More benefits from transcript data

Besides complying with the pending law (if and when it becomes law) and providing a great experience to your hearing-impaired audience members, enabling closed captioning can also serve the following purposes:

• The transcript can be used for narration for visually-impaired individuals.
• With the right player-side technology, the time-coded aspect of the video transcript enables your audience to find and go directly to specific scenes or moments in the video.
• There is greater opportunity to increase your video’s global reach with translated caption content.
• The transcript can be indexed by search engines for greater discoverability.
• It helps non-native speakers and other learners (such as children) with word identification, enriching their experience with your video.
• It gives audiences a way to experience and understand your video content if they can’t listen to audio during their viewing session for any other reason.

How does it work?

Closed captioning, which relies on temporal metadata (associated with a specific timeframe), isn’t very complicated when you have the right systems in place. To provide captions as an option with your videos, you need three things:

1. A complete transcript of each video, converted into a time-coded text file (either SAMI or DFXP):

• Distribution format exchange profile (DFXP) is an XML-based language for marking timed-based text, such as closed captions and subtitles.
• SAMI (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange) is a markup language for simplifying caption creation for media playback on a PC.

2. A player that supports captions, like thePlatform’s Player Dev Kit
3. A video management system that can deliver the requisite SAMI/DFXP file, like thePlatform’s mpx Beta.

You can incorporate SAMI-format caption files into your media objects, and your users can choose to view captions when they play Flash video.

Players built with the Player Dev Kit support closed captioning in two different ways:

• Using separate caption files that conform to either the SAMI 1.0 or DFXP 1.0 specifications
• Reading data embedded into an MPEG4 media stream

SAMI and DFXP files

thePlatform’s mpx Beta video management system relies on a custom field named “Subtitles” when constructing release metafiles that reference separate caption files. You create this custom field before assigning any caption media files to your media.

When a Player Dev Kit player sees a SAMI or DFXP file reference included in the metafile for a clip, it enables closed captioning for the user by displaying a closed-caption button. The user can click it to display captions, and they then get a menu of the available caption languages, based on choices that you provide. When they click the language that they want to view, the player begins displaying captions.

Until they make another choice, the player remembers their language preference and displays captions whenever that language is available. This makes the user experience much better for your closed-captioning users who make repeated visits to your site.

MPEG-4 files.

You don’t need to set up a “Subtitles” field if your MPEG-4 files contain transcript data. The Player Dev Kit automatically processes caption data that is embedded within the MPEG4 stream, and the language for the captions is added to the closed caption button in the player.

thePlatform has integrated partners like PLYmedia and RAMP that can help you prepare and render your captions in a Player Dev Kit player. Contact your Account Manager to learn more.

Today’s growing video companies have changing needs. This week we launched a number of new features for mpx Beta to help better control that growth. They include new tools for creating and managing feeds, better support for applying ad policies, and more capabilities for configuring restrictions. These features add to the already rich feature set of mpx Beta.

Increase video views with more options for managing feeds

Creating a new feed in mpx Beta is simple. Just go to the feeds section and add a new feed. From there, you can configure any number of parameters including the content categories, the format (RSS, JSON, Atom), whether content needs to be approved or not, the feed cache lifetime, the sorting keys, and more. You can also specify the fields that will appear in the feed content including namespaces, media fields, file fields, category fields, and more. Lastly, you can apply ad policies and restrictions to the feed.

Once you have a feed created, it’s time to add content to it. You can add content to a feed from the media view or from the feed view. You can set the lineup automatically by creating a dynamic feed based off of categories, tags, workflow labels or a custom field. You can also curate the content of a lineup and specify what shows up first, second, third, and so on. We provide a feed preview window where you can drag and drop content into the order you prefer. Lastly, you can even set up a mixed lineup, where the first set of videos are curated, and the rest are dynamically generated based on your predefined parameters.

Monetize more of your content with full support for ad policies

mpx Beta supports the creation and use of multiple ad polices. An ad policy is a set of rules, settings, and connections to ad sources that ensure your video content is monetized properly. You can integrate the ad sources from any of our advertising partners.

Creating an ad policy allows you to integrate a primary and secondary (failover) ad provider. You can create and define ad wrappers and you can specific settings for bumpers, pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and post-rolls. You set the number of ads to show for each, the frequency of showing, and whether the user can skip them or not. Lastly, you can set up a default policy for all of your content or apply an ad policy on a specific release or to content in a particular feed.

Manage your content relationships with extensive support for restrictions

As a media company, you understand the requirements for when and where you can show online video, and when and where you can’t. Helping our customers respect content relationships is a critical part of mpx.

There are many kinds of restrictions that need to be enabled in today’s online video world. They include geo-restrictions on country, region, metro code, city, area code, and postal code. While some geo-restrictions may be inclusive, others may be exclusive and require blackout areas for specific audiences. mpx supports all of these scenarios and more. With mpx you can restrict content by referring domain, expiration, date, IP Address, and even specified keys. You can set a default restriction for all your content or apply restrictions to content in feeds and/or to individual URLs.

Other great features for managing all aspects of your video business in mpx Beta

In addition to the new features for feeds, ad policies, and restrictions, mpx Beta also includes new features that make it easier to manage content across different deployment scenarios.

• For those who have a multilingual effort, we now have bidirectional language support in our console.
• In addition, we’ve added more features to mpx Beta to streamline your administration including the capabilities to create asset types, add servers, and customize file-level management of Public URLs (Releases) so you can create and manage your files’ URLs in the media object view.

Introducing the Whitepaper: Securing the Broadband Video Delivery Chain

Overall, with this latest release of mpx Beta we’ve added some extensive features for empowering different business models. In support of that effort, we’ve developed a brand new whitepaper dedicated to how we secure your business’s content. The new security whitepaper covers the entire online video content security landscape for our customers. In the process, we offer best practices of mpx for your consideration in this whitepaper for when you are evaluating any video management system.

Download the whitepaper here. Or contact thePlatform today for more information on great features of mpx and how you can put it to use in your organization.

Clipping puts users in control in the sharing process. It allows them to curate shared content for the intended audience, making that content more likely to be viewed. In the process, you retain business control as your advertising and content policies continue to move with the curated clip as if it were any other clip from your library.

This is how it works:

1. The viewer plays the video, and then clicks the Share button.

2. They then see a scrubber bar on which they select start and end points for their clip.

3. After they share the clip to a site, the clip recipients see only the portion of the video shared, with new start and end points applied.

The 4.2.3 player gives the recipient more context: the control rack shows them exactly how long the shared video clip is. This is a change from how we originally designed the clipping feature. Previously, recipients saw a scrubber bar that showed the entire timeframe of the video beyond the shared clip. Timeframe context gives recipients more reason for watching your video (“It’s just a short clip; I’ve got time to watch that!”).

In order to encourage further sharing, we’ve also made it easy to keep the level of personalization high: the recipient can either re-share that clip, or create a completely new one from any portion of that clip.

Find out what else is new in PDK 4.2.3 and download the latest version in the Technical Resource Center.

The latest version of the PDK (PDK 4.2.3) lets you add a single sharing button right onto your control rack so that viewers can share video directly from the video screen.

What else can you do from our social media player? Check out these features:

• Offer your audience more social media sites for sharing, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, VodPod, Reddit, and Windows Live.
• For a more personalized sharing experience, let viewers clip a video and send to a friend. The shared video will start automatically at the point the sender specifies.
• Enable Twitter hash tags to automatically send a tag along with your shared video, which helps you track and manage your Twitter sharing traffic.

Download the latest version of the PDK in the Technical Resource Center, or contact your Account Manager today to learn more.

• A custom animation of a spinning cube tells the viewers that the next video is loading:
  
• A pop-out slider bar provides a easy volume control:
  

• Closed captions are on a custom overlay that provides contrast between background and text:
  

• Viewers can tag favorites and see a video’s tally:
  

PBS KIDS GO! keeps impressing us with their PDK customizations. Visit the site to see their creative designs and great content, and give us a call if you’d like information on creating a custom player with thePlatform’s PDK.

To add an end card, install PDK 4.2.3 and ensure the relatedItemsUrl is defined. By default, the endCard parameter is set to tpMenuCard, but you can customize it to show any end card you create. If the parameter is not present, then the player will not display any end cards.

Of course, as with almost every other element of the PDK, you can customize your end card however you want including customization of colors, text, links, messages of the page and related items list.

For more information on end cards and how they work, see the topic Modifying the Default Forms in the Technical Resource Center.

See end cards in action in the player below. Just watch the video playlist all the way to the end.

Nowadays television viewers have more content options than ever before: hundreds of linear channels, thousands of VOD titles, and even more content on the DVR. This new era in entertainment calls for a new type of TV guide, one that helps viewers easily find what they want.

In developing a guide with greater usability, you need to consider five core principles.

The User Is at the Center

Current guides are content-centric. Long, static, and unsuited to discovery in a rich content environment, they force the user to stick to known shows or channel-zap at random. Guides are also provider-centric: displaying providers’ icons (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) in the main menu puts the user’s preferences (i.e. which movie or show to watch) second.

The next generation of guides will be user-centric. The starting point will be the individual. What are you in the mood to watch? What types of movies and shows do you usually like? What did you watch recently that you enjoyed? Discovery tools will filter the universe of content based on the user’s moods and tastes.

This approach also encourages the user to look beyond the familiar hits and new releases to find what fits his or her preferences in rich content libraries, and to take full advantage of robust multi-channel programming.

The Discovery Process Is Holistic

The Catalog Is Meant for Discovery

An intuitive discovery process starts with a catalog that reflects the way users think about content. Genres (comedy, action, etc.) were originally designed for back-office cataloging. By contrast, indexing content by storyline, mood, style, etc. – the language people use to talk about what they watch – can support genuinely intuitive discovery experiences.

A deeper understanding of people is also crucial for personalized discovery. Collaborative filtering, which uses statistical correlations between users and content items – the familiar “people who liked X also like Y” – cannot easily analyze the “whole picture” of a specific user’s tastes. New approaches aim to understand and model each user’s unique, multifaceted tastes. As part of a highly personalized experience, such models can also be used to describe and compare users’ tastes e.g. “You both especially like clever and touching stories about buddies and falling in love.”

The User Interface Is Only as Good as the Underlying Data

The user interface is key to a positive entertainment selection and viewing experience. Most entertainment interfaces look remarkably similar because they’re designed around the “same old” data: keywords such as titles and people, and genres. Data reflecting intuitive categories (moods, storylines) can naturally support innovative, intuitive interfaces.

The Viewing Experience Is Multiplatform

Users watch content on a range of platforms, from PCs and TVs to mobile devices and game consoles. A next-generation guide should work with as many platforms as possible and facilitate viewing wherever the user chooses.

Read more about how you can take advantage of Jinni’s discovery-and-recommendation engine for premium video content with their plug-in to thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK).

Yosi Glick is the Co-Founder and President of Jinni.

• Canwest, Canada’s largest media company, needed a scalable online video solution for a network of television stations and newspaper assets, including 18 specialty channels and GlobalTV, their largest broadcasting property.
• CBC/Radio-Canada, the only multilingual Canadian broadcaster delivering a comprehensive range of radio, television, Internet, and satellite-based services, needed an on-demand video and audio portal for broadcast TV, film clips, and webisodes from numerous Canadian and global content producers.

With the addition of Canwest and CBC, thePlatform supports online video publishing services for some of the largest media companies in Canada. We’re helping Rogers with their Rogers On Demand Online TV Everywhere initiative, and supporting Corus Entertainment’s entertainment portals, including Treehouse TV, YTV.com, and W Network.

If you’re in Banff next week at the nextMEDIA conference(link to conference website), come see our VP of Sales and Marketing, Marty Roberts, in the panel Working with Ad Networks: Monetizing Content. During this panel, Marty and others will discuss the ad network landscape and how to select the best mix of technology, advertisers, tools, and resources.

Check out the case studies, and give us a call if you have any questions about how thePlatform can you help you out with your own broadband video projects.

While thePlatform runs its video management system as an application service provider (ASP), we serve clients with a variety of requirements. RMP is ideal for customers who want to run video publishing operations in a hybrid environment, mixing locally housed services with online hosted services to maximize efficiency and maintain flexibility.

RMP helps ensure that your entire workflow is faster even when the largest and/or highest bitrate mezzanine files need to be processed, encoded, and moved to the right locations. With RMP, you can manage local delivery and storage servers, online hosted services, and third-party hosted delivery and storage servers all from one console.

Specifically, RMP is ideal when:

• You have very large media files to be transcoded, encrypted, or otherwise processed, and you want to do some of that work locally.
• You want make your workflow smarter and minimize the bandwidth used when moving files over the Internet for common workflow tasks.
• Your content or services are behind corporate firewalls and you need a local server that can act as a proxy with the outside world to deliver your media files.
• You want to increase security by processing your high-quality media files on servers controlled by your organization before they travel across the Internet.

Review the RMP release notes to see the latest features of RMP 2.2.3, or contact us today to find out how RMP and the rest of thePlatform’s products and services can help you optimize your operations and grow your business.

Jamie has 16 years of experience financing, building, managing, and successfully exiting technology companies, and has managed nine private and public market M&A transactions on behalf of four companies. Jamie is a passionate manager who has made a career of building and leading highly effective organizations. Most recently, Jamie served as President at Zango, eventually becoming its general manager after it was acquired by blinkx in April of 2009.

He’ll be overseeing our Accounting, Human Resources, and Legal departments, and lead our growing Professional Services organization. Jamie has an extensive background in professional services consulting, having served as COO/CFO and EVP Business Development at ePartners, Microsoft’s largest business applications consultancy in the United States, with nearly 400 employees.

We’re also pleased to announce that Marty Roberts, VP of Marketing since 2007, is now VP, Sales and Marketing. Taking on Sales, Marty builds on his successes in repositioning the company and products, increasing brand awareness, building a partner ecosystem, and driving product strategy.

Congratulations Marty, and welcome, Jamie!