Company Profile: Online Video Service

Dozens of companies have established themselves as providers of Webcasting and other streaming video services. Many, if not most, frame their services as being everything to everybody in the hopes of pulling in as much business as possible. As streaming matures, this market has begun to segment itself, with some providers recognizing the inherent value in focusing on specific verticals. This profile takes a look into one such company—Online Video Service—and the market it’s chosen to address: the public affairs and government space.

A Beginning to Success
Online Video Service (OVS) grew out of the work experience of its founder and CEO, Tim Treanor. He worked for years as a professional campaign manager and political consultant, and later spent time at RealNetworks (before it was called RealNetworks) in the tradeshow and marketing group. "It dawned on me at that time in the late ’90s that the public affairs space would really be an early driver of online video and Webcasting," says Treanor, "because, unlike entertainment and enterprise, there were no copyright issues to deal with, you didn’t have overwhelming margins of audience size, and you didn’t need as hard of an ROI."

So, in late 2000 Treanor started OVS to focus solely on this segment of the overall online market. And by the spring of ’01, OVS had won its first government contract.

Since then, OVS has brought on a host of clients from across the public affairs market, which "primarily has been what I classify as the .org and .gov space," says Treanor. "On the federal side of the .gov space, those include the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Department of Transportation, specifically their office of pipeline safety. From the state and local level, there’s been the city of Kansas City, Missouri and the Washington state court system. And on the .org side, we’ve worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the California Lung Association, and Catholic Relief Services International, among others."

The Suite of Services
There are four components to OVS’s suite of services. "First is our premises-based solution where we remotely turn on and off our set of encoders," says Treanor. "We have encoders built into the AV room itself that take the uncompressed video, compress it onsite, and push it to our servers. We manage it remotely from our broadcast operations center in Seattle."

"The other piece of this is our Webcasting," Treanor continues. "If an organization is holding a hearing or some other event in a hotel, we’ll work with the hotel AV and the organization to broadcast that event live from that location."

While Webcasting live events is the primary focus for OVS, it also offers services surrounding on-demand content, including helping organizations bring libraries of content online. "The third piece of our services suite is large-scale archiving and encoding. We do quite a bit of encoding. Most of the organizations we work with don’t have internal expertise in encoding. We’ve done the largest educational video library for Films Media Group. We encoded over 3,000 titles of their library."

OVS also provides hosting and content delivery services. "The final part of our mix is content delivery. Most of our clients will pay us a subscription fee to stream their events live and continue hosting their content after the event," says Treanor.

An Ideal Market
There are a number of factors that distinguish the public affairs space from the entertainment or enterprise markets and that make it a potentially lucrative one. "It’s a different audience you’re trying to communicate to. There’s also no hard ROI, no need to sell anything," says Treanor. "Your mission is to raise awareness about issues, communicate to members and stakeholders, and to influence public opinion so you can get more appropriations, donations, and other forms of funding."