technologies 
• YouTube - Sam Blackman interview at NewTeeVee Live 09
• Beet.TV: Elemental Technologies is Transcoding Video in "Record Time," The New York Times
• Nvidia’s Gamers Helped It Win Big Business - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
• Elemental nabs $5.5M - Portland Business Journal

Kaltura Brings Flexibilty and Control to Online Video

At Streaming Media East last month, Kaltura Co-Founder and CEO Ron Yekutiel illustrated the key differences between his company from the other online video platforms on the market. The two key differentiators Yekutiel emphasized are flexibility and control for online video publishers, with full control of Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 video content, and the flexible new Kaltura Exchange which fosters third-party development for their open source video platform. Kaltura offers a SaaS solution, a complete self-hosted solution and a free community edition of their open source video platform.

Over the last several months Kaltura has released a number of new features and capabilities, in response to the latest developments within the online video ecosystem, such as HTML5 video playback. As a founding member of the Open Video Alliance, Kaltura and open source partners launched HTML5video.org to promote the growing community and development around the HTML5 video open standard. Kaltura also developed a full HTML5 Video Library, available for download at: www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5. Kaltura also recently announced full support of or Microsoft Silverlight, including the Silverlight-based player and Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming available with their hosted and self-hosted editions.



Kaltura has been on a steady pace to integrate open source video extensions into its platform, with the release of Joomla and Moodle video extensions earlier this year. As Yekutiel noted, the company recognized the rich innovation within the third-party developer community, which led to their announcement of "Kaltura Exchange", the virtual marketplace for video applications built to expand on the Kaltura platform. Applications within the Exchange, are in specific categories, such as skins, themes and language packs, plugins for the video player, remixer, and other video tools, client libraries in different programming languages, and stand-alone widgets and apps. Dozens of companies got on board at with the launch this past April, including Adap.tv, Tremor Media, TubeMogul, PLYmedia, Artivision,  Taboola, YuMe, LiveU, HD Cloud, Market7, encoding.com, 3Play Media, TikiWiki and more.

Dr. Shay David, Kaltura VP of Business and Community Development noted that:

"The Kaltura Exchange facilitates a convenient and simple-to-use marketplace where publishers can find new apps and services to enhance their video experience, and developers and service providers can promote and generate revenue from their apps, services and unique expertise."

At Streaming Media East, Kaltura announced the commercial release of their self-hosted platform, which Yekutiel stressed, is the control publishers need to secure and manage their video content – and differentiates Kaltura from the other online video platforms.

Yekutiel described Kaltura's value proposition in this way:

"Our open source offering presents a highly attractive alternative to both 'build' and 'buy'. Kaltura's self-hosted platform enables customers to enjoy code ownership, flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, and cost savings, with a robust platform that is supported by a leading vendor and backed by a global developer community that ensures an unmatched pace of innovation."

Kaltura offers the following editions of its online video platform:

• Kaltura SaaS Platform (Kaltura hosts it) - including Kaltura support and services such as tier-1 hosting and streaming, transcoding, syndication, advertising, security and more.
• Kaltura Self-hosted Platform Commercial Edition (customer hosts it, gets support from Kaltura and can resell services) - offered either under an Enterprise license for organizations that need an online video platform for their own media, or an OEM license for organizations that want to support multiple sites and resell OVP services. Both licenses are offered with 3 levels of Kaltura maintenance and support services.
• Kaltura Self-hosted Platform Community Edition (customer hosts it, gets it for free, gets support from community and must give all developments back to the community) -  developed through the combined efforts of Kaltura and the community. 

About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 52,000 web publishers, service providers, and developers use Kaltura's flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities, including publishing, management, syndication, monetization and analysis, as well as content uploading and remixing. The free community-supported self-hosted software and source-code is available for download at www.kaltura.org. A commercial version of the software can be obtained at www.kaltura.com along with Kaltura services such as streaming, hosting, transcoding, analytics, ad serving, support and maintenance packages, and professional development. Founded in 2006, New York-based Kaltura is also a founding member of the 'Open Video Alliance' (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open standards for online video.

Update 6/4/2010: See Ron Yekutiel's Streaming Media East Red Carpet interview with Peter Cervieri -  Kaltura CEO on Entrepreneurship - ScribeMedia.org