Natural Evolution: PaaS to SaaS

If we are to oversimplify the evolution of the value chain in the computing industry, it broadly breaks down to: from hardware to operating systems to software applications (a little of the chicken/egg fallacy there).

Using that storyline to examine the current online video platform market, we are starting to see platform providers evolving into application providers, or platform providers beginning to focus on the solution stack they are providing.

PermissionTV has gone through a make-over and tries to find some viability as Visible Gains.

The evolution is good and we wish Visible Gains the best of luck!

DO YOUR JOB

This really has no place on a corporate blog. But then again, it does.

Peter King talks about the feel good story of this NFL season, in reference to the Denver Broncos:

” Whether Denver’s a championship team or not — and allowing an insane 6.5 points per game through four weeks suggests they’ll battle San Diego for the AFC West title — there’s one thing you have to love about the Broncos: They’ve got a Patriot way (what a coincidence!) of tuning out the outside crappola and focusing on the only thing that matters — the next play. They tuned out the Jay Cutler thing. They tuned out the Brandon Marshall distraction. That’s not easy in an NFL-crazy market like Denver, but McDaniels did it. “DO YOUR JOB” is the gigantic wall art in the Broncos’ team meeting room, something McDaniels brought with him from New England and his mentor, Bill Belichick. And it’s what his players are doing.

Now let’s do a mini-analysis of the biggest decision of the off-season, Denver dealing Cutler for two first-rounders and Kyle Orton. It reminds me of the Patriots dealing Drew Bledsoe in 2002 and handing the quarterback job long-term to Tom Brady. Bledsoe, the independent-thinking mad bomber; Brady, the caretaker who’ll follow the gameplan to a T. Just substitute Cutler for Bledsoe and Kyle Orton for Brady and you’ve got McDaniels’ line of thinking. Now, I’m not saying (and McDaniels wouldn’t either) that Orton’s going to morph into Brady, but the amount of negative plays at the quarterback position has been exactly what McDaniels has preached: zero interceptions, zero lost fumbles, six sacks. If Orton continues on his present pace — 3,624 passing yards, 20 touchdowns, 59 percent passing (that should be a tick better) — the Broncos will be playing in January.”

That’s exactly right: DO YOUR JOB.

(P.S.: Thanks for the pointer, Riff)

H.264

Good news!

We just added in H.264 support today, and moved away from FLV to MP4 in our choice of container format.

Video quality’s awesome, and some samples available for a short while at:

1) Fantastic Four: http://marcellus.tv/f_four.html
2) Sharks: http://marcellus.tv/shark.html
3) Batman Begins: http://marcellus.tv/batmanbegins.html

Enjoy the videos and stay tuned for more exciting announcements coming up in a couple of weeks!

Announcement: advanced player customization

Exciting news from the Marcellus product team: two new features added this week.

First, we’ve added the ability for the scrubber to be hidden after a few seconds of inactivity(you can specify the number of seconds, of course).

Second, you can also specify the default volume for each player instance when the video loads up.

Screen shot below, and hope you enjoy these additions!

Google to buy Brightcove. Not.

I got my first email at 12:28 pm – “rumor: Google to buy Brightcove.”

I got my second email at 1:07 pm – “rumor false: Google to buy Brightcove.”

I spent the time during those emails scratching my head – What is wrong with the Brin/Page/Schmidt triumvirate? Does it really make sense for Google to invest in an up-market (at those price points Brightcove is no Walmart) white-label video streaming provider?

Google has an audacious goal – organize the world’s information. I guess it does make sense for Google to acquire tools that publish that information… but Brightcove? Seriously? Some reports went on to expand that it would create synergies with Youtube. Um… you mean the same synergy that Brightcove and Brightcove TV created?

Sometimes the sum of the parts is less than the parts themselves… what these speculators are missing out on is: the white-label video platform space is different than the UGC video portal space. Publishers in the white-label video have different needs – they are not looking for platforms that market their content.

They are looking for tools that let them publish, manage and track their content at affordable price points. Then they are looking for a platform that lets them scale up and scale down on-demand. Simply put, IMHO – Google + Brightcove makes as much sense as Pizza + Ketchup. Sounds exciting for 39 minutes… and then you wake up.

Adobe announces DRM for Flash

Recently, the artist formerly known as Macromedia – Adobe plugged the most obvious hole in its Flash platform by announcing DRM in the form of Flash Access 2.0.

What can we take away?

• Premium content comes at a premium and needs to be treated differently.
• Adobe has effectively killed the Adobe Media player – browser-based streaming is the future.
• The competition for adoption by premium-content owners is going to heat up… and for now it looks like it going to be Microsoft versus Adobe.

The bigger question: DRM serves a tactical purpose, but is it sound strategy?

The money question: How many publishers out there are interested in DRM?

What is Marcellus’s stand? Well we couldn’t say it any better than Mr. Jobs:

“Convincing them (publishers) to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace.  Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.”

The Power of You

This is a super interview of Greg Jarobe (co-founder of SEO-PR) on ReelSEO.

He talks about the opportunity presented by an audience of over 105 million monthly unique visitors, and some of the mindset changes needed to capitalize on that opportunity.

Key take-aways:

1) Think of YouTube as an opportunity to promote, and pre-sell.

2) Provide enhanced content(high quality videos, lots of videos), and an optimal context(meta-data for search and discovery)

3) Engage with the YouTube community- don’t just sit there and wait for the hits to come.

Thanks to Mark (Robertson) at ReelSEO for conducting the interview.

Google analytics: Tracking conversions across subdomains

We’ve recently had to break something of a sweat in figuring out how to track conversions using Google analytics, when the goal funnel involves sub-domains.

In case anyone else runs into similar problems, here’s what you do:

1) Add this line(in BOLD, below) to your Google Analytics code, on both the starting page(step 1) as well as the conversion page(step 2).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".example.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>

2. Then, if your start page(where visitors land) is: http://mydomain.com/start/index.php and your conversion page(where people land after signup or something like that) is: http://sub.mydomain.com/welcome/index.php, then you specify your funnel as:

Step 1: www.mydomain.com/start/index.php

Step 2: sub.mydomain.com/welcome/index.php

3.  That’s it. You’re done.

Tooltip support added

Some publishers need tool-tips for buttons on the player scrubber, and some don’t. So, we’ve added tool-tip support as a player customization feature in your publisher console.

Just click on a video, and on the player customization page that follows, you’ll find a checkbox to enable/disable tooltips. Simple.

Much love to Everett Teague @ Pro Web Communications for the gentle prod.

Screenshots: Marcellus Video Platform

The Marcellus Video Platform (mvp v1.0) went live over the weekend.
You can now sign up for a trial account directly on the site(http://www.marcellus.tv) and try out the service yourself.

Here are a few screen shots:

1) Video listing: A listing of your entire video library, sortable by viewership, video title(alphabetical), and date.

2) Metadata editing: Easily add/change video metadata like title, keywords and description. Comes in handy when we start making your video content SEO-friendly.

3) Video player customization: Change the look and feel of your video player, including colors for individual player components. Add a custom watermark or logo as well.

4) Video uploads: Upload video files up to 1 GB in size, in most formats (WMV, MPG, AVI, MOV, MP4) for automatic encoding to Flash. Also, view real time information on your used storage vs. total storage capacity.

5) Reports: comprehensive reports on your content usage, video placement footprint(first publishing point only for now), storage and bandwidth usage, and more. All in one simple reports interface with date-based filtering.