Castfire and TubeMogul Announce Partnership

You know Castfire as a content management system and online video platform. You know TubeMogul as a tool for distributing video to multiple sharing sites, and one that features a rich analytic suite called InPlay. Look what happens when they get together.

Under a partnership announced today, Castfire and TubeMogul will deliver amazing, real-time analytic data to customers, allowing them to swap assets and track live results. Clients will be able to study viewer engagement and drop-off rates like never before.

TubeMogul's InPlay technology offers robust data on what viewers are watching, says Brian Walsh, CEO and founder of Castfire. The integrated analytic suite lets customers drill down into the data, studying engagement timelines of how long viewers watched, as well as traffic sources such as search engines.

Castfire's publishing platform, Walsh says, lets clients overlay templates on uploaded video, easily adding branding, advertising, and copyright messages, to name a few. Using its template-driven system, clients are able to quickly build out finished versions of their videos for distribution.

When these two players combine, however, clients get a dramatically more powerful analytic engine. For the first time, they'll be able to experiment with multiple versions of the same content, showing variations to a live Web audience and tracking which form works better. Do you think your pre-roll video is driving people away? Test it with pre-rolls of various lengths and see how long viewers stick around for each. Check out different ad formats or post-rolls.

This kind of testing is called A/B testing, and the two companies say it's never been available in real-time this way. Content producers will be able to see viewer engagement patterns live as they happen, and the system even works with syndicated content.

The partnership is a win for both companies. Existing Castfire clients will get the improved analytics for no extra cost, so they'll be able to start A/B testing right away. Castfire's clients include CNET, CBS, various NFL teams, and Federated Media. TubeMogul's execs are similarly enthusiastic about the possibilities of live analytic data and attracting new customers. "You can take two pre-roll ads and see which one people click away from faster and you can see which they stay with. And you can do that with live data," says David Burch, TubeMogul's marketing director.

Without a live system like this, content distributors would have to wait until a video had run, then experiment with changes in a second video to learn what works best. Think that introduction is too long? Shorten it the next time around. With this integrated system, however, they'll be able to swap elements immediately to see which work best. Make changes and study how long viewers remain engaged and when they drop off.

The combined system has been in beta for the past month, and is now being rolled out to all customers. Using Castfire's templates, producers can create different templates for different syndication clients, then use TubeMogul's analytics tools to track the results of each site separately.

"We're excited about the opportunities that this tech brings and the insights it's going to bring to people," says Burch.