ExtendMedia Launches Solution for the "TV Everywhere" Model: OpenCASE Publisher

Multiscreen video software solutions provider, ExtendMedia, on Monday launched a product called OpenCASE Publisher, which it bills as designed to help cable, telco, satellite, mobile and other video service distributors take advantage of the growing momentum of the "TV Everywhere" distribution model, by providing a platform for them to quickly build and deploy multiscreen video offerings (note: the "TV Everywhere" model, which has long been championed by Time Warner and its chairman and CEO, Jeff Bewkes, seeks to make programming that pay-TV customers have already paid for through their cable, satellite or IPTV subscriptions available to those customers on multiple platforms, and thus aims to head off the threat posed to pay-TV services by the increasing availability of over-the-top programming--for more background, see the articles published on itvt.com, April 30th, May 14th, June 25th and July 15th). "The TV Everywhere concept is clearly popular with consumers, content owners and distributors," ExtendMedia CEO, Tom MacIsaac, said in a prepared statement. "However, to date, the technology questions have primarily focused on the authentication piece--verifying that a consumer is a subscriber to a pay cable, satellite or telco TV service before allowing access to premium content online. We think there is another set of equally important questions around what happens after authentication. Just to name a few...How does a provider manage a scalable broadband service fed by dozens or even hundreds of cable networks? How does it make sure the right channel line-up is delivered to each consumer? How does it manage entitlement across devices? How does it provide transactional capabilities for up-sell, cross-sell or a la carte content consumption? How does it avoid the advertising and reporting issues that have hindered TV VOD? Extend's OpenCASE products are built to solve these problems."

ExtendMedia claims that OpenCASE Publisher streamlines many of the complex challenges providers face as they try to launch new TV Everywhere/multiscreen video services that support traditional and Web-connected TV's, PC's, mobile devices and game consoles. It bills it as a "vendor-neutral" software platform that provides a comprehensive, easy-to-use solution for managing all aspects of multiscreen content ingestion, syndication, publishing, management and reporting. Among other things, the company claims, OpenCASE Publisher:

• automates content ingestion and aggregation from an unlimited number of network content providers and content aggregators through a GUI-based, multi-point ingestion engine;
• offers the only drag-and-drop GUI for creating categories, channels and content playlists, as well as automated categorization using a sophisticated rules engine;
• simultaneously publishes and syndicates ingested content feeds and catalogs to multiple video portals, players and storefronts;
• integrates with leading ad-serving platforms and ad networks (including any other VAST-compliant ad server);
• eases the multi-source content search and discovery process through a unified, cross-provider search capability;
• provides comprehensive metering and reporting for advertising, consumption, publishing, syndication and viral sharing.

ExtendMedia also claims that OpenCASE Publisher is specifically designed to work easily with homegrown or third-party feeds, platforms and players, and that it integrates seamlessly with the various other solutions in the OpenCASE product line (CMS, Commerce, AdBridge, MediaPlayer, etc.). In an interview with Contentinople, CEO MacIsaac said that OpenCASE Publisher, which will compete against solutions and services from Comcast-owned thePlatform, is already being used by "three Tier 1 multichannel operators that will be using this product to deploy TV Everywhere services in the fall. Comcast and these other guys have made a lot of noise about a [5000-subscriber] trial, but we have customers that are just out there doing it," MacIsaac added.

In related news: In an interview with Multichannel News's Todd Spangler, Monday, HBO CTO Bob Zitter, revealed that the programmer plans to provide encrypted video content to distribution partners for TV Everywhere services, using Adobe Flash and the Adobe-developed encrypted Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMPE). "The Flash player is relatively ubiquitous across PC's and Macs," Zitter told Spangler. "It was important to us to make this offering work on Macs as well as PC's."