NEW YORK, April 15, 2019 -- Zype ( www.zype.com), the leader in video content management and distribution infrastructure, today announced it received a 2019 NAB Product of the Year Award in the B2B Streaming category for Zype Playout which enables IP-based linear channel distribution. The award was presented at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 10.

“We are honored to accept this award from the NAB Show for Zype Playout, a significant innovation for the market,” said Ed Laczynski, CEO of Zype. “The community at NAB Show recognizes the need for better technology solutions for B2B streaming initiatives and Zype provides enterprises with the infrastructure and tools needed to build and manage video products and services in a complex and fragmented video ecosystem.”

The 2019 NAB Show Product of the Year Awards recognizes the most significant and promising new products and technologies being exhibited at the Show. It is an independently judged awards program recognizing product innovation.

Playout helps video product teams navigate the challenging linear live broadcasting landscape and grow their distribution footprint. It empowers VidOps teams to quickly build and launch broadcast-quality linear live IP-based streams using their existing video libraries. Zype Playout offers easy-to-use workflows for transforming playlists of videos into IP-delivered linear live streams, including slate and ad timing management, as well as scheduling, packaging, and broadcasting linear channels for distribution. To learn more about this award-winning solution, please visit: https://www.zype.com/blog/zype-playout/.

Zype presented and exhibited at NAB Show earlier this week, sharing video strategies for product managers and engineers to distribute and monetize video content. Zype also provided demonstrations of its latest solution, Zype Playout at the event.

Zype empowers video operations teams to build amazing direct-to-consumer video streaming services across the web, mobile, connected TV, and social media. Zype provides the most powerful and reliable cloud-based video content management and distribution infrastructure, with leading-edge monetization options, business analytics, automation, and integrations with thousands of SaaS applications.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in New York, NY. Zype is a privately held company with over 180 customers worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.zype.com.

Zype Playout Wins a NAB Product of the Year Award for B2B Streaming at NAB Show 2019

We’re excited to announce the launch of Zype Playout, the easiest way for video product teams to create, monetize, and distribute broadcast-quality, linear live IP-delivered streams.

Zype Playout offers easy-to-use workflows for transforming playlists of videos into IP-delivered linear live streams, including:

Slate and ad timing management, scheduling, and packaging

Distribution to your Owned and Operated websites and video apps, plus OTT marketplaces

Syndication to partners like SlingTV, YouTube, Twitch, and any other RTMP or MPEG-TS standards-based destination.

With Zype Playout, customers have all the tools they need to build, program, and broadcast linear channels using playlists of videos from their Zype library.

Zype provides an easy to use flow for creating and managing Playout Destinations -- the streaming destinations where linear channels are being broadcasted or syndicated out to. Customers can store Playout Destination profiles for popular streaming targets like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and Periscope by entering stream URLs and keys for each destination. Or customers can create and manage custom Playout Destinations for any stream target that can accept RTMP, MPEG-TS, or HLS input.

Once Destinations are created, customers can then begin building Playout Channels. Playout Channels are collections of videos programmed in a specific order, which are transformed into linear live IP-delivered broadcasts. Playout Channels inherit ad timings managed within the Zype platform, allowing for easy integrated ad management. After customers have programmed Playout Channels and scheduled a start and end time for broadcast, they can assign which Destinations each channel should be broadcasted to.

Zype handles all of the complex underlying video packaging, broadcast server management, and infrastructure needed to successfully broadcast a Playout Channel. All customers need to do is ensure their Playout Destinations are configured to receive streams!

Schedule a live demo to learn how Zype Playout can help your VidOps team organize, plan, program, and distribute broadcast-quality linear video channels to increase audience engagement, and grow your distribution footprint.

If you’re not attending NAB, or would like to simply learn more today about working with Zype, please request a demo with our team!

Easily Launch IP-Based Linear Channels with Zype Playout

Today we conclude our series on the core tenets for VidOps success — the approach that breaks down silos and provides a framework of shared responsibilities, visibility, collaboration and workflows to uncover the value from premium video.

The VidOps Framework outlines ways that teams can build better video products by aligning business stakeholders and objectives and practicing collaborative workflows.

During our series, we’ve covered a lot of ground, and we hope you are well on your way to adopting new best practices for delivering awesome video products.

Here is a quick review of what we’ve already covered:

Asses Current Video Delivery Processes, Teams, Tools and Infrastructure

Create a unified and measurable matrix of requests, requirements, and goals around video initiatives

Collaboratively Build Target Audience Personas

Map short and long-term objectives and audience personas to the video distribution landscape

Establish a system-of-record for content, video subscriber and audience-data management

Establish streamlined workflows based on collaboration and visibility

Think security, reliability, scalability, and governance — build from a solid foundation

This brings us to the ninth and final tenet of the VidOps framework:

Tenet 9: Test early, launch, measure performance, and iterate

Defining success for your video product is relatively simple. Irrespective of genre or target audience, all content providers want to drive strong viewer engagement, audience growth, and penetration and to maximize the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers. However, with so much control provided to customers and the rapid rate of change in video technology, keeping pace with this evolving landscape of customer needs and technology is a far more vexing challenge.  In addition, it is almost impossible to nail your video offering and experience at the outset with the optimal mix of monetization models, platform reach and UX design and feature set.

Hence, speed and agility are now the coins of the realm. VidOps teams must be empowered to execute a lean, agile approach. This requires a combination of processes, collaboration, and technology stack, and tools to enable responsive iteration and experimentation. In addition, capturing data and surfacing the right insights is crucial to guide your iterations and tuning of your service.

It is increasingly rare for video teams to nail their strategy and experience out of the gate.   Hence, teams should focus on fast time for market for their initial experience, putting themselves in a position to quickly assess end-user feedback and analytics to hone and optimize their suite of apps over time.   To accomplish this, there are a number of foundational capabilities and approaches video teams should pursue.

Target the platforms “that matter” at the outset - Building, deploying and maintaining apps can be complex and costly.  Consequently, teams should target platforms that can provide the greatest reach - namely Apple, Android and perhaps Roku, and then gradually deploy to second and third tier platforms such as Smart TVs and gaming platforms.

Leverage UX templates; ensure they are customizable - Building customized apps from the ground-up are typically the most cost, time and resource intensive aspect of launching a video service.   Consequently, teams should seek to leverage out-of-the-box templates for their initial launch and after gathering experience and insights determine whether the investment for fully custom apps is prudent.  Ideally, these templates are highly customizable and teams have the ability to own and modify the underlying app code.

Ensure monetization flexibility - In addition to having the ability to layer in additional interactive features, a modern video platform should provide an easy ability to tweak or make wholesale changes to your monetization model including building hybrid monetization plans (e.g. subscriptions plus rentals plus ad-based monetization.).

This agile approach must also extend beyond tools and into teams. Empower your developers with platforms that have all the necessary tools built in, so they can focus on innovation and speed-to-market. Make sure your content management tools enable your creative teams to experiment and test with minimal time required for development.

Leverage data to inform your iterations and optimizations.

Once a product has been launched, gathering metrics and measuring performance will help your team make data-driven decisions moving forward. Diane Strutner, CEO of Datazoom, recently shared a post on the Zype blog discussing methods for obtaining and leveraging data within the VidOps lifecycle.

While testing and measurement is a discipline, art, and science all unto its own, some good ideas that have worked for successful products include:

Sending out customer surveys - particularly NPS - to gather feedback and create conversations with early adopters and later stage product champions

Understanding your customer segmentation and behavior - using tools like Google Analytics and your video analytics platform

Paying careful attention to high-level engagement trends on each endpoint or platform that you distribute to. Give your team the tools to answer questions like: How are we performing on Roku App vs our website?  Facebook vs. Apple TV App?

Create interactive tutorials to guide users towards features and journeys proven to drive high levels of engagement (based on analytics) or to avoid identified pitfalls of your end-user experience.

When launching, testing, measurement, and iteration come together through VidOps, not only will time-to-market speed up, but you’ll continuously learn what is working and you’ll know how to iterate for continued success.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series as we’ve dug into each of the core tenets that drive VidOps success.

If you want to download the entire VidOps framework, you can find it here.

Building Video Products that Endure with VidOps

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!

Let’s continue our discussion of the core tenets of VidOps, the industry approach that promotes collaboration, visibility, and shared goals to drive the expansion of owner-controlled video content and the value it delivers.  (Learn more about tenets one, two, three, four, five, six and seven in previous blogs).

Think security, reliability, scalability and governance — build from a solid foundation:

When we talked about gathering requirements in tenet three, building a matrix of requests, requirements and goals, some of those requirements are going to satisfy security imperatives, compliance and relevant regulations.

Today, organizations must be more proactive than ever when it comes to the security, scaling and reliability of digital assets and ensuring proper video governance throughout the organization.   Rather than reacting to a disastrous security breach, a critical outage, or a compliance violation, it is better to get ahead of these scenarios by defining processes and policies that govern all critical business functions at the outset. By creating a VidOps governance strategy that spans organizational, financial and operational requirements, these actions are built into the early stages of the product lifecycle.

To quote directly from the VidOps Framework :

“In a rush to bring a product to market, many organizations do not devote enough focus and time to the foundation of video streaming systems. Understanding and addressing the needs of security, scalability, reliability and governance is an important step toward product success.

VidOps initiatives need to hold this mission at its core, so teams work together as partners and key business stakeholders can be assured of success. While this process is crucially important at kick off, it also is an important part of the ongoing process, regarding constant assessments against the plan for compliance.”

Establishing a robust, yet manageable, governance model should consist of the following foundational pillars. These pillars are applicable regardless of whether the governance model and plan are supporting security, scaling, or resiliency of regulatory compliance.

Understand the tradeoffs and objectives of video governance

The scope of any video governance model will be unique to each video provider as they are driven by a number of specific factors including business strategy, staffing and investment ability, geographic reach and customer expectations. For example, the level of resiliency you build into your service will come at a cost and it’s important to not only establish customer-facing goals for uptime and performance but to accomplish some basic hypothetical modeling to understand the potential impact to your business of 99.999 reliability versus 99.9. Similarly, if you are, for example, planning to expand from a U.S. only service to countries within the European Union, there are distinct regulatory requirements that apply relative to privacy and portability of your service.

Establish Key Ownership & Responsibilities

A central tenet of VidOps is to promote ongoing collaboration amongst video teams and stakeholders and break down operational silos. The benefits of collaboration and transparency are critical to governance, however, it is essential to establish individual owners and clear objectives for video governance of security, scaling and reliability.

Governance owners will be responsible for ensuring that inputs, feedback and critical information to inform governance decisions are collected from across the VidOps stakeholders. Owners will also have the crucial responsibility of conveying the tradeoffs associated with different levels of governance rigor, establishing clear objectives and ensuring the governance plan is well-documented and maintained over time.

It is impossible to adequately assess the trade-offs of an established video governance model without having a clear understanding of how your business will respond to a potential violation of your plan and objectives. VidOps governance owners should consider how violations will be determined (proactive or reactive, the specific information will be required to be collected and the method for communicating the violation with customers, regulatory agencies or partners).

Where and how to start with video governance?

Video governance is an ongoing journey, and plans, responsibilities and deliverables should be maintained on an evergreen basis. Following are some preliminary questions and checklist items around each of the core areas of governance that should be used both at the beginning and on an ongoing basis to ensure your objectives and approach to governance for security, scaling, reliability and compliance consistently align and support your broader business strategy.

Do we have an understanding of our Average & Peak concurrency loads across all aspects of our service (e.g. media processing, video request handling, ad requests, transactions, CDN distribution)?

Do we have a process for sharing our quarterly/annual forecasts with internal teams and our infrastructure partners?

Do we have a process for ensuring adequate capacity for “tentpole” events with uniquely high anticipated customer demand?

Do we understand how our capacity requirements for partners compare to their actual capacity?

Are there options for reserving stand-by capacity we should consider?  What are the specific costs?

What are customer expectations around reliability and performance based on key criterion (e.g. service cost, type of content, geographic/cultural considerations, customer-facing SLAs and penalties etc)?

Have we modeled potential scenarios assessing the impact of various uptimes on the impact on churn and engagement?

What redundancy levels are built into our infrastructure partners solutions?

What are the failover mechanics for our infrastructure partners?  What SLAs and penalties are provided?

Are failovers seamless?  Are failovers redirected to infrastructure proximate to our customers or from other regions? What downtimes should be expected?

In what global theaters are distributing content and what are the applicable privacy and use regulations? (e.g. PII in U.S.; GDPR and Portable/Nomadic use in E.U.)

Where does PII information physically exist (e.g. subscriber databases, transactions, ad ecosystem, etc.)?

Have our partners provided documentation and/or certification that they are compliant with our applicable regulatory requirements?

Do we distribute licensed content which requires encryption? What levels (e.g. common encryption or studio-quality DRM)?

What is the intrinsic value of our own owned content? What are the potential revenue and business impacts of piracy/theft?

Are we supporting offline viewing?  Are there unique encryption requirements for this content?

Are there differing levels of encryption required for parts of our VOD catalog? Do the requirements differ for linear or live?

Can syndication partners support our security & encryption requirements?

These requirements are ever-changing according to the needs of the organization, relevant regulations, the scale of distribution and so forth, so make sure the process is ongoing to facilitate continuous improvement.

If you’ve made it this far in the VidOps journey, congratulations -- you’re almost there! The work your team has done, leading up to this point, will set you up for success and streamline complex tasks.

Next time, in the last and final post in this series, we will unpack the topic of testing and performance measurement. Stay tuned.

Building a Secure and Reliable Foundation for your Video Lifecycle

Building a Secure and Reliable Foundation for your Video Asset Lifecycle

In this article, Guy Columbro, Sr. Account Executive at Zype, shares his first hand experience in the shift f rom the days of Blockbuster VHS to the direct-to-consumer, digital-first video landscape we have today. He documents what his "aha" moment was and why it still matters to keep your eye on the horizon.

I can still remember the day my father brought home our shiny new Dell desktop computer monitor and hard drive tower. We built the desk for it together and there it sat, glistening in the office lighting. Little did I know the about the powerful world that was placed in front of me. So, what did I do first? Download the two critical most components to benefit my social life, of course!

What do AOL-IM and an MP3 player download have to do with OTT? The over-the-top (OTT) media wave is new; until 4 years ago, many of us did not have a device to stream content in our home. Our experience with direct-to-consumer really started with very basic forms of digital interaction. I’ve had a chance to reflect on my journey from MP3 to OTT and am excited to tell you how it landed me as an AE at Zype.

It All Started With Music: Downloading MP3 Files

For many of us, the first shift towards digital began with instant messaging and the ability to download music (legally and illegally) from the internet directly to the computer. Like me, you may remember the “Folder to Folder” icon that would pass a piece of paper from one folder to another, representing the downloading process. And then...you’d begin your wait. While I unfortunately was not one of the first kids in school with a new iPod to listen to all my super cool MP3 file music, I can admit I almost immediately damaged the family computer downloading illegal files from any and every music website claiming to have the song I was looking for.

Having my music on the computer was novelty enough to me. I couldn’t possibly have imaged that one day, it would be in my pocket, available from my phone. Smartphones are too big a topic for me to cover in this one, but I will say that for me, streaming music was first gateway into streaming video.

Then We Moved Up in the World:  Streaming Content on Desktop

My next big experience with technology revolutionizing my media consumption methods was when I learned how to stream video files on my computer. No more running out to the theater to pay $20 for over-buttered popcorn and someone’s head in my way of the screen. I won’t confirm or deny the legality of it, but let’s just say finding feature length films available at the touch of a download button seemed to top it all.

There was a slight drawback however; the content I was steaming wasn’t exactly quality . To put this in perspective for all those used to a millisecond load time and zero lag, let’s look at some riveting tech data. From 1990-2004, there were essentially 4 media players that allowed you to stream content from the internet (check out the image below for a good laugh). If you had any experience with them at all, you will remember that the stream was typically inconsistent, buffered frequently and ultimately you probably clicked out of the window to move on with you day. So not exactly living like a king, but hey, I was watching at home! How cool is that?

Followed by the Emergence of Mobile Streaming & Netflix

So I have music on my computer, and now I have a couple of choppy stolen - uh, downloaded - videos, but for the consistent movie experience, I’m still completely loyal to Blockbuster. On a Friday night, I’m rushing to the neighborhood Blockbuster with my friends to try and rent the latest games and movie, and grab a huge box of Sour Patch Kids. It really doesn’t occur to me that there are massive overhauls on the horizon.

My real “aha” moment came with two things. First, the release of the iPhone in 2007, and second, the new DVD rental service Netflix. I was certain Netflix was a fad, impossible to sustain. Mailing DVDs seemed like a ridiculous hassle to me, and completely impersonal compared to the Blockbuster-night experience I had grown up with and love.

And in a way, I was right. Netflix’s DVD rental service collapsed. Of course, little did I know about the plans for world dominance that Netflix had in store. Once the streaming platform subscription was released, everyone I knew quickly flocked to purchase an OTT device.

I will admit, I was pretty hesitant to jump onboard with a Netflix subscription initially. I was used to traditional cable providers with thousands of channels, access to premium channels like HBO, Starz and Cinemax with nothing to watch. Why was OTT going to be any different?

But it seemed like consumers were yearning for something new all along. Netflix surprised me again with original content and basically zero buffering time, and soon enough I was a subscriber and I, too, had a streaming device.

I don’t need to tell you how the iPhone transformed the way we think about the internet, communication, and access to music. But it’s not just that. Today, with apps like Netflix, HBO, and others, people are streaming more content on their phone than ever before.

As we all become more accustomed to a life of on-demand media, I think it is important to remember the luxury of high speed internet connection and endless video content consumption options. We live in a time of extreme change, and connectivity. I think it will be imperative to empower people to create content that will help improve, educate and bring together our world creatively, in a socially responsible way.

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Zype Playout Wins a NAB Product of the Year Award for B2B Streaming at NAB Show 2019

Easily Launch IP-Based Linear Channels with Zype Playout

Building Video Products that Endure with VidOps

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

Building a Secure and Reliable Foundation for your Video Lifecycle

Growing up with OTT

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