The Zype team is hard at work delivering the most comprehensive end-to-end video infrastructure platform available. Here are the latest product updates and a preview of what's to come next month.
New Features in Playout 2.0
Media companies are realizing the revenue opportunities of digital linear streaming, and many are turning to Playout 2.0 to build and monetize their new channels. This past month we enhanced our Playout 2.0 offering with new features, making it even easier to create and monetize FAST, pop-up or always-on channels of curated content.
Advertising Enhancements with Prefetch
We know complex ad workflows take time to produce. We also know our users want to make sure the ads they sell are filling and rendering during ad breaks and delivering a personalized ad experience for the end customer.
Playout 2.0 users can now enable prefetch to ensure a better advertising experience. With prefetch enabled, Zype makes requests for ads from the ad server in advance of ad breaks to help increase fill rates, render rates, and create a better advertising experience for customers. By making the ad call ahead of the ad break, the ad server has more time to determine the right ads, cache them, and stitch them into place within the break. Prefetch in Playout 2.0 works with all ad decision servers including FreeWheel, Google Ad Manager, SpotX, Roku and others that have SSAI enabled.
To enable prefetch in Playout 2.0, simply toggle on the service and let the system know how far ahead of a break ads should be requested. In order to use prefetch, you must be using Playout 2.0 and delivering to an HLS destination that has SSAI enabled.
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Improved Playout 2.0 Timeline Performance
When building playout streams, retrieval of timeline objects needs to be as seamless as possible - which means smart storage is essential. Now users who have large content libraries will experience improved performance when interacting with the Playout 2.0 timeline UI. With a re-architected UI client-server framework, Zype has improved performance of the timeline, including improved load times, reduced lag time and faster responsiveness. Look out for more updates to timeline performance to come later this month.
Updates within the Admin Dashboard
New Feeds Marketplace
Our new Feeds tab in the Connectors section of the Admin dashboard offers an improved way to access and distribute MRSS feed links. Within the “Generic Feeds” tab, users have the ability to generate MRSS feeds based on the content in your video library. Feeds can be auto-generated for the entire video library, or custom feeds can be created based on categories, sources or other filters. The new “Feeds Marketplace'' tab provides a new way to access, generate and distribute MRSS feeds to Zype-integrated vendors including Roku, Samsung TV Plus, PlutoTV, XUMO, Wurl, Google Ad Manager and more. Just locate the third-party endpoint you wish to distribute to, create or unlock your third-party profile in Zype, then use the API key to distribute content to the endpoint via an MRSS feed.
New Property Sample Account Data
New users who sign up with Zype X will see sample account data in their account upon first login and immediately get a sense of how to best-leverage the Zype platform. New Zype X accounts will come pre-populated with sample data for videos, playlists, categories and consumers. To remove the sample account data from your profile when it's no longer needed, please see the instructions in this article.
Coming Soon!
We’re not done innovating our product offering! Here’s a preview of some enhancements we’re working on this month:
- Additional destinations for Playout 2.0 - We’re adding more destination connectors for playout streams, including YouTube and Twitch.
- Enhancements to Apps Creator - Soon users will be able to automatically provision Apps Creator feeds from within the Zype dashboard.
Is there a feature you’d like to see that would help improve your video workflows? Please contact us!
The Zype Team