ooyala's posterous

How We Roll..

Hey, come work with us!  http://bit.ly/G818N 

We are a video technology company that provides a comprehensive software platform enabling the delivery, management, and monetization of online video content.

Need to publish your video and want an enterprise-grade solution? Got it. Analytics? Yep. Monetization features..For sure.

Big media/entertainment companies..Growing businesses..Our customer portfolio includes them all.

http://ooyala.com

 

 

USMAGAZINE.COM's "Scoop" - Getting the Exclusive Video

USMAGAZINE.COM'S SCOOP ON THE 1984 JACKSON/PEPSI AD - by Steven Smith, Digital Media Editor

http://www.minonline.com (MEDIA INDUSTRY NEWSLETTER)

When Us Weekly reporters got their hands on the 25-year old raw footage of the infamous Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial accident that singed his hair, editor-in-chief Janice Min and her staff knew how to prepare for a tidal wave on USMAGAZINE.COM, but the effort needed to be coordinated and polished.

Rather than slapping raw footage on the site immediately, Wenner Media chief digital officer Steven Schwartz coordinated the Web release with the print edition's July 15 newsstand drop, which included stills from the fateful shoot.  But Schwartz also made sure that the video itself was crafted to travel well.  "We had acquired the video 36 hours prior and did heavy editing," he says.  "We knew the storytelling component was important so our users got a sense for a take that went well for the commercial followed by the take where the accident took place."  The clip uses superimposed captions to narrate the incident, and prominent Us Weekly branding is ever-present.  In fact, in the increasingly viral ecosystem of the Web, where USMAGAZINE.COM  encouraged other sites to embed the video, it is critical that content work as a standalone entity that also showcases the originator's editorial chops.  Us framed the tale as newsworthy beyond its shock value.  The 1984 Pepsi commercial accident was the beginning of Jackson's purported addiction to an array of drugs.

"We were able to maximize the video's impact and associate Us as the brand that was able to deliver it," says Schwartz.

He got what he was looking for.  In July, the video attracted 11 million unique visitors to USMAGAZINE.COM.  According to the site's video technology provider Ooyala, the 1-minute/35-second video received 150,000 hours of viewing in the two days after its July 15 launch, with the vast majority of users watching all of it.  Unlike many viral clips, Us Weekly publisher Vicci Lasdon Rose and her staff were able to monetize this wave with pre-roll ads from several sponsors.

"The other important part is that we have seen as a result of this our other video offerings experience significant growth, which was a great by-product of having the breakout video," says Schwartz. 

The site has been building momentum for its Hot Stuff and Us Musts, and fortuitously the MJ video coincided with the site's new partnership with Ooyala, which allowed for easier viral distribution.

Internal logs show that July was far and away the best month ever for Wenner Media's fast-growing contender in the fiercely competitive celebrity news segment online.  July's 14.8 million uniques and 351 million page views set a new milestone for a site that enjoyed 185% page-view growth and 163% expansion in unique users in the first half of 2009 compared with the same six months in 2008. Even in the new world of raw footage coursing around the Internet to get grabbed and sensationalized by every other news outlet, there is a place for editorial values.  Us Weekly could have been merely the "source" for another leak of shocking footage related to MJ.  By shaping the narrative within the clip itself, ensuring the brand was prominent wherever it appeared, and coordinating the Web release with its deeper print treatment, the magazine controlled the video rather than letting the shock value of the video overwhelm the story.

Friday Movie Night

We're going to the movies tonight..WOoo!

The Team is choosing between two options and is using the site, http://movietickets.com (one of our customers), to view the trailers.  Movietickets.com is a great place to purchase your tickets and learn more about films. The trailers below are shown with our newish video player, "Swift."

To learn more about the Ooyala Video Player:

http://www.ooyala.com/blog?eid=72

And btw, if you want to work for a company that shows their love in the form of movie nights, great food < we think we have one of the best startup kitchens in the WORLD>, frisbee, BBQs, golfing, go-kart racing, beach outings, ski trips, and massage chair visits, check out our Careers page: http://bit.ly/G818N. - Alexa

GI Joe

 

A Perfect Getaway

 

Easy Embeds, Drag N' Drop Labels


Here's another excuse to share Ooyala's video from The Relay 2009.  Looking back, yah. It was pretty grueling and wet!

Before publishing this video to share with you, we took some screenshots to call out a few points of interest:

  • Screenshot #1 Embedding: When you publish video, Backlot (our CMS) automatically gives you a few options to set your video frame size for the Ooyala Video Player. This is a fast, goof-proof way of embedding (using code snippets to publish) your video. Also, you'll notice that you can use a custom frame size, too. For best image quality results, avoid resizing your videos. In other words, encode your video to the size you want it to appear on the webpage.
  • Screenshot #2 Labeling: This is especially important when you want to automatically syndicate your video to YouTube, Google Video, Blinx, etc. You can also set up MRSS feeds with your video labels.
http://ooyala.com

(download)

Video Channel - Real Time CrunchUp Wrap

http://ooyala.com

Use a video channel to keep multiple videos together in one very nice looking video player. Viewers mouse over the video and select the TV icon to see the list of videos.  To browse, just nudge your mouse up and down.

You can very quickly create your video channel or channel set from within Backlot. Need to make quick changes to the text or swap in/out a video? The changes will dynamically update on your web page. Below you'll find an example we created onsite from the TechCrunch Real Time CrunchUp 2009. 

The screenshots show you what it the publishing controls look like inside the Backlot content management system.

(download)