2020 was a year of unprecedented change and challenge. At Zype, we found ourselves in a unique position. As the world went virtual, millions of people and businesses turned to video. This year, especially, brought forth our mission to connect the world's streaming video and viewers. In the most critical of times, our team worked extremely hard to make our video infrastructure more connected, more powerful, and more secure for our customers.
Here are our top 10 product updates and milestone from 2020:
In July, we introduced our new brand to better represent our mission and an updated Dashboard to match. This update included the addition of a "Favorite" feature that allows customers to save frequently used pages so they can access them directly from the navigation menu when needed.
We reached record milestones in both Video API Calls and Playout Requests Per Hour, and with this increased volume of traffic, we maintained our high standard of excellence, offering the fastest stream start times and best user experience possible.
In 2020, we expanded our connectors suite to include over 50 video distribution, payment processing, advertising, and marketing connectors and integrations. We added many new distribution connectors this year including: The Roku Channel, Google Ad Manager MRSS, Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, RTMP, HLS, and MRSS, as well as new social connectors: Youtube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, and Periscope.
We released a Playout service enhancement that allows customers to create Playout channels that originate from the European Union. This means that audiences in the EU will enjoy fast stream start times, and publishers will have a regional data lake for data compliance and segmentation purposes.
We also optimized playout channel delivery 4-second HLS segmenting to reduce latency on syndicated HLS channels and increase compatibility with additional downstream syndication partners.
We added domain-level protection on embeds with the web player referrer protection feature by allowing customers to prevent their players from serving content when embedded on unauthorized websites.
We also shipped an update to protect paywalled videos against password sharing using login limits, which allow customers to specify a maximum number of simultaneous logins available to any individual viewer account.
We enhanced stream hours analytics with granular time interval views, allowing teams to view stream hour data in as small as 15-minute increments to pinpoint when viewers are streaming most. This new reporting capability allows insights on the breakdown of viewer consumption by time slice, to help identify peak periods and make content and user experience decisions.
We rolled out an enhancement to our Stripe connector that allows customers to offer subscription pauses to their viewers, increasing retention and staving off unnecessary cancellations.
We released an update to help teams create more granular, personalized curation systems by leveraging our include and exclude rules. These category tags save time by automating content curation.
We added redemption code paywalls to our embeddables to allows customers to embed a video on their site with “redemption code required” enabled, without the need to embed a separate redemption code widget. Viewers can access the redeem flow and enter the code entirely from the video player - and are never redirected to an alternative widget or page - all as part of the typical authentication flow.
We’ve enhanced our player messaging support with additional custom options, allowing you to update default player error messages. 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. Learn more about player and video embed customization here.
