Tell us about the company – when it was founded, by whom and with what objective?
VisualOn was founded in 2003 by Dr. Yang Cai and Dr. Bill Lin in Silicon Valley to bring low-cost, high-quality, multimedia experience to more consumer devices through supporting the new video compression standard H.264 in software. It has since become the leading streaming media player solution provider most trusted by the top service providers in the world.
FAST. AVOD. SVOD. MVPD. vMVPD. OTA. These services represent the options available to content owners or aggregators to deliver entertainment, sports and news content from centralized hubs to individual consumers. Their goal is simple – expose and monetize their content libraries to as many consumers as possible. However, that doesn’t mean the consumer is top of mind when it comes to facilitating their journey to their content of choice.
Few industries are as fast paced and highly pressurised as the media industry. What was already a competitive field has become even more so, as the demand for content has increased in-line with the explosion of OTT services. To manage this high volume of throughput, content supply chains have become more complex, with multiple teams all contributing towards content preparation.
Linear TV isn’t dead, but the internet has changed it forever. At a time of global downturn, an increasing number of content owners are pinning their growth hopes on ad-funded live or VOD-to-live FAST channels. But drawing eyeballs and maximising ad revenues in this increasingly crowded marketplace will rely on more than just an EPG and good promos.
As head of content operations at global distributor Banijay Rights, Richard Clarke knows the importance of effective media operations management and the challenges arising from the industry’s ongoing migration to the cloud.
Video streaming is growing at a rapid pace, gaining more and more viewers from legacy broadcast. To keep up with their growing investment in content, video service providers need to find effective methods to boost content monetization, and targeted advertising is one way to do that. Enabled by ABR streaming, targeted advertising allows service providers to seamlessly deliver video ads into streamed content to create additional revenues.
Almost six months after Take 1’s acquisition by Unicorn company, Verbit, Take 1 CEO, Louise Tapia, provides an insight into how the team is collaborating with their fellow media and entertainment sector specialists at sister company, VITAC, to provide end-to-end accessibility services.
In recent years, the choice of video services has multiplied, as large media organisations add a plus symbol to their established brands and roll out new platforms. In addition, many incumbents in the VOD space are now supplementing their main subscription models with AVOD options. In some cases, these ad-funded tiers will be differentiated with new content, but at the very least they will require new versions of the original media files with markers for ad insertion. Linear TV has not been left behind, evolving its offering with more content choice, and diversifying with themed FAST channels.
It’s almost a cliché to talk about how the last few years have changed live broadcasting.
Broadcasters kept going even though events were canceled, and companies like Dejero kept them on air producing great content. The need to shift working practices to distributed models where people could work from home came almost overnight.
We heard from many of our customers that they already had the capacity to handle remote workflows and connectivity with their existing Dejero solutions, but hadn’t had a reason to harness its full power until the pandemic.
From an overall business resilience perspective, we found these new ways of working provided new challenges and created a level of vigilance that we have never seen before. Resilience has always been a primary focus for broadcasters who demanded increasingly robust forms of business continuity to ensure they stay on air—or risk the loss of advertisers, audiences and, ultimately, revenue.
ARGUS is a new product from Telestream that represents the next step in centralized video monitoring management. It was developed in response to the needs of OTT service providers who require large scale comprehensive monitoring of their entire distribution network. ARGUS enables automated surveillance of each video transition point with data aggregation from monitoring probes across the video delivery chain and provides deep dive analytics data that enables service providers to quickly identify the source of video quality issues and their root causes. Without a system like ARGUS, service providers are effectively blind when locating problems across the delivery chain.