Video to Go

Transpera aims to address both these needs in helping content owners create rich media mobile experiences. "We are bringing to mobile video that which previously hasn’t been there: deep integration with online video properties, delivered both on- and off-deck with carriers, and social interaction where users have the ability to grab a video from a website, send it down to their phone, and send it to other users’ phones in order to share it with a group of friends," says Transpera CEO Frank Barbieri.

Railing against the broadcast model of mobile delivery, where users are expected to simply sit back and watch, Transpera aims to get users engaged, and by doing so drive awareness around content. The way it enables mobile video sharing is as follows: "The video lives on our servers. When a user sends it to a friend, we send a handset-optimized link to a carrier-optimized file on our servers. We manage the whole process of choosing the right video for the right handset, so the video doesn’t have to move anywhere," says Barbieri. This can be important, given the limited bandwidth of mobile networks and limited storage of mobile devices.

Transpera also enables the decidedly social act of allowing users to easily upload and share videos of their own creation.

Getting started with Transpera is a straightforward endeavor. "We’ll make it brain dead-easy for you to create and manage mobile video channels. Literally, if you send us an RSS feed with your video, we can turn around a mobile app within weeks if not days," says Barbieri. "Plus we’ll help you monetize this content through carrier relationships and advertisers as well."

Enabling advertising is a key component of Transpera’s offerings. "We’re not only helping the content get out there, we’re helping integrate advertising in a way that will be unobtrusive," says Barbieri. "We have four key ad components: your typical banner and text links, which can be dynamically stitched on the server side and delivered as part of a video experience; in-stream video ads like pre-rolls; and the last is what we call pocket sites, which are sites we build where there’s an action, like submitting an email address or mobile number, that we build out specifically for our advertising partners."

Just by knowing a user’s phone number, Transpera can do things like geographic targeting, as well as contextual targeting based on the content they’re watching.

Transpera’s ideal customers are content owners who have an audience for online video that they want to extend into mobile markets. "The sweet spot is in that area where they’ve done a great job on the web, but they don’t want to invest in building a custom mobile infrastructure," says Barbieri. Their preference is actually to work with sites that are realizing between 1 and 20 million uniques a month, rather than the media giants, who are more likely to build these capabilities out themselves.

Transpera is already working with a handful of content owners and a mobile carrier, and they plan to launch with all their partners by the end of the year.

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