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Getting to Know Ooyala – My Interview with Bismarck Lepe

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The last couple of weeks have been mind-blowing.  Firstly, I have the pleasure of posting my OVP Test Drive reviews on VidCompare.com, thanks to its founder, Kris Drey.  Since then, I have been contacted by a few people in the online video industry, complimenting me on how thorough and in-depth those posts really go.  Thanks to all those who reached out – the encouragement will only result in more reviews, so stay tuned!

Secondly, to my surprise and excitement, I was contacted by Ooyala and had the chance to speak with its co-founder and President of Products, Bismarck Lepe.  During that discussion, Bismarck kindly walked me through a very detailed demo of Backlot and addressed all of the questions I originally raised in my April review of their free trial.  Don’t worry – the results of that demo will be shared on this site before the end of the month.

Finally, after the demo, Bismarck was kind enough to answer some general questions I had about Ooyala.  The following is an exchange that took place by email late last week.

Charlie Davis:

Ooyala clearly has carved out a niche in content monetization. How else is Ooyala differentiating itself from the rest of the pack of 90+ OVPs now and into the future?

Ooyala:

We don’t consider ourselves an OVP. Our video platform, Backlot, is just one of the many products and services we sell. Small to mid-sized companies are fine with a one-size fits all approach to video publishing, monetization and analytics, but the large broadcasters and operators require a lot more flexibility. But to answer your question, the things that differentiate us today are:

+ Flexibility through modularity: A publisher can buy each one of our services separately which makes it easy for large companies to integrate with their own video technology stack. As I mentioned earlier, Bloomberg leverages their own transcoding, their own storage, and their own content management system. We help them with metadata management, analytics, ad serving and player controls and personalization.

+ Scalability: After YouTube, we deliver more streams than any other video technology company in the world – more than Hulu, more than Netflix and more than BBC’s iPlayer. Being able to manage this kind of volume requires the build-out of highly scalable and distributed infrastructure and technology.

+ Viewer insight through real-time analytics: We have the only real-time analytics engine on the market. And unlike ALL analytics systems out there, we provide detailed per-video and per-user reporting for both on-demand and live video streaming. Our analytics system processes information real-time and updates the analytics dashboards every couple of minutes. The breadth of reporting insight we provide allows publishers to maximize revenue, reach and engagement.

+ Comprehensive monetization system: In addition to providing yield management of advertising across multiple data sources – ad networks and 3rd party ad servers – we also have seamless integrations with payment systems for the ability to launch both paid and ad-supported video business models.

+ Subscription management: With personal playback, we’re able to manage first party CRM systems, third party entitlement systems like Adobe PASS and our own subscriber database to authenticate streams across all devices. A person can have a continuous viewing experience for content across all devices.

+ Secure video delivery across all devices: We provide DRM and multiple levels of content protection out of the box for all screens.

Charlie Davis:

Where else does Ooyala see its strengths? Weaknesses?

Ooyala:

Strengths:
+ We also believe that our focus on iterating quickly and launching new products has allowed us to offer technology that helps our publishers deliver a better and more engaging experience for their consumers. We were the first company to launch adaptive bit-rate video delivery in flash, we were the first company to launch video playback on the iPhone, and we’re now launching personalization features that will help publishers create a distinct experience for every single one of their viewers.

+ Another strength is the fact that we are a global company. We have 7 International offices in addition to the 3 offices we have in the US. This allows us to provide local attention to our customers outside of the US. Today, over 60% of our streams come from outside of the US. In Japan, by the end of the year, we will be powering over 50% of video in that country via our customer and partner, Yahoo! Japan.

Weaknesses:
+ In the last 7 months we’ve hired about 80 people. The growth and adoption of online video is driving our aggressive growth strategy. That said, we still need to hire more people and we’re falling behind on our plan.

+ Of the companies that compete for publisher business, we’re still relatively young. Most of the companies have been around 6+ years, while we’ve only been selling for 3 years. So there is still a fair amount of work that needs to be done to build our brand.

Charlie Davis:

How does Ooyala manage customer support and where is the support located?

Ooyala:

+ We have 4 levels of support.

- Consumer Services Group: This team helps scope and launch a customer’s video deployment. They’re also the teams that provide in-person support for live events. (In local markets – CSG EU, CSG NA, CSG JP, CSG APAC)

- Account Management: All professional and enterprise accounts have an account manager assigned to them. The account managers help with day-to-day deployments and optimization questions. (In local markets, UK, FR, US, MX, JP, CN, AUS)

- 24-hour tech support: The 24-hour tech support team are there to respond to questions or issues 24 hours a day. We have three main technical support centers – North America, Europe, Asia.

- Support engineers: We have engineers in every single core engineering team to quickly fix or respond to product issues that may be impacting a particular publisher. By having support engineers, we avoid impacting our core engineering teams that are actively working on delivering on our product roadmap.

Charlie Davis:

How many unique customers does Ooyala currently support?  Of all those customers, which one presented the most unique challenge and how did Ooyala solve it?

Ooyala:

Because Ooyala has a self-serve product, we actually have over 3,000 customers that serve more than 5 hours of content per month. That said, the vast majority of the revenue comes from a couple hundred accounts. Recently, the MVPDs have brought with them unique demands on our products and organization. This is requiring that we work more closely with large system integrators because there are certain things like building our own set-top box, that we will just not do.

Charlie Davis:

Ooyala has had a SEO SDK and Facebook Sharing SDK for some time. Are there any new toys that developers can expect in 2011 or 2012?

Ooyala:

Yes! Expect a lot of really cool tools and services for personalization and multi-device consumer experiences.

Charlie Davis:

One of the biggest hurdles for video is content creation. Does Ooyala have solutions or partnerships with companies that address some of the burden felt by users trying to produce quality content?

Ooyala:

We have people in our consumer services group that work closely with publishers to help them create the right kind of content that will be watched by consumers on connected devices. We’ve also partnered with TurnHere and other videography services to provide this kind of support in places where we don’t have people on the ground.

Charlie Davis:

It has been about five months since the Ooyala partnership with Yahoo! Japan was announced. Have you successfully implemented all of your key objectives in that partnership, and what has Ooyala learned thus far?

Ooyala:

A partnership of this size has an 18-month launch plan. But we’ve already started to deploy on one of Japan’s biggest sites, GyaO! – http://gyao.yahoo.co.jp/dokitere/, and they recently launched Vipo, a co-branded version of our service that they’re selling in that market. So far, it’s been a huge success. Via the reseller relationship, Yahoo! Japan will be making a couple of very large customer acquisition announcements in the coming weeks.

Charlie Davis:

I would imagine before signing Yahoo! Japan, there were some preparations Ooyala undertook to ensure the platform’s availability under heavy traffic. Can you comment on what steps were taken?

Ooyala:

Can’t comment on the specifics. But in order to get ready for this account, we had to build up our presence in Asia.

Charlie Davis:

On the Ooyala web site, it says, “Panasonic has been working closely with Ooyala to transform the connected TV experience”. I also read that Ooyala is working with LG and Philips. Can you elaborate on what these OTT relationships will mean to Ooyala customers and those with connected TVs?

Ooyala:

Our goal is to make it easy for our publishers to deliver incredible video experiences across all devices. This means that we’re doing all the work of seamlessly integrating the device SDKs into our own products so it’s just as easy to push content to connected device app experiences as it is to embed a video embed on a website.

Charlie Davis:

Any comment on the Ooyala + Facebook rumors that surfaced last week?

Ooyala:

We work closely with our publishers to help them leverage the social graph to create incredible experiences on Facebook. Last week, Sephora ran a live event on Facebook, Whole Foods is running original content on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/wholefoods?sk=app_211251575575204) and we’ve powered a lot of live concerts on Facebook. Facebook is an incredible place to build a video business and to leverage video to connect with your audience.

Charlie Davis:

Thank you, Bismarck, for this excellent opportunity and I look forward to speaking with you again in the future.


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