Online video platform provider, Ooyala, on Wednesday unveiled an iPhone app called OoyalaDirect that it bills as making it easy for video publishers who use its service to record and publish high-quality videos directly from their smartphones.
According to the company, the new app--which Ooyala publishers can download and install directly from the iPhone App store--allows multi-user access in order to make publishing faster and less centralized. A news reporter on the scene of a breaking story or a music promoter backstage at a rock concert can shoot, upload and publish video immediately, the company says. "Adding online video to a Web site is the best way to increase engagement," Ooyala senior product manager, Alex Holub, said in a prepared statement. "But capturing and publishing high-quality video has always been difficult, expensive and time-consuming. That's why we created OoyalaDirect. It's the easiest way to capture and publish video directly from an iPhone."
Last month, Ooyala released a suite of mobile advertising enhancements for the iPhone and iPad (see the article published on itvt.com, August 2nd). The company bills the launch of OoyalaDirect as "a continuation of this strategy of making it easy to publish and monetize all video."
In related news: Rival online video platform provider, Brightcove, said Wednesday that it has formed a "wide-ranging alliance" with CDN company, Akamai Technologies, which it bills as bringing together "two of the most widely used cloud-based platforms for professional online video to create a powerful, end-to-end offer that makes high-quality video publishing and distribution easily available for businesses and organizations of all sizes." According to Brightcove, the partnership will see it providing Akamai's CDN, the Akamai HD Network, as a bundled component of its broadband video platform service. Brightcove previously used Limelight Networks' CDN. However, the latter company recently acquired Delve Networks (see the article published on itvt.com, August 9th), giving it new capabilities that appear to transform it into a competitor to Brightcove (see, for example, this analysis by Jeff Baumgartner of Light Reading Cable).
Brightcove bills itself as offering a comprehensive solution for video content management, encoding, publishing, monetization and analytics, while Akamai bills itself as providing customers with global reach, full adaptive bitrate streaming, faster start-up times and interactivity for their online video assets. The companies claim that their combined customer base includes leading media, ecommerce and enterprise companies, as well as small business, from around the globe. They say that their integrated solution will give customers a fast path to leverage their respective platforms to deliver high-quality, adaptive bitrate video across Flash and iOS devices.
The Brightcove-Akamai alliance sees Brightcove joining the Akamai HD Network partner ecosystem and Akamai joining the Brightcove Alliance partner ecosystem. Akamai bills its HD Network as "delivering the highest quality experience at broadcast audience scale across the industry's most popular devices, platforms and runtimes"; as "enabling content owners to increase audience engagement and expand revenues through higher-quality video playback and interactivity"; and as being designed to "deliver live and on-demand content while leveraging an infrastructure of tens of thousands of HTTP servers deployed globally in ISP servers." Brightcove, meanwhile, bills the Brightcove Alliance as providing customers with "a broad range of expert partners, pre-integrated technologies and services to support online video initiatives of any size and scope in every market." According to the company, the program has over 200 members.
