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Belsasar Lepe, Co-founder & SVP of Products & SolutionsLeaping with Strong Foundation and Partnership
Ooyala was founded by two brothers Belsasar and Bismarck Lepe, along with Sean Knapp in 2007, with the foresight that premium content and audiences would migrate online. Since the onset, they've made data-rich analytics and strategic insights core to Ooyala’s platform and services to enable web publishers and broadcasters to make informed decisions about how to best monetize and optimize their video content. With the course of time, when TV distribution and online TV publishing witnessed a rapid success, Telstra–an Australian telecommunications company—acquired Ooyala in 2014, to render next-generation solutions in digital TV including personalization, addressable TV advertising, accessibility, mobility, and greater monetization.
At the end of the day, when a broadcaster or operator intends to supercharge their digital TV experience, they should be capable and willing to try different approaches. The company helps its clients create digital TV experiences through various possible approaches. “Our uniqueness lies in our credibility to offer customers with multiple choices, and we do it on a scale that very few can match,” explains Belsasar Lepe, Co-founder & SVP – Products & Solutions, Ooyala.
Employing Ooyala and Microsoft’s Azure Media Services, clients benefit from a scalable and reliable infrastructure to stream content, backed by the analytics and monetization capabilities, they need to grow their video business. This includes companies delivering video-on-demand or live-streaming content to global audiences, watching at the time and on the devices they prefer.
Since the partnership, the duo has served many established companies including a global sports association, a major weather publisher in the U.S., and a dominant sports league in Australia.
Distinct Vision: Multiplying Success
Ooyala has the vision of delivering TV online and takes a different approach towards achieving that. While other players in the market focus on simply getting video online; Ooyala’s vision goes far beyond that. Ooyala does not just ensure that video gets online; it helps clients multiply their revenue, reach, and measure their audiences, Moreover Ooyala’s specialized services and integrated video solutions also allow them to capitalize on data-driven insights through its platform built on big data. “We collect analytics and derive insights from every video instance—whether it is from the broadcasters and operators (our customers) or their audiences—to see where we can make the platform smarter,” adds Lepe.
From identifying what content resonates with a particular audience, to understanding exactly when viewers stop watching content pre-roll or mid-roll ads, the company’s video analytics platform—Ooyala IQ— provides insights for everything to create a better and more enjoyable TV experience online. These insights help them make smarter decisions about what content to produce or license in the future, which devices to target and why, and how to keep the viewers engaged. This further helps in creating a better experience for the customers as well as greater monetization, which undoubtedly remains a concern for them. Moreover, in production, efficiency is paramount. Companies are challenged to deliver more content in more formats, to more devices, in more languages and regions than ever before, but at less cost and, typically with the same resources. To solve it, companies are looking for solutions that make their teams and processes more efficient.
"Ooyala helps to level the playing field for content creators and distributors looking forward to channelize compelling content through digital TV"
Microsoft and Ooyala are working together to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) to video production. Using Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and Ooyala Flex, companies can simplify metadata capture by extracting transcripts, detecting faces within videos, and analyzing text to detect key topics. The benefits range from streamlined metadata insertion, greater personalized video delivery to audiences as well as better ad targeting and ensuring brand safe environments for advertisers.
Evolve Beyond OVP
Ooyala’s IVP solutions address the challenges across every step in the video journey, from production to publishing and advertising through its complete set of solutions, which includes Ooyala Flex, the Ooyala video platform, and Ooyala Pulse, along with Ooyala IQ. Through Ooyala Flex, the company helps its clients deal with the cost and complexity related to creating, managing and distributing content. Its video production workflow technology platform offers complete control of the end-to-end asset and metadata management, workflow orchestration, and operational insights to transform and modernize video content operations. It organizes all the elements of production workflow in a way that it becomes easier to adapt to the upcoming market changes or user behaviors.
Our uniqueness lies in our credibility to offer customers with multiple choices, and we do it on a scale that very few can match
Ooyala states, Ooyala Flex helps get content to market faster with some customers reducing project delivery times by more than 75 percent.
Ooyala Pulse, on the other hand, delivers capabilities for advertising. A holistic, video advertising platform, Ooyala Pulse combines both capabilities of an ad server and programmatic trading platform into a single solution. It empowers advertising operation teams to make smarter decisions about how to sell their inventory - whether direct or programmatically, for every piece of inventory, every time. It helps to optimize the advertising business of the clients effectively in order to drive monetization for them. Ooyala, with these solutions, serves over 400 broadcasters, publishers, and media companies including Walmart’sVudu, Sky Sports, ITV Studios, Star India, Media Prima, and the Telegraph.
Best of Breed with Ooyala and Microsoft
Ooyala has also launched a new subscription service for a major sports league in Australia, in association with Microsoft. The sports league was aiming to reach wider audiences, expand its fan base, and modernize its video business to deliver league content across devices. Ooyala assisted them as a live streaming partner to deliver pre-game commentary, behind the scenes content, and player interviews, and also supported with a full advertising video-on-demand (AVOD) business model. This helps the sports league drive monetization and gives a platform for its sponsors and advertisers to reach its dedicated fan base. “With Ooyala and Microsoft, the league is reaching its fan base across desktop, mobile, and smart TV devices via the web and apps, for all teams in the league and league online properties, across Australia,” remarks Lepe.
Microsoft and Ooyala, together, have assisted numerous businesses across the globe materialize their vision of making digital TV possible. Ever since Ooyala has formed an alliance with Microsoft, its journey has been nothing less a than a success story. Lepe believes that Microsoft, as a partner, shares their vision and understands the value of data and analytics, which has been the go-to strategy for Ooyala ever since the beginning. Microsoft even endeavors to further collaborate with Ooyala to provide machine-learning insights focused on video to help broadcasters and TV operators drive their business forward. “Together, we are building OTT platforms to cater to the needs of the largest broadcasters and operators in the world down to those just starting out,” Lepe concludes.
May 24, 2017
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