Today Zype announced its acquisition of MAZ Systems, a leading OTT app publishing platform for connected TV and mobile devices. The combined company is powering over 900 video apps and playout channels from a platform that serves over 15 billion video API requests per month.

This acquisition will change what it means for video publishers to launch a streaming service in today’s rapidly shifting environment, and empower Zype and MAZ customers with new tools and flexibility. Here’s our plan to impact the video publishing world:

WE’RE EMPOWERING VIDEO PUBLISHERS TO GROW REACH AND REVENUE EVERYWHERE

The ability to stream video content anywhere, anytime and on any device is an essential part of a smart content business strategy. Our recent report on the video engineering gap proved how vital video is for businesses, with 92% of respondents agreeing that video is key for their company when it comes to customer engagement. Yet 66% of respondents from video-centric businesses feel that their management doesn’t even realize the complexities that go into video optimization and distribution. 

The network of devices that Zype and MAZ connects to allows enterprise video publishers to distribute content to over 2 billion people worldwide, and this network is growing every day with every new smart TV sold.  Now with MAZ’s app platform as an extension of Zype’s leading video API and infrastructure framework, we make it easier than ever to launch OTT TV and mobile video applications by leveraging cloud-based in-browser design and curation tools, backed by a viewing experience on par with top tier consumer platforms like Netflix and Hulu. Using Zype and MAZ for app building, publishing, and streaming, content providers can get to market quickly and bring their content directly to viewers on all of the platforms where people are streaming video, without in-house coding or design expertise. Our comprehensive joint solution costs as much as 4x less, yet improves implementation and go-to-market times by as much as 80% when compared to traditional multi-platform video distribution  methods.

Zype’s toolkit for packaging and monetizing content extends across all publishing endpoints, supporting a diverse range of video business models such as creating SVOD subscription plans, offering TVOD video rentals and purchases, as well as serving AVOD content monetized with video advertising.

Top-tier curation tools and content analytics enable video publishers to dynamically program the best content experience for their viewers and optimize for the performance and business metrics that matter.

WE’RE COMMITTED TO AN OPEN VIDEO ECOSYSTEM 

Openness, flexibility, and connectivity have been part and parcel of Zype’s philosophy since our first video API launch in 2014. As Zype and MAZ both do today, our customers will have the flexibility to use some or all components of a modern, API-first platform, offering a modular approach to streaming architecture that highlights Zype’s commitment to an open and connected video ecosystem. Our suite of video connectors includes integrations with all major OTT/CTV distribution channels, and we integrate with 1000+ major SaaS platforms.

With MAZ, Zype now supports automated app publishing across all major mobile, tablet, connected TV, gaming console devices, and browser experiences including iOS, Android, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung Tizen, Vizio, LG, Android TV, and Xbox. These app capabilities are in addition to Zype’s current support for streaming to digital and linear platforms including YouTube, Twitch, XUMO, Hulu + Live TV, Local Now, Samsung TV Plus, The Roku Channel, and PlutoTV.

Video publishers can leverage Zype and MAZ software along with their choice of online video platform, encoder, CDN, or video player, and integrate with their existing payment, customer data, and data management platforms. Now video publishers will benefit from access to even more endpoints, with integrated advertising and subscription connectivity along with video streaming capabilities that will allow them to scale their operations and business models with success. 

WE WILL CONTINUE TO INNOVATE THE ENTERPRISE VIDEO API AND INFRASTRUCTURE STACK

The video publishing landscape is continuously shifting and evolving, which makes it challenging for video publishers to maintain a top-tier video business strategy and experience. Whether its new streaming services that offer opportunities to reach new audiences, new technical standards to maintain a quality experience across all devices, or new business models that enable publishers to drive continuous revenue growth,  publishers need to be on a SaaS platform that will meet their needs today, as well as predict their needs into the future.

Zype’s Video API and automation, available in an affordable and scalable Software-as-a-Service model, is ready to evolve to meet our customers’ business needs thanks to a global team of experienced engineers, product designers, and customer support staff. The acquisition of MAZ extends our bench of like-minded experts ready and willing to adapt to new streaming market opportunities, standards, and business models.

By combining resources and deep technical expertise, Zype and MAZ together provide a joint solution that allows customers from enterprise clients to standalone content creators to leverage top-of-the-line live streaming infrastructure for their end-to-end video workflows spanning ingest, distribution, monetization, consumer management and analytics on their video streaming platforms across every consumer touchpoint.

MAZ customers will continue to have access to all services, in addition to Zype's full stack video API and infrastructure, including Zype’s Playout, CRM, and CMS solutions.  This includes all services including the MAZ Publishing platform that caters to customers focused on article based content. Zype’s deep roots in supporting complex content taxonomies and support for all media types - including article and image content - will enable us to present a comprehensive solution to enterprises as they make their journey towards a video-centric publishing transformation.   

As the infrastructure for digital video, Zype’s goal is to enable our customers to easily and seamlessly curate content in an intuitive way, so that they can focus on creating and monetizing engaging content experiences instead of worrying about the architecture behind their workflows.  With MAZ’s tools under our belt, Zype is primed to deliver an outstanding full service, end-to-end content delivery solution for all our clients.  

To read more on the acquisition, check out our press release here. 

Ready to get started? Speak with our sales team to learn more about our joint offering today. 

Why Our Acquisition of MAZ Systems Will Change the Game for Video Publishers

Media and content businesses can deliver and monetize advanced streaming applications with integrated, best-in-class capabilities 

September 15, 2021, New York -- Zype, the leading video API and infrastructure platform, today announced it has acquired MAZ Systems, a leading OTT app publishing platform for connected TV and mobile devices. With MAZ, Zype adds no-code OTT TV and mobile app automation to help enterprise video publishers create streaming experiences for the billions of people who watch streaming video every day. The combination of the companies brings Zype to more than 80 employees on four continents. The company now supports over 900 video apps and playout channels available to over 2 billion people worldwide.

“Streaming video content is now essential for enterprises to engage audiences anywhere, anytime and on any device,” said Ed Laczynski, CEO of Zype. “Adding MAZ’s best-in-breed TV and mobile app publishing and automation will help enterprise video publishers design  cross-platform apps from a single configuration. Our research shows that 92%  of organizations underestimate the amount of manual work required to create and manage video products, and we are excited to add these capabilities to better connect the world’s streaming video and viewers.”

With MAZ, Zype now supports automated app publishing across all major mobile, tablet, connected TV, web browsers, and gaming console devices, including iOS, Android, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung Tizen, Vizio, LG, Android TV, and Xbox.   

According to MAZ systems CEO, Shikha Arora, "Our philosophy for the acquisition was to extend our capabilities beyond the OTT apps and mobile space, providing a deeper and more robust set of solutions to both MAZ and Zype’s customers, and most importantly to invest in innovation in the video ecosystem with a larger team of engineers, product, and sales experts who share a common set of values and goals." Arora will join the Zype leadership team and continue leading the MAZ group and help Zype's innovation strategy going forward. 

The acquisition demonstrates Zype’s commitment to an open and connected video ecosystem with its modular approach. Video publishers can leverage the Zype API and MAZ automation along with their choice of online video platform, encoding, CDN, or video player, and integrate with their choice of ad-serving, payment, and data management platforms.

“As a long-time Zype customer and video publisher, I’m excited to see MAZ join the Zype product family,” says Kristen Gray, President of Konami Cross Media NY. “Enterprise content publishers will benefit from access to more endpoints, with integrated advertising and subscription connectivity along with Zype’s massive scale video streaming capabilities.”

MAZ customers will continue to have access to all products and services, in addition to Zype's full-stack video API and infrastructure, including Zype’s Playout, CRM, and CMS solutions. 

MAZ was founded with one goal in mind: To empower content creators to be amazing. Today we carry out this mission by bringing businesses of all shapes and sizes to every major media platform. From mobile and TV streaming apps to Apple News and gaming consoles, the MAZ platform covers it all. https://www.mazsystems.com

Zype is the infrastructure for digital video, providing an API-first SaaS that helps product teams solve mission critical streaming video challenges. Enterprises use Zype to drive revenue and engagement with streaming video on the web, mobile, OTT and connected TV, and social media. Zype provides the most connected and reliable cloud-based video content management and distribution infrastructure, with monetization, CRM, business analytics, automation, and integrations with thousands of SaaS applications.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in New York, Zype is a privately held company with over 300 customers worldwide. www.zype.com. 

Contact:
Guy Murrel
Catapult for Zype
gmurrel@catapultpr-ir.com
(303) 581-7760

Zype Acquires MAZ Systems to Extend Leading Video API and Infrastructure Platform with No-Code TV and Mobile App Publishing Framework

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.

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’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.

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

After dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of work, we’re beyond excited to announce our brand new downloadable guide -- The Essential Digital Video Infrastructure Guide for Publishers: 2019 Edition.

Crafted exclusively for the publishing and media industries, the guide features:

30+ pages of strategic, tactical, and technical information

Breakdown of the 5 core components of digital video infrastructure and how to optimize each to increase revenue

Moving on from the pivot to video, this in-depth guide on how teams are solving the challenges of building and scaling their video infrastructure, highlights five unique hurdles publishing and media organizations are overcoming. From choosing where to distribute content to understanding revenue optimization on a technical level, the guide is meant to bridge technical and business teams together on one unifying goal: ultimate digital video success.

Throughout the guide, you’ll also discover best practices from Tom Lucas, founder of the successful OTT application MagellanTV and Kirby Grines, founder of 43Twenty.TV and more. Beyond these amazing contributors, we interviewed dozens of video engineers, product team members, and business folks knee-deep in digital video at leading publishing and media organizations to craft content catered to specific needs and hurdles they discussed.

Whether you’re on the business, technical, or product side of digital video, we guarantee you’ll find value within the pages of our latest guide.

Introducing The Essential Digital Video Infrastructure Guide for Publishers: 2019 Edition

Zype, the leader in video content management and distribution infrastructure, announced it was recognized as Company of the Year by OTT Exec Magazine, presented at the OTT Executive Summit, hosted by Over-the-Top Video Executive and Trender Research.

Zype has made significant strides in the industry over the last year, innovating to provide the most powerful and connected end-to-end SaaS platform for video content management and distribution.

"We had a huge interest in this year's OTT Accolades program with many excellent nominees. I congratulate Zype on its win as Company of the Year," said Brian Mahony, president of OTT Executive Summit and Magazine. "Zype provides a 'one stop shop' for new OTT services. It is an excellent choice for a complete platform that includes content management, distribution, monetization and intelligence."

Zype offers a full-stack video content management and distribution service that includes developer-friendly APIs, the most integrations into the OTT ecosystem, and business-friendly dashboards and workflows. The Zype service makes technically challenging tasks like managing multiple MRSS feeds, complex encoding, metadata, video player, social media push, linear playout and audience data management easy for video operations teams so they can focus on building innovative video-focused products and experiences.

"We are honored to receive this industry recognition and validation of our efforts to provide innovative solutions for the increasing complexities associated with video content management," said Ed Laczynski, CEO at Zype. "Zype's growth in the last year powered by innovative customers serviced by our awesome team, and our mission to connect the OTT ecosystem helped us win this award from the OTT Exec community."

The OTT Executive Summit, which took place May 29 in New York, brings together the top minds in video content, distribution, and technology to discuss how OTT is enabling new business models for both traditional Pay TV providers and new innovators, and the challenges to making that vision possible.

You can view the official press release here.

Zype Wins OTT Exec Company of the Year 2019

Zype Wins Third Stevie Award for Customer Service and Support

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Why Our Acquisition of MAZ Systems Will Change the Game for Video Publishers

Zype Acquires MAZ Systems to Extend Leading Video API and Infrastructure Platform with No-Code TV and Mobile App Publishing Framework

Extending Your Member Management System To Streamline Your Online Fitness Experience

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

Introducing The Essential Digital Video Infrastructure Guide for Publishers: 2019 Edition

Zype Wins OTT Exec Company of the Year 2019

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