Delve Selected to Power TroopTube

Posted on November 11, 2008

We’re pleased to announce that Delve Networks has partnered with Marion, Montgomery, Inc. (MMI), a marketing and interactive agency, to launch TroopTube, a video-sharing website for members of the United States Military and their families. The TroopTube video sharing site is part of Military OneSource, a resource provided by the Department of Defense for the 4 million members of the active military, national guard, and reserves, along with their families.

The entire team here at Delve is really honored to help provide our men and women of the armed services with the ability for them to share experiences with one another and their families - even while deployed far away from home.

We’ve placed some screenshots of TroopTube on Flickr.

This is a great example of how the Delve video publishing platform can be used to create user generated video-sharing sites just as easily as powering professional video online. We’re excited to add TroopTube to our growing list of Delve powered video sites across the Internet.

Over the next few weeks, you can expect to hear more about how our customers are using the Delve platform to bring video online.

Alex Castro

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Special Offer to Brightcove Network Customers

Posted on November 4, 2008

Last night we learned that Brightcove plans to terminate their free network service for smaller publishers. As reported by NewTeeVee publishers have until December 17th to upgrade to Brightcove 3 or find another solution.

Here at Delve we’re sorry to hear that many small publishers who have been using Brightcove to publisher great online video might be left out in the cold. We’ve prepared a special offer for Brightcove customers looking for an alternative solution.

The Delve video platform distinguishes itself along the following lines:

1. The easiest to use interface - you don’t have to go through long multi-step wizard to publish your video online

2. Rich functionality - we have everything you’d expect from an online video platform, e.g., custom players, rich video library, powerful analytics, advertising support. We also have functionality nobody can offer, such as, the ability to look inside video to provide video search.

3. Personal attention - we love all out customers, not just the big ones. We pride ourselves on providing customers with deep personal attention. Many of us came from Amazon, and we’ve taken the fanatical attention to customer service with us to Delve.

4. Great pricing - we provide flexible pricing options for publishers of all sizes.

It is hard to beat Delve combination of great pricing, powerful features, ease of use, and personal attention.

Try it yourself. Sign up for the Delve Free Trial.

Alex Castro
CEO
Delve Networks, Inc.

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Message to EyeSpot Customers

Posted on October 7, 2008

Today, we learned that EyeSpot shut down. EyeSpot was an early entrant in the “video mashup” space with a consumer destination that eventually moved into the video publishing platform space. This is an example of a start-up that eventually figured out the right strategy, providing tools for companies interested in publishing videos online, but didn’t have enough money left to make a go of it.

Here at Delve, we are reaching out to EyeSpot customers to offer them a special offer that will allow them to seamlessly transition their video to the Delve Video Platform so they can continue to service their own customers without interuption.

If you are an EyeSpot customers and interested in Delve’s Video Platform, contact our sales team or better yet, request a Free Trial and see for yourself what has our customers so excited about Delve.

Alex Castro
CEO
Delve Networks, Inc.

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Video Publishing Platforms - It’s About the User

Posted on September 23, 2008

Lately there has been a lot of news in the consumer video portal space that reminds me of the importance of treating your users well.

Joost - a well financed, must hyped service, that initially forced users to download a P2P client to view video has finally announced a web-only version. I don’t know why this took so long, but Joost finally realized that users had no incentive to download a P2P client to watch video when they can go to other places like Hulu and skip the extra download. Joose now gives users the option of installing a lighter weight browser plug-in to watch HD and live video, or they can watch lower quality video without bothering with a plug-in.

Veoh - another consumer video service has announced they are replacing their high quality video download, VeohTV, with a lighter weight browser plug-in.

Meanwhile, Hulu isn’t sitting still, and they are adding improved navigation and search functionality.

What does this mean for publishers who want to create their own branded video experience on their own websites?

1. This is a fast moving market and the competition is itense. These consumer video portals are both potential distribution channels AND competiton for your audience and video advertising revenue. Publishers will need to continue to ensure their video features keep up with the pace of the market. You may have a decent homegrown system in-place today, but are you investing enough resources in it to keep it from looking obsolete in 6 months? If you are using one of the industry’s existing video legacy platforms, how quickly are they updating their service with cutting edge functionality?

2. User experience is critical. Forcing users to jump through hoops in order to watch your content is rarely a winning proposition for the majority of publishers. Very little content, with the exception of primetime hit shows like Grey’s Anatomy, offer enough value to convince users to download and install additional software. For the vast majority of publishers providing high quality video (e.g. H.264, connection sensing, variable bit-rate deliver) without an extra download will be critical.

Alex

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NBC looks inside the video to put the Olympics online

Posted on August 18, 2008

Chris Albrecht from NewTeeVee recently posted an article about some of the ways the Olympics have pushed the envelope of online video technology. NBC has made over 2,200 hours of video available on NBCOlympics.com.

As Chris points out, Microsoft and Digital Rapids were forced to innovate themselves out of some unique challenges related to how much hardware space was available to NBC in the Olympic broadcast center:

“To help fit in those constraints, Digital Rapids and Microsoft came up with a new technology called Dynamic Complexity that scales the amount of encoding power from the CPU based on what is being shown. For example, with an actual sporting event, you want to make sure all of those action-packed bits get transmitted, so the video doesn’t get compressed as much. For something more sedate, like video of a talking head, you don’t need as many bits, so you can compress the video more. The Dynamic Complexity helps even out the loads being carried by the bandwidth.”

The basic idea here is that what the human brain considers “very high quality” is not strictly dependent on bitrate alone; the actual content of the video combined with the bitrate determines what is considered great quality. Watching Bob Costas, as a relatively stationary figure, can be delivered at a lower bitrate while still “looking” like very high quality video to the viewer.

This is another good example of how additional intelligence about the video itself, by looking inside the video, can lead to better results and why publishers need to look past legacy video platform providers for next generation solutions. I expect to see more innovation like this from ourselves and others in the future.

Alex

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Delve Partners with EdgeCast to deliver high quality video

Posted on July 21, 2008

Today’s we’ve announced that EdgeCast has been selected to provide CDN services for the Delve video management platform. After carefully evaluating many alternatives, there were a few reasons why we decided to work with EdgeCast:

We like the EdgeCast team and we’re happy to work with them; however, our philosophy has been to ensure reliability and performance. As a result of this desire, we will have relationships with several CDNs as well as maintaining own infrastructure across multiple data-centers.

Alex Castro

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Video Metrics

Posted on July 19, 2008

This week, ComScore came out with online metrics for May. Here are some of the highlights:

Unfortunately, ComScore leaves a number of questions unanswered:

My take away is that video metrics, as with many things related to online video today (e.g. advertising) there is a lot of confusion and ambiguity. While reports like these from ComScore are certainly helpful, they do not yet provide the comprehensive data necessary to bring clarity to this market.

In order for publishers, advertisers, etc., to make intelligent decisions about video they will need to look at available metrics from sources like ComScore and others, but they will also need to make some projections based on previous historical trends for how previous Internet trends evolved and matured.

Alex Castro

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Goodbye Brightcove, Hello Brightcove

Posted on June 18, 2008

Today, Brightcove has acknowledged their product lacks the ease-of-use and advanced capabilities publishers require to be successful. Or, as TechCrunch so aptly puts it, “Brightcove Gutted and Rebuilt.” After reading the various articles and blog posts, I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t much substance to this release and even less forward innovation available for publishers.

Here is a summary of their new functionality:

Publishers must ask - “Which online video platform will help me succeed?”

In the online video market innovation occurs at a blistering pace. Publishers need a partner capable of keeping up with, and most importantly staying ahead of, the industry trends. By the time Brightcove’s new release reaches the market, they will have spent 18+ months on it. However, if you look at their website, they haven’t delivered much additional value to existing customers since since April 2006 - an incredibly long 30 months in a fast moving market like video.

While the market demands innovative features like search, video SEO, enhanced video management, higher quality video, enhanced advertising, increased user engagement, Brightcove has been playing catch-up with basic features like providing a user interface that meets the basic usability needs of users and copying innovations introduced by their competition. This puts their customers at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

I was also very surprised to see Brightcove attempt a complete rewrite - they are basically throwing out their entire publishing system and starting from scratch. If there is one thing I’ve learned is that there is a tremendous amount of risk associated with complete rewrites. One doesn’t need to look much farther than Microsoft’s challenges with Windows Vista for evidence of this.

Ironically, the complete rewrite approach results in the evaporation of Brightcove’s main selling point to customers - “we’re market tested.” Since Brightcove’s new release can no longer claim to be “market tested”, publishers have to really evaluate video platform providers on the basis of who is innovating, who is bringing them additional value more quickly and on a regular basis, and who will ultimately help them succeed in this space.

I firmly believe that Delve Networks provides the most advanced, intelligent, and comprehensive video platform. We don’t just give publishers basic features like transcoding and a video library, but instead provide a whole host of more advanced capabilities (e.g. search inside) derived from our core technology and ability to look within the video content itself.

Alex Castro
CEO
Delve Networks

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The Delve Video Platform

Posted on June 14, 2008

By Alex Castro
Delve Networks

Web video has never been more popular, as evidenced by the fact that over 11.2 billion online videos were viewed in the United States in March of 2008, according to ComScore Video Metrix. Yet, you have to wonder if the current video platforms have kept up with demand—both on the publisher side and user side of the web video viewing equation.

Consumption has grown at a geometric rate over the past few years and it’s imperative that the technology for distributing and viewing that video—along with monetization through advertising—keeps pace with user demand for rich media content.

So, what are the top ten things that content companies should look for in a video platform?

1. A reliable hosting solution that scales with their business.
2. A fully featured video player— with normal play controls, plus sharing and posting functions.
3. An advertising solution that allows the publisher to monetize their video assets, either by placing their own ads or integrating with third party ad services (or both).
4. Metrics— enabling the publisher to rapidly measure the consumption of their video and learn more about their web-based audience.
5. An easy way to upload and manage video files to the video platform. This should be a secure, web-based interface that does not require advanced technical skill.
6. A consumer-facing solution that preserves and enhances the content publisher’s brand. This can be done by “skinning” the player to match the publisher’s web site and corporate “look and feel.”
7. The ability to easily organize videos into channels or playlists.
8. A video format that supports Hi Definition output.
9. A platform that is flexible enough to support company needs, but not so complicated that it requires special training or an inordinate investment of time to get going.
10. Great customer service. A publisher deserves to expect prompt access to the video platform team when any issues arise.

At Delve, we just made an exciting announcement about our new Video Platform. Obviously, we hope that we are raising the bar in our industry, helping publishers get more content into the ecosystem and giving users a radically new way to experience video content—giving them a chance to navigate within a file, before hitting “play.”

The innovations continue . . .

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Neilsen Gets it Right: Minutes Matter Most on the Media Web

Posted on July 11, 2007

Nielsen’s announcement yesterday marks something a lot bigger than just a way to measure the relevance of sites that use AJAX. While folks like Steve Rubel correctly predicted the death of the page view metric some time ago , this new announcement does more: it lays down the foundation for measuring and monetizing the Media Web. This is a great example of the difference between the “fetch-a-page-of-text” web and ad model and the emerging interactive Media Web driven by live, time-variant experiences, like video.

Video context (and user intent) changes from moment to moment, creating additional monetization opportunities. The longer you keep the user around, the more opportunities you have to monetize, if your advertising approach is sophisticated enough to take advantage of that engagement.

One way to keep users around is to give them opportunities to interact with and control their media. Early experiments at DoubleClick shows that users interact with video at an astonishing rate, up to 29%. With our HearHere and SeeHere technology we give users the ultimate incentive to interact and engage, the ability to find what they want, and jump to it.

Once again, giving users control and convenience pays off: In our early deployments we’ve seen providing search increases user time with the media by 200%. For users that actually do search within the show, that goes up to 300%. This means potentially 2-3x more monetization.

Nielsen’s new measurement approach will become even more significant once advertising systems and models catch up. Virtually all ad business on the Internet is still focused on fetch-a-page-of-text, the entire business model was designed when page views still mattered. In this scenario, ad context is determined once and fixed for each show or clip when it is retrieved from the server. This is why, assuming a status quo approach to advertising, webpages seem to monetize better than videos, as this post on NewTeeVee points out.

At Pluggd, we change that by providing additional opportunities to monetize as video context changes and the user interacts and searches. And withSeeHere and HearHere, we help keep the user around to see those ads, because as this announcement from Nielsen points out, minutes are what matter most on the Media Web.

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