This Week in the Digital Video Industry: 11/7-11/13

1 Streaming Sales Provide Bright Spot for Indies

If there's one silver lining for the film industry to the coronavirus pandemic, its VOD.

2 Disney+ Passes 73 Million Subscribers as Streaming Takes Center Stage

The company has experienced deep losses in its theme park division because of the pandemic, but investors don’t seem to care at the moment.

3 Google Fiber Adds Sling TV to Its Streaming Lineup

Google Fiber earlier this year pulled the plug on its own video service and instead began featuring streaming TV options including fuboTV. Over the summer it added Philo to the list, and now Sling TV.

4 YouTube Experienced Widespread Technical Problems Playing Videos

The problems were evident on desktop and mobile apps, as well as connected-TV devices including  Google’s Chromecast. YouTube ads also were not loading during the technical outage.

5 Sony Acquires Faith Based Streaming Service

In a move to expand its reach with Christian audiences, Sony Pictures is buying a streaming service launched by the makers of the “God’s Not Dead” film franchise.

6 Molotov Launches Free Ad-Supported Streaming Service Mango

Mango features a thousand movies, TV shows, documentaries and shows for kids. The company has partnered with copyright holders that want to find a new distribution channel for their content.

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VideoFuel: Disney+ Passes 73 Million Subs, Google Fiber Adds Sling TV to Lineup And More

VideoFuel: Gen Z’s Increasing Mobile Video Consumption, T-Mobile's New Streaming Service, And More

Is migrating consumer data or integrating systems the best approach to building a cohesive online and onsite fitness experience?

2020 has been the year of many things; one of those things has been the tenacity and the perseverance of the fitness industry. Prior to COVID-19, large fitness companies like Crunch, XPO and Zumba saw the potential in offering an online option in addition to their standard onsite facilities. Now, with the forced evolution to a digital-first strategy, gyms, studios and corporate wellness providers are looking to find a way to marry their existing onsite member management systems with their new virtual solutions. 

While for the boutique studios with hundreds of customers it may be an easy decision to migrate consumer data to a new streaming platform, for larger corporate providers, with hundreds of thousands of members, it’s about finding a way to integrate legacy systems with new, innovative workflows for entitlements and authentication.

The importance of selecting a streaming infrastructure provider relies heavily on the vendor’s APIs and overall flexibility. Many “turnkey” solutions in the market today provide an end-to-end platform, enabling users to quickly get started with little to no development. However, many of them do not allow for customization, which can easily become restrictive at scale. 

Similarly to when selecting an digital infrastructure provider, it’s important to evaluate the flexibility of your membership management system. At the end of the day, you’re looking to build a cohesive experience for your consumer, whether they signed up at the front desk or your website. The end goal is to make it as seamless and easy as possible for subscribers to access the content they’re paying for. 

The essential features of a membership management system provide:

At Zype, we’re able to take a customer’s existing member registrations, contact lists, renewals, and payments and create an authentication layer to support entitlement management across all platforms: web, mobile, or OTT. By leveraging Zype’s APIs, Zype’s Professional Services Team creates a custom single sign-on (SSO) flow which allows users to universally access their streaming fitness content wherever they want to workout. This is essential in a world where convenience is key to customer retention and consumers expect to have content at their fingertips 24/7.

Beyond being able to access content across platforms, it’s important to have a system that allows native purchasing, for one-off classes, events and more. Zype’s Marketplace Connect simplifies and unifies in-app purchasing across multiple app marketplaces, without restricting your end users’ viewing to a single device. With Marketplace Connect, you can track all purchases across all app marketplaces, allowing for complete visibility into your customers’ buying activity.

The evaluation and selection of a vendor to handle subscriber migration varies not just on the size of your membership base but also on the timeline, technical resources, and system compatibility, among other things. The right turnkey video infrastructure should be open and flexible enough to handle these complex integrations and work with your existing systems. No fitness routine should be one size fits all, and neither should your technical infrastructure partner’s approach to servicing your customers. 

Extending Your Member Management System To Streamline Your Online Fitness Experience

finding a way to integrate legacy systems with new, innovative workflows for entitlements and authentication.

1 Roku Delivers Big Revenue Beat As More Ad Dollars Shift to Streaming

Shares of Roku Inc. were up 3% in after-hours trading Thursday after the company showed that it continues to benefit from the shift of advertising dollars away from traditional television.

2 Netflix Picks France to Test First Linear Offering

Named Direct, the linear channel — which is only available to subscribers — will air French, international and U.S. feature films and TV series that are available on the streaming service.

3 T-Mobile Gives Cord-Cutters What They Want and Media Companies Aren't Happy About It

The non-sports package, whose 30 channels include Discovery, Food Network, Comedy Central, and AMC, costs just $10 per month, while the other bundle starts at $40 per month. But apparently, Discovery CEO David Zaslav isn’t too pleased with this arrangement. 

4 TiVo's Deep Discovery Tool Gets Moody With Metadata

TiVo’s new Deep Discovery tool for video service providers, electronics manufacturers and media companies digs deeper into metadata to improve search and recommendations.

5 Lionsgate Revenue Falls 20%; OTT Subs Grow 2.3M To 13.7M

Lionsgate revenue dipped to $745 million last quarter, down 20% from $938 million the year earlier, as OTT subscribers jumped and the shares headed higher in late trading.

VideoFuel: Roku Benefits From Ad Dollars Shift, Netflix Testing New Linear Channel, And More

Roku Benefits From Ad Dollars Shift, Netflix Testing New Linear Channel, And More

In the past couple of months, Zype has added new Video CMS and Connectors features that can help video teams deliver an even better viewing experience with improved Roku UX and added player messaging flexibility. 

Keep Viewers Engaged With Improved Roku UX With Trick Mode 

Trick mode is a new user experience that provides visual feedback during playback operations such as seek, forward, and rewind, showing the timestamp and preview thumbnail of the video content while seeking along the player bar. Both time-based and scene-based trick mode are supported for Zype hosted content, as shown below: 

Trick mode allows the viewer to find or rewatch specific parts of videos with ease, making for a more convenient and enjoyable viewing experience. 

If you'd like to learn more about building Connected TV apps with Zype, you can read more here.

Customize In-Player Messaging to Align With Your Brand

We’ve enhanced our player messaging support with additional custom options, allowing you to update default player error messages. For example, these messages may appear if a playback attempt is made on an unauthorized device or on an unauthorized domain, or if a subscription is required to watch. 

Here you can see the default player messaging that appears when a video is accessed from an unauthorized domain:

Here you can see a custom player message is set:

These new customization options help ensure your player messages are in line with your product messaging and allows for better control over communication with your viewers. 

Zype provides many ways for teams to own their branding. Learn more about player and video embed customization here.

Improve Web Streaming Security with Domain Whitelisting

Protect your videos and increase security by enforcing domain-level protection on your web player embeds. Enabling the “web player referrer protection” feature allows you to whitelist the exact domains your embeds will be able to render on. Using domain-level protection, you can prevent your players from serving content when embedded on unauthorized websites. Read about how to better protect your content using web player referrer protection here.

Zype Introduces New Video CMS and Connector Updates to Help Teams Customize Their Viewer Experience and Improve Streaming Security

Zype has added new Video CMS and Connectors features that can help video teams deliver an even better viewing experience with improved Roku UX and added player messaging flexibility. 

This Week in the Digital Video Industry: 10/23-10/30

1 Streaming Was Part of the Future--Now It's the Only Future

With the end of the year in sight and the entertainment industry crowded with streaming options, legacy companies are making big bets on their new services, using public executive shake-ups and declarations of digital-first importance to make their point heard. 

2 Gen Z Increasingly Take Up Mobile for Video Consumption

In a market snapshot highlighting the importance of mobile video among an increasingly important demographic, Parks Associates has found that viewing on a smartphone or tablet now accounts for over 40% of all video hours for Gen Z.

3 T-Mobile Expands Into Live Internet TV With New TVision Streaming Service

After years of anticipation, T-Mobile is finally getting into the live TV business with the launch of a new internet-based streaming service called TVision, launching on November 1st.

4 Comcast Talks Up Peacock's AVOD/SVOD Hybrid Model As Sign Ups Surge

NBCUniversal’s newly launched streamer Peacock has reached 22 million sign-ups in a better-than-expected quarter for parent company Comcast.

5 'CTV Took From Everybody': How Connected TV Won This Year's Upfront

The dollars have already started following audiences who are increasing tuning out of linear TV and into streaming. But this year that flow of money picked up pace. 

If you ask me what I like to do, oddly enough one of my answers will always be I like to work. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely get Sunday scaries every once in a while and I dream of a point in my life where I can sleep in on a daily basis, but really I love having something exciting to do every day. Obviously having a job you love makes a load of a difference, I’ve definitely found myself in workplaces where I’ve felt stuck and unmotivated. I’ve actually been on the search for a perfect job since I was 15, and honestly, I think I may have finally found one to be close enough because really there is no such thing. 

I started working at Zype a little under two years ago as an Account Manager and I’m grateful every day that this job found me. Zype is a SaaS tech company headquartered in NYC with employees in the US, Latin America, and Europe. As a fast-growing company, we’re always looking for top talent to join our team. So if you’re thinking of applying, I thought it might be helpful to tell you a little bit about why I value this job as much as I do, and why you might too.

A Product Worthy of Your Time and Energy 

One of the most important things I recommend looking at when applying for a new job is to take a look at the products or services offered by the company. Zype has an end to end video content management system and I must say after working here for over a year, I’ve learned it’s truly world-class and it continues to improve on a daily basis. What does a good product tell you? First, it’s sellable, there’s definitely fun challenges to selling our product but in this case, that’s only because what we offer is so extensive, and there’s a great amount of technology behind it as well. Second, great products are made by great people, and that’s definitely true here. The people behind Zype are all talented and intelligent individuals that know how to work well together and are always looking for ways to make improvements. It feels good to be part of this team. Lastly, the best products continue to advance, and that’s usually the case with technology companies-- if you don’t continue to evolve, you are out of the game. This continuous innovation makes working at Zype especially exciting.

One of the main reasons I was interested in working at Zype to begin with was because of the great work-life balance our company offers. I was looking for a remote job at the time as I’d spent two years away from my family and partner while working at my previous job, and it was taking a toll on my mental health. At the time not everyone at Zype was working remotely, but they did offer remote Fridays (which due to Covid, has turned into remote everydays). Having a remote culture says a lot about a company, but most importantly, it signifies trust.. In my eyes, when a company trusts you to do your work on your own time without micromanaging, it motivates you to do more and work harder. I’m thankful for the trust, and therefore I try to reciprocate that by doing my best on a daily basis so it goes both ways. 

On top of the remote culture at Zype, we also offer unlimited vacation time as well as Summer Fridays, both of which allow you to refresh and replenish your energy and mind when needed, keeping you at your best self both in and out of the office. 

Zype’s a smaller company but there’s still a lot of room for growth. I myself started as an Account Manager and was recently promoted to a Senior Account Manager. It’s important to recognize accomplishments and our team definitely doesn’t shy away from that. This to me is very meaningful because although I know I’m a hard worker and am always trying my best I still run into moments of doubt, which can be easily shut down when your team makes note of your efforts. Growth comes in many forms here at Zype, a promotion being just one of them. I think one of the best parts of my job is that I’m always learning new things; there’s really never a dull day. I learn a lot from our Zypesters, and I love that I can ask questions without fear of judgments. Apart from day to day activities, we also have an education budget which can be used towards Udemy courses or certifications and so on. So as long as you're willing, there’s always a chance for you to advance and master each role. 

I’m proud to be a Zypester and I’m happy to be part of our growing team. The impressive offering, the amazing benefits and culture, and the exciting opportunities for advancement are just a few of the many reasons why I truly love my job. We’re always adding on new members to our team, and I must say, each person who gets hired has a vast amount of unique qualities and knowledge that continue to add to the growth and success we’ve had thus far. 

If Zype sounds like your kind of Company, we look forward to hearing from you. Please check out our open positions and apply!

Why I Love Being a Zypester (and You Might Too)

As a fast-growing company, we’re always looking for top talent to join our team. So if you’re thinking of applying, I thought it might be helpful to tell you a little bit about why I value this job as much as I do, and why you might too.

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VideoFuel: Disney+ Passes 73 Million Subs, Google Fiber Adds Sling TV to Lineup And More

Extending Your Member Management System To Streamline Your Online Fitness Experience

VideoFuel: Roku Benefits From Ad Dollars Shift, Netflix Testing New Linear Channel, And More

Zype Introduces New Video CMS and Connector Updates to Help Teams Customize Their Viewer Experience and Improve Streaming Security

VideoFuel: Gen Z’s Increasing Mobile Video Consumption, T-Mobile's New Streaming Service, And More

Why I Love Being a Zypester (and You Might Too)

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