News & Opinion

Greater Bandwidth Efficiency and Immersive Viewing Complement New Capabilities Designed to Meet Today’s Video Marketplace Needs Ooyala today announced a suite of new capabilities and features for OoyalaLIVE, its application for effortless creation, management, delivery and monetization of live streamed events and linear TV channels on any device. Among other developments, Ooyala’s Digital Video Playout solution now enables the Ooyala Flex Media Platform to support VR360 content. Exhilarating immersive experiences for viewers are now possible, including live streaming with OoyalaLIVE, VOD content with OoyalaADAPT and playback support on all major platforms and devices leveraging OoyalaPLAY, Ooyala’s video player. The open and extensible Ooyala Flex Media Platform allows media companies to better optimize the content supply chain with customizable workflows, seamless integration of third party tools and a common data set across the entire video operation. “We are at the forefront of our industry, recently providing the workflow infrastructure for the VR360 experiences of the 2018 Winter Olympics as well as high quality and low bandwidth HEVC streaming solutions,” said Jonathan Huberman, CEO, Ooyala. “Providing the best live video experience is a major part of our mission, and we’re leveraging best-of-breed Ooyala Flex Media Platform solutions to realize that objective for our customers.” The new features include: Multi-audio: The ability to deliver multiple audio streams in a single player, enabling multiple language tracks, additional audio commentary, or even audio description for the visually impaired, both for live streaming and VOD content. HEVC Streaming: The addition of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2 offers approximately 30% bitrate and bandwidth savings, enabling users to reduce bandwidth costs or deliver higher quality for the same bitrate – and making 4K delivery a reality for more consumers. VR360 Support: Ooyala’s Digital Video Playout solution supports the ability to stream, upload, store and play VR360 content, offering viewers an immersive experience, live and VOD, in both monoscopic and stereoscopic formats. Enhanced Live Clipping: Building on OoyalaLIVE’s existing capabilities users can now open live streams in OoyalaMAM to clip up VOD assets and highlights during live events, with timed markers and rich metadata. Leveraging the Ooyala Flex Media Platform, it is now easier than ever to automate syndication workflows for VOD assets, orchestrating distribution to multiple platforms with a single button-click, saving manual steps and reaching eyeballs faster. Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI): Support for Google DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) brings monetization opportunities to DFP subscribers. SCTE-35 markers are now supported providing frame-accurate and unique, per-user localized frame-accurate ad insertion. The latest Digital Video Playout updates follow a combination of late 2017 updates, including real-time monitoring, improved support, and back-up systems and scheduling tools, collectively offering content providers a 99.95% uptime for their video streams. Ooyala’s Digital Video Playout solution has been designed with a focus on ease of use to help broadcasters and other TV and video content providers, operators and online media publishers reach and monetize their audiences with high-quality and highly reliable live streams. The integrated solution provides all the advantages of the Ooyala video platform, including content management; analytics; monetization; publishing; and player management for channels, events and live-to-VOD recordings. Ooyala will showcase these new features as part of the Ooyala Flex Media Platform at Broadcast Asia, Singapore, June 26-28, and the MESA Media & Entertainment Day at the Microsoft Tech Center, New York, July 24.

Media Companies Created and Processed Nearly Three Times as Much Video Content in Q1 2018 vs. Q1 2017, Ooyala Study Finds Report Highlights: Mobile devices accounted for 58% of all videos watched globally, stabilizing at 1.8% growth, one of the smallest increases in 14 quarters Q1 2018 marked the first quarter-over-quarter decline in mobile’s share of plays Media companies created and processed nearly three times as much video content as in Q1 2017 Long-form video (20+ minutes) exceeded 50% of time watched on every device and screen On smartphones, viewers watched long-form content (20-40 mins) to completion 57% of the time; ultra-long form content (40+ mins) more than 45%   Mobile video consumption continues to rise, but growth stabilized in Q1 2018; total video plays increased during the quarter just 1.8% from the prior year, per Ooyala’s newly released Q1 2018 Global Video Index Report. The increase was one of the smallest in 14 quarters, and also marked the first quarter-over-quarter decline in mobile’s share of plays at nearly 4.6%. Nevertheless, consumption on mobile devices of long-form video – defined as more than 20 minutes in length – continues to thrive, the study finds.  On smartphones, for example, 20-to-40-minute-long videos were viewed to completion 57% of the time, while videos exceeding 40 minutes (ultra-long form) were viewed to completion more than 45% of the time, the Ooyala study found. On other devices, Ooyala found: Viewers watched long-form content (20-40 mins) to completion 61% on tablets and 71% on PCs Viewers watched ultra-long form content (40+ mins) to completion 51% on tablets and 59% on PCs "Consumers are becoming far more comfortable watching any content on every screen than they've ever been," said Jim O'Neill, Ooyala principal analyst. "The traditional barriers to multiscreen viewing -- the amount of available premium content, the cost of service and the quality of experience -- all have fallen. The first screen for viewing truly has become the screen that's most available to the viewer at the moment." Regional Mobile Video Viewing Trends Latin America (LatAm) saw significant quarter-over-quarter gains in mobile’s share of video plays while Asia-Pacific grew slightly, despite declines in Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) and North America. But in North America, mobile video plays were still up 9% from a year ago and 18% over the past two years, accounting for 56.6% of all video plays in Q1 2018. In related findings: EMEA saw mobile video plays hit 58% in the first quarter of 2018, a 22% Y/Y increase from 47.8% in Q1 2017, and 39% better than Q1 2016 Asia-Pac saw the share of video plays on mobile devices hit 60.7%, up from 52.3% a year ago Latin America’s share of video plays on mobile devices reached an all-time high of 59.5% The Rising Tide of Streaming Video Content While OTT services more than doubled their hours of content offerings in Q4 2017, even more content was created in Q1 2018 – reaching nearly three times the amount processed the year before. Specifically: Long-form content (longer than 20 minutes) jumped 189% Medium-form content (5-20 minutes) was up 171% Short-form (shorter than 5 minutes) grew 178% “Mobile video content is coming from an expanding universe of creators and distributors across sports, news, entertainment and enterprise,” added O’Neill. “They understand that mobile needs to be a pillar of any content provider’s streaming video strategy. Ignore mobile or allow lower-quality standards for your video stream, and you’re likely to lose a significant portion of your business.” The full Ooyala Q1 2018 Global Video Index Report can be found here.

Content owners, distributors and creators gathered for an important thought leadership breakfast on Tuesday, April 25th at NAB to discuss the rapidly evolving media and broadcast landscapes. The breakfast addressed many of the complex questions facing content owners and end users in the evolving digital media ecosystem for delivering interactive, anyscreen experiences.Cisco and its technology partners, including Intel, Grass Valley and Presidio, were joined by the chair of the Producers Guild of America New Media Council, for a panel discussion “IP, OTT, OMG!” which featured many of the innovative challenges which must be addressed by the industry in the next five to 10 years, including: Tipping the scale: How do you easily scale digital distribution of live and premium content?IP for Anyscreen TV: Broadcast video functions and processes are shifting to IP and cloud/virtualization; What does the optimized future supply chain across the ecosystem (production to distribution) look like? How does it open up more revenue sources?Managing Expectations: How do media companies manage expectations for next gen technologies including Ultra HD and Virtual Reality? Watch the video below to see and hear what they had to say. Also available on FierceVideo here - https://www.fiercevideo.com/sponsored/ip-ott-omg-cisco-partners-nab-thought-leadership-breakfast 

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Ooyala has collaborated with Avid® to integrate the new Flex Media Platform into Avid MediaCentral®. The new Flex Media Platform now provides comprehensive, fully integrated media logistics functionality. With this new integration, Ooyala and Avid now offer a best-of-breed solution to get content to consumers seamlessly, rapidly and in a manner that is truly streamlined to maximize ROI. “Media companies are managing growing inventories of high quality content, and they want a solution that eliminates the complexity of the process while increasing operational efficiencies,” said Jonathan Huberman, CEO, Ooyala. “Being an Avid Alliance Partner means customers won’t have to uproot their existing tools and systems in order to have the most comprehensive solution possible. They can now leverage the advanced Media Logistics capabilities of the Flex Media Platform seamlessly within their existing Avid infrastructure.” Managing video assets is a common challenge for many media companies that handle large amounts of content yet lack efficient metadata capabilities. Ooyala, a leading provider of software and services that simplify the complexity of producing, streaming and monetizing video, solves this challenge with the Flex Media Platform. It is an open and extensible video production, delivery and content-supply-chain-optimization platform that simplifies and streamlines the process of managing, curating, orchestrating, publishing, measuring and monetizing video content. Among other features, the platform can automate the assignment and management of metadata across complex, fast-growing inventories of video assets. The integration empowers customers with advanced metadata modelling using metadata aggregated from a variety of sources.  Assets can be seamlessly transferred from cloud-based storage into existing Avid production environments. “By integrating the metadata capabilities of the Ooyala Flex Media Platform, we’re powering a best-of-breed solution that provides a ‘single source of truth’ and better overall orchestration of the process,” said Ed Caracappa, Sr. Director Global Alliances at Avid. “We’re now able to provide modern content supply chain solutions to digital media production processes that continue to become vastly more complex.” Ooyala will showcase its new Flex Media Platform at NAB 2018 in Las Vegas, with hands-on demos at the Ooyala booth #SV1000 in the Silver Parking Lot, just outside the North Hall entrance. Avid, Interplay, and Media Composer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. The Interplay name is used with the permission of the Interplay Entertainment Corp. which bears no responsibility for Avid products.

  After a successful NAB last year, when much of its stand was powered by Adder Technology’s innovative KVM products, Ross Video decided to take the winning formula back to its new Customer Experience Centre and EMEA headquarters in Reading, UK. The ADDERView DDX30 KVM matrix switch systems now power its new state-of-the-art demo suite in the new premises, delivering an awe-inspiring viewer experience. Ross Video is returning to NAB 2018 (booth SL3305) ready to make a similar impact, supported by Adder’s DDX systems. With these in place, Ross Video will be able to easily switch between, and control the numerous computers required to demonstrate the breadth of features it offers. Stuart Russell, Ross Video’s senior communications manager, said, “We are extremely proud of our new EMEA home in Reading; it reflects our innovative and forward-looking approach. Adder’s technology is enabling us to use our demo suite as a showcase for the most comprehensive range of broadcast technology solutions in the market.” “It is only natural for us to want to replicate this at NAB 2018, building even further on last year’s complex setups. We want to give visitors a hands-on experience of the power of the Ross ecosystem; the DDX systems from Adder definitely make this task a lot easier and smoother.” Caleb Hooper, vice president of business development and product marketing, Adder Technology, added, “The partnership between our companies ensures that we are not only able to offer Ross Video access to the Adder technical team to come up with solutions where there is a definite need for KVM, but we can also proactively engage with its customers and prospects who are likely to also have a KVM requirement. We were extremely impressed with the company’s plan for its NAB booth and felt that our products were the ideal solution to help them overcome the hurdles they faced along the way. We are sure that all those that visit the Ross Video booth at NAB this year will be extremely impressed by what they see.”

In April Sprint announced the availability of its all-new 4G LTE network in several new markets – one being Los Angeles – and currently Sprint’s 4G LTE is available in more than 100 cities across the country. Since April, Bob Gold & Associates has hosted two events with Sprint, and will be hosting a media tour to show how 4G LTE is positively affecting Los Angeles pet owners. While the previous two events were focused on the combination of technology and entertainment, the upcoming tour focuses on apps targeted at pet owners. On July 30, Sprint is working with world renowned pet expert Warren Eckstein to show how pet owners can re-establish an amazing relationship with their pets through a number of apps. Sprint spokesperson Kathleen Dunleavy will demonstrate some of these apps that can be used on Sprint's Truly Unlimited plan to make your lives with your pets more interactive. Warren is excited to be a part of this media tour as he believes apps specifically tailored for pet lovers, “help better the quality of life for pets and their owners and allow both to have more fun!”

Our Bob Gold & Associates team experienced a digital wonderland of sights and sounds as well as controversy while supporting multiple clients at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where we were busy from morn till night. The biggest story and PR lesson in years came out of the show that saw nearly 150,000 attendees. Who in America doesn’t now know about the surprising controversy created when CBS CEO Les Moonves personally pulled the Best in Show Award as voted by his CNET’s editorial staff for our client, EchoStar’s design and manufacture of the Dish set top box, Hopper with Sling? CBS got an avalanche of bad publicity when their own editors’ votes were tossed aside by too-big-to-care corporate brass. Suffice it to say that, as PR professionals, we know independent editorial judgment is among our most prized freedoms. Beyond the awards fireworks (and another example of poor judgment that only seems to occur in Vegas), we were also wowed by: Panasonic’s ginormous 3D TV display.  Jaw-dropping doesn’t do it justice Samsung’s TVs moving like Rockettes in a smooth million-dollar staging – Ultra HD anyone? Intel’s cyclone of personal laptops Everyone seemed to have a tablet – even old brands attempting comebacks like Polaroid and RCA Chinese brands that start with an H (Hisense, Haier and Huawei, for starters) Non-tech brands got in the game - New York Times, Lowe’s and even Ford The next wave of CE products will be centered around the connected “smart home” with IP security cameras, home healthcare gadgets and energy-efficiency solutions. That means your cable company will be in the game, right?

1. Continuity Across Devices- With more users on multiple devices, 2013 will see a move to provide the missing link in today’s computing experience – the ability to change devices and pick up the session in exactly the same place you left off. 2. Transformation of the Television - Mobile TV (as on cell phones) officially arrives! The app-ification of media by innovative firms like Slingbox across connected devices will further drive content delivery beyond traditional TV. 3. M2M - The Internet of Things - In 2013, the physical and digital worlds will continue to fuse. From RFID tags on a marathoner’s bib to the real-time camera feed from traffic lights, the physical world is becoming a digital information system to build a better, more connected world. At least, that’s the plan – until one smart MIT dropout or terrorist cell takes control of the whole digital ecosystem and politicians are called in to save us! 4. An Increasing Role for Analytics – Big Data. Big Data. Big Data. Learning to manage the daily addition of multiple terabytes of new data will drive innovation and desperation. How customers are engaging and the amount of information about each of us that is unprotected makes George Orwell look a bit tardy, but not forgotten! 5. Wearable Computing - Everything Gets Smart. Not just Maxwell Smart, but the proliferation of owning and carrying “smart” devices such as Google Glass—becomes standardized and easily connected to the cloud (If you think “cloud” was overused in 2012 – just wait till this year!)