The 411 on OVPs
To state the obvious, if you’re distributing on multiple platforms—say Flash, HTML5, iOS, and Android—check to make sure that all critical features are available on all critical platforms.
If direct selling isn’t your target, monetizing via advertising or pay-per-view is, so let’s take a high level look at those features.
Monetization and Security
If you’ll be serving advertisements, the first question is which types of advertisements the OVP supports. You’ll also need to make sure that the OVP supports the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Digital Video Ad-related formats that you plan to use. The second question is which advertising networks the OVP supports, since not all OVPs support all networks. If you’re not serving advertisements from an ad server, ask about intro and outro videos or the ability to insert your own short videos before and after videos on your site, which can be valuable mechanisms for direct marketing to your viewers.
If you’ll be charging for your videos, either subscription or pay-per-view, be sure that your OVP supports your planned business model and offers a range of payment options. For example, Ooyala’s Paywall supports charging for live viewing, on-demand rental, and syndication, while accepting payments via PayPal or major credit cards. The Paywall is flexible enough to enable viewing windows—such as unlimited views in 3 days—and also to allow timing-related decisions, such as allowing the viewer to watch for 90 seconds before stopping and requesting payment.
You can see a demonstration of this function at www.ooyala.com/go/paywall/video-demo.
One component of payment is stream security, since you have to protect your content from other, nonpaying viewers, though security is often important in nonpayment situations as well. Different OVPs offer varying techniques to protect content, which can include the following:
- Access control via authentication and authorization
- Domain restriction—Limiting playback to certain domains, as in an intranet scenario
- Geofiltering—Preventing playback outside of certain geographical windows
- RTMPe or other encryption—To encrypt a stream to prevent content ripping
- SWF verification—Another technology for preventing content ripping
Again, for all these features, you have to determine whether they’re available on all of your target platforms. While Flash and the iOS platforms are generally well-supported for monetization and security, complete support for HTML5 and Android will be harder to find.
Integrated Where?
You can drive your OVP multiple ways. The most basic way is to log directly into your OVP to upload videos, choose encoding templates, manage content, grab analytics, and the like and to use embed codes generated by the OVP to display videos on your website. In addition, you can typically use general-purpose application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate these management functions into your own website, so you upload videos to www.yoursite.com rather than www.ovp.com.
If the OVP has plug-ins or extensions for your website’s content management system (CMS), this integration is faster and simpler. Many OVPs offer plug-ins for WordPress and Drupal, though Kaltura seems like the leader in this category, with support for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, MediaWiki, MindTouch, and many others (check http://exchange.kaltura.com for a complete list).
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