As part of the acquisition, KickApps is being consolidated into KIT Digital. The brand will disappear around the third quarter of this year. The platform will still be around, though, just as a part of a larger KIT Digital suite.
KickApps launched back in 2005 with the goal of helping large enterprises improve interactions with customers by adding social functionality. It serves leading media and entertainment companies and enterprises.
The company began offering its social CMS system when it launched in 2005. It’s been through several versions, with the 5.0 version released in January 2010. Also that year, KickApps launched a web-based application development platform, letting customers create custom video players, widgets, and other Flash experiences with a drag-and-drop interface. In October 2010, it began offering Facebook publishing, letting customers create experiences on their Facebook sites.
Sorenson Media is so well-known for its encoding software that some still might not know that it has an OVP: Sorenson 360. As a relatively new entrant, Sorenson is making a name for itself by supporting a variety of formats and offering its own approval process. Not surprisingly, it integrates well with Sorenson Squeeze as part of a larger workflow. While the OVP offers three tiers, each one has the same base features. The only things that change are the bandwidth, storage, and number of users.
Sorenson 360 launched in May 2009. It’s an off-the-shelf solution that users can have up and running immediately. At the same time, its APIs let customers shape it to fit their workflows. It’s built with a modular design, making it flexible.
Target customers are anyone working with online video daily. The product is big with video producers and post houses, as well as education, media and entertainment, and enterprise customers. It’s used in a variety of verticals by companies that range in size.
In late 2009, 360 began offering templates and controls that let customers design their own customized Flash player. Early the next year, it expanded the range of formats it supports.
For customers that find getting videos more of a problem than getting an online host, RealGravity could be the right choice. This company offers OVP- like tools connected to a library of more than 600,000 videos. Thanks to content deals created by RealGravity, the company has a large library of videos to offer its customers.
The system is built for those who distribute content to partner sites, showing most of their videos on sites they don’t own. It lets partners log in and manage their own accounts. The content owner and the partner then split the revenue from the streamed videos. This partner system lets sites that don’t have a lot of money enjoy a library of premium videos.
RealGravity launched on Jan. 1, 2009. The focus has been on allowing people who create niche video syndication sites to easily manage their entire networks. Target customers include brands or ad networks that need to deploy content across a network of sites. Some customers have their own content, and some rely on the RealGravity library.
When RealGravity first launched, it was a simpler version of the product. Customers used embed codes to show the desired content. The next version, in the fall of 2010, gave more control over how videos displayed on the page. It also established the format of an OVP connected to a content library. The third version added ad server integration, letting customers easily sell their unsold inventory.
This article first ran in the August/September 2011 issue of Streaming Media.