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

We all knew The Office was leaving Netflix…

But we weren’t sure of its new home until NBC’s Upfronts 2019 presentation, where it was announced it would stream on their own service, coming in 2020.

But… Netflix’s licensing deal for “The Office” runs through 2021...It’s unclear if NBCU will need to wait until the Netflix deal runs out before bringing  the show to its own service…

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg at this year’s Upfronts.

Here are a few more headlines that anyone producing or distributing online video should continue following throughout the year.

Beyond “The Office”, other older yet top performing shows like “Friends” are “coming home” according to NBCUniversal’s ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino, who spoke on stage at their upfront 2019 preseentation at Radio City Musical Hall.

They aren’t the only ones pulling their older content from streaming partners like Hulu and Netflix.

With the DisneyPlus streaming announcement just a few weeks ago, it’s clear that old shows and content can be an acquisition and retention tool for subscription video as DisneyPlus will be the exclusive home for top Pixar and Disney movies.

Which might be bad news for Netflix as “more than half of the top 50 shows on Netflix are made by media companies planning to launch rival streaming services, according to Jumpshot data cited by Recode.”

CBS News’s live streaming news network, CBSN, now has one million daily video streams, with 80% watching the content live.

Millennials are likely to consume their news through other media forms like print and digital words. In fact, sixty four percent of millennials use digital outlets to find out what’s happening in the world. Millennials still watch TV, but only 24 percent of them, compared to 51 percent of the 55+ generation.

So it makes sense that live news streaming is gaining in popularity. CBS News also has a five year head start on other news channels… So it will be interesting to see how the news streaming wars plays out.

 Digital Publishers are Producing More Long-form Shows 

Buzzfeed announced that their video strategy will moves to more TV-like digital shows tied to specific verticals.

You may not have known this, but Buzzfeed’s move to longform, serial content has been slowly occurring over the last several years. One of their top millennial media video series shows include “Worth It,” which features a host trying similar foods at three different price points to select the best.

The show, which has run for five seasons, has collected 4 5.3 million video views and 323.4 million minutes of watch time on YouTube in the past three months.

If you’re not analyzing what top digital publishers are doing in video...you’re falling behind.

Did you know Meg Whitman was running a “mobile first TV” company?

Quibi came out of the woodworks at the perfect time to announce...they’re raising $2 Billion.

While they were not an official part of the 2019 Upfronts, it’s clear this was a strategic announcement on their part.

But...does it really take that much money to compete with Hulu, Netflix, and other digital streaming services?

Well, they’ve already raised $1 billion...so some venture capitalists must believe them.

When Netflix is spending over $15 billion in 2019 on producing and licensing content, the number begins to make a little sense.

With a mission to “entertain, inform and inspire with fresh content from today’s top talent—one quick bite at a time”, we’ll see if they can take a bite out of the streaming wars when they launch in the fall 2020.

 Upfronts 2019: Streaming is Here to Stay but TV isn’t Dead 

There were dozens of other Upfronts 2019 headlines...and to be honest, it was hard to pick just four. However, we think these headlines will be the most interesting to follow over the next year, especially for those in the streaming and digital video verticals.

4 Upfronts 2019 Headlines to Follow in the Age of Streaming Media

It’s no secret that the video landscape is shifting drastically. Events like NAB help bring together video and broadcast industry professionals to share experiences, network, and discover new opportunities.

Zype is excited to join the media, entertainment and technology professional community at NAB Show 2019 to share new and innovative ways to leverage video content management and distribution technologies to build awesome video products and services!

We will also be launching an exciting new product for broadcast-quality linear video distribution called Zype Playout and providing demonstrations of this powerful new capability at NAB. Zype Playout was officially nominated for the NAB Show Product of the Year Awards. This award recognizes the most significant and promising new products and technologies being exhibited at the event. Stay tuned Wednesday, April 10 to find out if we won!

NAB Show 2019 ( @NABShow, #NABShow) is a semi-annual event hosted by the National Broadcast Association bringing together industry thought-leaders and more than 100K decision-makers for networking, interactive sessions, presentations and fun! This year’s conference is taking place April 6 - 11, 2019, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Learn more about the event and who to see from the editors of Streaming Media Magazine on Friday, March 29 at 11 a.m. PDT/ 2 p.m. EDT. Register for the webinar here.

Zype will be located in the South Hall (Upper) at the Las Vegas Convention Center in the Connected Media Pavilion - booth # SU11312

Visit our booth to chat with video content management and distribution experts, see a live demo of Zype, learn about our exciting news and find out how you can leverage Zype to share your content with more viewers at speed.

We’ll be demonstrating Zype Playout at our booth the following times:

If you’re attending NAB, we’d love to meet with you!

To meet one-on-one with one of our experts and or learn more about Zype and schedule a meeting to see how you can ensure the best quality video delivery.  We’ll be hosting meetings at our booth location SU11312 as well as in our executive suite at the Aria Hotel.

To kick the event off right, our SVP of product, Chris Smith, will present a live studio session with Wowza Media Systems. Catch this talk at the Wowza booth (SU7114) at 2 p.m. on Monday, April 8 .

Next, Chris Smith will be speaking, along with Steven Tripsas, solutions architect at Zype, at the Google booth ( #SU217) on Wednesday, April 10 from 2 - 2:20 p.m. The session is titled,"Building Scalable Video Analytics with BigQuery." You can learn more about Google speaking events at NAB here.

Also, please join Steven Tripsas for his presentation, “CBR vs VBR? Solving live stream challenges from encoder to distribution channels,” Wednesday, April 10 at 4 p.m. in the Connected Media IP Presentation Theater. Register for this session and add to your conference agenda here.

We will be sharing news and pictures live from #NABShow.

Attending NAB Show 2019? Meet with Zype April 6 - 11 in Las Vegas!

Free Ad Supported Streaming: Tap Into the Massive Audience Behind the Free TV Movement

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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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