Have you ever gone to watch a YouTube video and just as you get to the good part it suddenly stops to buffer? Or even worse, it takes so long to load you give up watching the video before it even starts?

You spend so much time creating these videos for viewers to watch, why not make sure your viewers not only watch the video, but also have a good user experience?

 LVP ensures that your viewers will have the best video viewing experience with adaptive streaming. The player auto-detects the user’s connection to deliver the highest quality at all times. Using LVP can guarantee that you videos will be watched by your audience and have the best user experience possible.

 On YouTube, after your video finishes playing, it automatically syndicates to similar videos, which more often times than not will be a video of your competitor.  Moral of the story, don’t send your viewers to other sites. Keep them where you want them-on your site!

 Using LVP allows you to syndicate to social media sites like YouTube, so you can still reach a broader audience without the risk of hand delivering your potential customers to competitors.

 LVP provides the tools to make your videos viral-or you can choose not to. It’s your choice with easy turn on and off features. If you choose to, our features allow you to share to social media sites, which allows for viewers to post your player on other sites, RSS feeds, or even email to a friend.

 Fact: A common goal for company websites is to increase the traffic on their site.

 Using LVP is a sure way to guarantee that viewers will spend more time on your site. While your videos may get more views on YouTube, you’re also sending them away from your site. With YouTube, someone can come to your site and when they go to watch your video they are automatically redirected to YouTube, thus leaving your site and diminishing traffic. Rather than sending your viewers away, you can keep them engaged on your site by using LVP.

 If you are planning on monetizing your video content with YouTube, you can forget it! Not only is this virtually impossible to do, but it’s kind of hard to generate revenue off your video if it’s being played on YouTube.

 LVP, on the other hand gives you the option to monetize through integration with third-party ad-servers/networks serving your own content through the LVP propriety ad-server. It’s as simple as turning on the ads and making money.

 Using LVP analytics gives you the upper hand so you can determine the best approach to not only make your video content more effective, but your site as a whole more appealing to your audience.

 We can’t stress enough the importance of being in the know. Understanding your audience will give you the insight to what exactly your viewers do and don’t want to see. Having this knowledge will benefit you in both generating revenue and increasing your site traffic.

 YouTube does not provide this tool, therefore leaving you in the dark not knowing which content is working and which content is not as successful.

 When everything is all said and done, it comes down to whether you really care about the growth of your site traffic and user experience. Yes, YouTube is free, but what good does that do you if your audience isn’t watching because of buffering or leaving your site? Using LVP is a definite way to stay organized and make sure your video content reaches if full potential.

Want to learn more? Call for a personal demo: (800)261-3295

 Mobile ad consumption is sky rocketing, and so is the need for companies to acquire a set of tools to help them accomplish this. For example, Limelight Video Platform (LVP) is an easy and efficient way for companies to implement revenue opportunities with mobile advertising.

 With the rapid growing trend, mobile traffic is exploding on the Internet usage scene. No longer are consumers relying on TV or print ads to expose them to what’s hot now, when they can simply watch video ads in the palm of their hand.

 As the medium of how we watch ads shifts, so does the shape and tone of advertising, according to ReelSEO.  Once upon a time, it was enough for an ad to well-just advertise, but not anymore. Consumers want more from their ads, they want to be entertained. The hunger for feeling an emotional draw to products is now the driving force of how advertising will transform.

 Since 2009, the increase in advertisers going mobile has had an increase of 128 percent reports the Los Angeles Times. Advertisers are making the conscience decision to move to mobile because as Cisco has stated, with an expected world population to reach 7.2 billion by 2015, so too, will the use of mobile device consumption. By that time, with Cisco’s prediction of 7.1 billion mobile devices being utilized, that’s like saying; in 2015 there will almost be enough mobile devices for every human on Earth.

                                                                                                           Cisco Blog

Needless to say, advertisers are wise to choose mobile as a major medium for publishing their ads because mobile will stretch further to all corners of the world. Traditionally, mobile traffic has had the highest consumption rate in North America. However, Cisco says this will become a thing of the past. Over the course of the next four years, Western Europe and Asia Pacific combined will make up over half of the global mobile usage. We’ll even see spurts of growth in the Middle East and Africa with a 129 percent increase by 2015.

 So why should companies choose LVP for their mobile delivery?

 The importance of acquiring a video platform with mobile delivery has become a transparent necessity, which is promising for LVP as we expand and grow with the trends. With the help of LVP, companies will be able to touch consumers farther than they ever dreamed. With our easy to use solution, they will be able to reach a whole new untapped consumer resource that was previously limited, if even in existence. With the capability to touch rural villages in Africa of the depths of the jungle in South America, this gives companies the potential to stretch from millions to billions of viewers.

 Visit our product page to learn more: Mobile Online Video

 We’ve published a new paper on how to maximize the value of your e-commerce video. Download the report, click here.

It’s not enough just to add video to your site, however. Retailers have to optimize video for better user engagement and a stronger financial return on investment. Here are five tips for maximizing the value of your etail video and increasing product sales on your e-commerce site.

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If you’re looking for other resource materials on e-commerce, check out some of our earlier papers, including 5 Steps for a Successful Etail Site, and Three Trends Causing Paradigm Shifts in Online Retail.

“The explosive growth in Internet data traffic, especially video, creates an opportunity in the years ahead for optimizing and monetizing visual, virtual, and mobile Internet experiences,” said Suraj Shetty,  Cisco’s VP of worldwide service provider marketing.

Over the next four years, Cisco predicts that nearly 3 billion people will be actively using the Internet. To put that in perspective, 40 percent of the expected world population will be online. In short, Internet usage with be quadruple of what it is today.

This surge in Internet growth will directly impact online video.

As online video drastically grows over the next four years, Cisco says that it will become the main drive in the growth of bandwidth usage. With an expected million minutes of video consumption per second by 2015, we can almost guarantee that Limelight Video Platform will be in the spotlight for years to come.

TV isn’t going just anywhere; it’s going everywhere. Which is why we at Adobe are launching Adobe Pass®, a new authentication service for TV content providers looking to reach more viewers on more connected devices. As a long-time partner with Limelight Networks, we’re also working with the Limelight Video Platform to present content owners and distributors with a comprehensive solution offering everything from video player options and user authentication, to web acceleration services and secure delivery across laptops, smartphones, tablets, connected televisions and more.

TV Everywhere is still a relatively new concept, but one that broadcasters and pay-TV providers are aggressively pursuing in order to meet consumer demand, realize new revenue opportunities, and remain competitive in the market. Authentication is perhaps the biggest challenge with new deployments. How do you get content to new devices quickly and easily while ensuring it remains protected? Approaches in the industry have varied significantly so far, with providers testing a wide range of technologies. This experimentation has made it clear what is most important in a solution – namely flexibility, ease of use, and secure authorization – all of which we can deliver with Adobe Pass.  Once an authentication system is in place, providers can not only deliver content everywhere, but also begin to offer cross-platform services, and take advantage of new monetization opportunities available online.

Meanwhile, the Limelight Video Platform has some great capabilities that fit with Adobe Pass, and with our mission to keep things simple, but also customizable in the online video world. Open APIs, optional integrated delivery services, and flexible content management all contribute to an experience that is effectively streamlined for video providers, and easy and enjoyable for online TV viewers.

For detailed information on Adobe Pass, take a look at www.adobe.com/go/adobepass. Adobe Pass is fully deployed and available today. Highlights include:

• Leverages the Flash Platform and HTML5
• Player and DRM platform agnostic
• Flexible business rules
• Easy integration with multiple Pay tv providers
• Leverages the latest security capabilities in the Adobe Flash® Player runtime
• Single log-in for consumers; no additional download required

You can read all the details on Adobe’s blog but here are some of the highlights that matter the most to video publishers:

Performance and Power Management Improvements

• The new Flash runtime has faster execution and reduces resource consumption. For instance, tabbed browsing with multiple flash players running at the same time will consume far less memory than with previous Flash runtimes.

Video improvements

• Delve’s H.264 encoded videos will now look even better on Flash 10.1. This new version takes advantage of hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead. Using available hardware on your PC, the runtime offloads tasks from the CPU to improve video playback performance, offer smoother frame rates, and reduce system resource utilization.

• Seeking has also been improved through a feature called “Smart Seek”.  Smart seek allows the video viewer to easily rewind or fast forward video without the player calling back to the server which reduces the start time after a seek.

• Dynamic Streaming or Adaptive Streaming -which allows the player to “switch” to the video stream that best fits the available client bandwidth and CPU – has been supported by Delve for months. With Flash 10.1 the time it takes to switch between streams dynamically is now even faster. This means viewers will always have the best viewing experience regardless of bandwidth fluctuations or client computing power.

Delve is committed to support the latest video technologies in online video publishing. Whether your customers require Flash or HTML5 to experience video on PC’s, smartphones like the iPhone or Android or devices like the iPad, Delve has the right solution to let you reach the widest possible audience. Sign up today for a Free Trial!

Over the last few years, the consumption of video on the web has exploded. Unfortunately, there are no free and open standards for video. The use of H.264 has gained popularity and has become widely used, but H.264 requires users of this standard pay a licensing fee to the MPEG-LA, a consortium of companies that control the patents for technologies associated with H.264.

The MPEG-LA has so far not aggressively pursued licensing fees for publishers and content owners using H.264, but there exists the possibility that they will do so in the future. The potentially significant added expense associated with H.264 could negatively impact the health of the video ecosystem on the Internet.

Until today, there was no free and open alternative to H.264 that enjoyed broad support by industry leaders. However, that has changed with the introduction of WebM, in addition to Delve Networks, leaders like Adobe, Google, Mozilla, YouTube, Opera, and many others have thrown their support behind WebM.

What is included in WebM?

• VP8 Video Codec – This is a high quality codec developed by On2, a leader in video codec technology, and acquired by Google. The VP8 codec has been made available under a royalty-free license.
• Vorbis – This is an existing open source and widely accepted audio codec.
• A container format that is optimized for a web-based playback experience, e.g., quick start-times, seeking into video.

What are the benefits of WebM?

• Free & Open – Publishers, content owners, technology vendors, advertisers, can invest in the encoding of their content into the WebM standard without fear of vendor lock-in or threat of excessive licensing fees that would harm their business.

• Superior Video Playback – WebM has been developed with web playback in mind, which results in a codec and container format optimized for fast start-times, seeking within video, support for sub-titles and video transcription.

• Low CPU Impact - WebM video can be decoded for playback on any device, e.g., mobile phones, iPads, laptops, without requiring a lot of CPU cycles. This ensures a smooth playback on devices that lack powerful CPUs and reduces the impact on battery life.

It is still early and H.264 will remain prevalent and important for our customers. However, we believe that WebM is an important step forward for the industry and that is why we’ve chosen to support it as an open and free video standard for the web.

Alexander Castro, Founder & CEO

Update: Alex offers more of this thoughts on WebM in an interview with Brier Dudley

Don’t get me wrong, HTML5 is a key technology which we already support and will continue to invest in in the foreseeable future. Delve customers that want to deliver HTML5 video to the iPad/iPhone and the rest of the “iDevice” family can already do so using the Delve platform via our mobile API.

HTML5 video, however, still has shortcomings that need to be addressed before it provides the richness of features our customers require and that today Adobe Flash provides: ability to secure content, adaptive bitrate streaming, comprehensive analytics and monetization of video through a wide array of advertising options. Customers that are using our mobile delivery solution are willing to experiment with video on these new devices to figure out what works and to keep their existing customers happy. But they all expect that eventually the mobile/tablet features match that of the Flash player on the PC.

Competition in the market is good. HTML5 has already made Flash a better product. And we expect that the HTML5 standard will continue to evolve to meet the demand of video publishers. In the meantime, our job at Delve is to offer our customers the best tools that allow them to deliver video everywhere.

With dynamic streaming of video to our players:

• Videos will start playing faster
• Playback is better, even on lower end CPUs
• There is less buffering when streaming videos

How does it work?

The Delve platform handles encoding into the correct video formats, bit-rates, and the logic associated with delivering the right bit-rate depending on the information the players sends back to the Delve platform. The video stream on the player adjusts based on available bandwidth to the highest quality video that can be delivered to the user. As the bandwidth available to the player fluctuates, a smooth video stream is delivered without buffering or significant degradation of video quality.

Here is a cool video that shows dynamic streaming. Enjoy!

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