Shipped: Zype’s 2019 Product Updates (So Far)

Are you asking yourself how it’s already August?

We honestly can’t believe it. Our team has been heads down this year launching tons of new product features, picking up a few awards, and hiring like never before.

What have we been working on? From new OTT app templates to tons of features for video content managers, our product team has been on a roll. Here are the product updates our team has shipped so far this year and how they’re enabling video operations team to succeed.

Product Updates for Distributing Video Across More Channels

The streaming wars are heating up more than ever, and it’s clear there is one main theme: diversification.

From diversifying distribution across various channels like social, YouTube, OTT, linear, and onsite to diversifying revenue streams beyond advertising, this new era of digital video centers around an organization’s ability to move quickly and try new features.

Here are some of Zype’s product updates that focus on helping teams diversify their distribution across channels:

Zype Playout - Take your videos, program them into a playlist, and then stream it out as a 24/7 HLS or RTMP linear-live stream to your website, YouTube, OTT Apps and vMVPDs

Zype now supports content distribution to endpoints like XUMO, WatchBack, and Oath through our Video Apps marketplace.

Product Updates to Help Drive Audience Engagement

The best way to drive revenue is not by forcing your viewers to pay, but creating content they want to pay for -- whether through subscription or with their time via watching ads.

We’ve been focused on helping video teams create user-friendly experiences that drive engagement including:

Video Registration Paywalls -  Capture first-party customer data by asking your website visitors to register with their email address to watch your exclusive video content

Mobile Marketplace Connect - Connect your iPhone and Android video apps to Apple iTunes Store and Google Play store to collect first-party data and enable access to your customers across all other platforms (eg. subscribe on iPhone, watch on Roku)

By collecting email addresses before showing video content, teams can market to these users for upcoming product releases, new video content, and so much more. Our Marketplace Connect product allows users to easily view your content across various channels with a single sign-in.

Product Updates for Digital Video Engineers and Video Content Managers

Who on your team makes sure your video streams on your OTT apps are working? What about writing the metadata that appears on your site under each video? Who optimizes your ad inventory?

These folks are the unsung heroes of the digital video landscape. One of our main goals here at Zype is to make their lives a whole lot easier.

In 2019, we really put a lot of work into building and updating a ton of features that help video engineers, video content managers, and the everyday users of Zype, do their jobs more efficiently, including:

Improved playlist management - We've made it easier for content management teams to manage and update playlists in the playlist relationships page in Zype admin. Content managers now have quick access to buttons for editing, syncing, copying, and deleting playlists. We've also improved the user experience for dragging, autoscrolling, and nesting playlists for content managers dealing with large playlist libraries.

Filter Consumers by payment provider - SVOD and TVOD customers who offer premium videos for purchase across multiple payment providers or in-app marketplaces can now easily filter their Consumers Page by payment provider to easily see how many subscriptions or transactions were generated from each marketplace or payment processor. The payment provider data is also provided as part of the .csv export feature on the consumers page.

Filter Video Library by Registration paywalls - Content managers can now filter their video library page in Zype to quickly view all videos that require registration, which makes it easy to evaluate which videos in the library will include a registration paywall for viewers.

Improved YouTube imports - Content managers who are importing video from their YouTube libraries can now quickly select whether to import and sync only public, private, unlisted, or all videos from their YouTube account.

Ingesting ad timings via MRSS - Customers who import content into Zype via MRSS feeds can now also import and map ad timings from their source databases into Zype during the MRSS import process. This makes it simple to sync existing ad timing data into your Zype library when importing your videos.

Improved videos search experience - We've improved the video library search experience for content managers, so that it's easier to now search and find videos on the Zype video library page. These improvements include improved support and results for 1- and 2-character searches.

Easily access Zobject metadata via APIs - We've added new parameters on our video and playlist APIs to allow content teams and their developers to easily retrieve Zobject metadata during common API requests. Zobjects are custom metadata tables that can be created in Zype to help customers extend the standard metadata available for videos (e.g., adding custom fields like Directors or Movie Stars). These Zobject Details parameters are available on Videos API endpoint.

Support for preroll ads on Live Videos - Customers can now set preroll ad timings on live videos in the Zype platform, which will generate a client-side ad request to their ad server prior to loading the live event in a player.

We’re just getting started

We’ve had an incredible year, including our two largest quarters, winning NAB Product of the Year for Zype Playout, and Company of the Year at OTT Executive Summit. It’s in great part thanks to our incredible product and engineering teams listening to our customer’s needs and seeing where the industry is headed before it gets there.

Want to discuss any of these features with our team? If you’re already a customer, email your account manager!

If you aren’t a customer, you can request a demo today and let us know which features you’re interested in.