A few lines of code to a ready-to-watch video player and stream

Developers can use the Zype Video API to upload video files to the Zype platform, transcode them, and receive back a fully integrated video player and ready-to-watch HLS stream to integrate into websites and applications in just a few lines of code.

In this example, we will show how to upload a file via multipart HTTP POST request, along with additional video metadata.  Zype will automatically transcode the video as soon as the upload completes. We will then show how to get back a fully integrated video player that is ready to embed, as well as a ready-to-watch video stream.

NOTE:  This example is written in ruby and leverages the ‘httpparty` and `json` ruby gems.  Any language is supported that can speak http.

First, you will need a Zype account. If you don’t have one please request one here. You'll need to retrieve your Upload API Key and Player API Keys from the platform from the API Key Settings section.

3. Retrieve your VideoID (from the Upload API call response) 

Now that you’ve uploaded the file, you can start using the unique Video ID

You can do a lot with the video file outside the scope of this article. Learn more in our Dev Center.

 4. Retrieve a Video Player to embed  or a Streaming URL 

For the player_response, you’ll get back a video player that is ready to embed into your website. It will look something like this:

"https://player.zype.com/embed/5de9664fe6ab785e13bc882a.html?api_key=9d376352-1f60-42e3-9f4e-6ffd12fb72eb"

You can also embed using JavaScript, or have the video automatically show up in your OTT or mobile app endpoints.

For playing directly using your own player infrastructure, use the streaming URL. This will be a fully functional HLS Manifest URL  that is ready to attach to any video player on any device. It will look like this:

https://player.zype.com/manifest/5de964dbb2540e5e22945970?api_key=9d376352-1f60-42e3-9f4e-6ffd12fb72eb

This will render a well-formed HLS Manifest that looks something like this:

#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1239040,RESOLUTION=1128x480,CODECS="avc1.4d001f,mp4a.40.2"

https://manifest.zype.com/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ1cmwiOiJodHRwOi8vdnNtLnp5cGUuY29tLzU2ODJiMGJiNjk3MDJkMmEwYjAwMDAwMC81ZGU5NjRkYmIyNTQwZTVlMjI5NDU5NzAvNWRlOTY0ZGNiMjU0MGU1ZTIyOTQ1OTcxLzVkYzllNjAwZGExNjMxZTMzMGIwOTI1Mi8yYzdkMjQyNS1hYTM5LTRkMjAtYjM5NS03M2YwODljMTQxMjIubTN1OCIsInBhcmFtcyI6eyI2cExLTVEzeSI6IlNxaTNOZzkwIn0sImV4cCI6MTU3NTU5MTU3NX0.XHxjbH_UT5NBQ538sOInKUTptZoVXvLhYVFsRgDeZ48

#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=2793472,RESOLUTION=1692x720,CODECS="avc1.4d001f,mp4a.40.2"

https://manifest.zype.com/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ1cmwiOiJodHRwOi8vdnNtLnp5cGUuY29tLzU2ODJiMGJiNjk3MDJkMmEwYjAwMDAwMC81ZGU5NjRkYmIyNTQwZTVlMjI5NDU5NzAvNWRlOTY0ZGNiMjU0MGU1ZTIyOTQ1OTcxLzVkYzllNjVhZGExNjMxZTMwODZmNTJkNC9hZTA1NjViNi1jODE4LTRhMjctYTNiZS04NjczMWRjZGE3ODcubTN1OCIsInBhcmFtcyI6eyI2cExLTVEzeSI6IlNxaTNOZzkwIn0sImV4cCI6MTU3NTU5MTU3NX0.PT2917E26tIn4KO3J0NucujQn8RPQMHknWU-A-G1teg

Introduction to the Zype Video API

DIY solutions seem like a great way to grow your video business. You can be fully independent and own your content at the same time, what's not to love? Well, it’s an idea that seems a lot better than it actually is.

A do-it-yourself OTT solution is a complicated process of creation, development, and business strategy that can quickly become very expensive and time consuming — especially for those who are new to video businesses and video platforms. Let’s take a look at what goes into a DIY OTT solution.

Smaller libraries are easier to manage and organize, but as your content grows, your system needs to keep up. Keeping track of different file versions for different platforms, like mobile, web, or set-top devices becomes more and more difficult as you continue to add to your library. Also, if your platform restricts certain monetization policies, you are now looking at separate systems to manage your AVOD vs. SVOD vs. TVOD content (at Zype, we handle all three, including hybrid models. Click here to learn more).

Application Development, Administration and Maintenance

There’s a lot that goes into developing and maintaining your video business. Maintenance becomes your responsibility. Every time your hosting platform or streaming destination endpoint updates their platform and software, you will need to make sure your apps are still compatible. Eventually, custom systems become too complicated for everyone to understand, and only the system administrator can do this.

With a DIY solution, it is your responsibility to make sure your videos are viewable on all of your endpoints. Streaming quality, internet connection, and bandwidth are all important factors to consider when evaluating a streaming service. Also, delivering to multiple platforms only makes it more complex when accounting for the viewer’s internet connection, device of choice, mobility and localized infrastructure in other regions. Also, you must make sure that your content is encodable so everything is up to the viewer’s internet speed.

Discoverability is also another area where a DIY solution adds an extra layer of stress. You need to create, manage and present your metadata in a way where you can reach your desired amount of viewers. Metadata, information that describes the key characteristics of the video, like the title, author, actors, description, etc, is so important because it allows for your content to show up in search engines and app stores. You also need to consider indexing, so that someone visiting your website can find your videos.

Digital Rights Management is a crucial aspect of content licensing that designates legal regulations around geographic availability, but it can also get extremely complicated. There are a bunch of third-party vendors who do this for you, but you need to make sure that their solutions are compatible with yours. If DRM is not properly implemented, there are very serious potential legal consequences.

A DIY OTT solution seriously distracts you and your team from the main reason why your customers flock to your OTT service — your content. It’s challenging and extremely difficult for one person, or a small team to accomplish; it involves third parties, coordination and discipline. Keeping track of all the moving parts while managing multiple vendor bills and paying higher rates for each usage component means the cost of doing business can get extremely high.

There are better solutions. Request a demo from Zype right here.

Why You Should Hesitate About a DIY OTT Solution

A DIY OTT Solution Sounds Great, But Should Make You Hesitate — Here's Why

Video-centric publishers, broadcasters, and enterprises typically have an outsized focus on content programming and distribution decisions: “ What content am I publishing, where am I publishing it, and how many viewers can I reach? ”

While these decisions are incredibly important to focus on, a challenge that may not always be top of mind is thinking about the Content Management Lifecycle, with a specific eye towards digital asset preservation.

How do you make sure the video content you own and manage digitally is secure, highly available, and will be formatted and distributed in the right protocols as new distribution opportunities emerge?

A snapshot of the contemporary Content Management Lifecycle:

In this diagram you can see what a sample content import, storage, transcoding, delivery, and publishing/distribution lifecycle might look like for video enterprises.

Increasingly important is ensuring your video content storage and management solution ensures support for both the present and the future.

Evaluating digital asset preservation needs:

Video enterprises should evaluate format portability, security, availability, and redundancy as important factors in their content management lifecycle. This way you can ensure your evergreen content will not only be distributed efficiently today, but available for future distribution opportunities as well!

Interested in learning more about Zype? Check out zype.com/request-demo/

Thinking About the Content Management Lifecycle

We are proud to announce new product features, video connectors, and integrations.

Zype, the leader in video content management and distribution infrastructure, today announced new platform integrations to help video teams deliver content to more customers across an expanding distribution ecosystem. Zype customers now have access to distribution endpoints Pluto TV and XUMO, along with Verizon Media Streaming, which includes integration with its Slicer and Smartplay technologies. Zype offers easy delivery of premium streaming video across nearly two dozen channels and platforms, plus expanded direct connectivity with even more OVPs.

Creating a centralized hub to connect the digital video distribution ecosystem has always been a core focus of Zype. It continues to update its industry-leading Video App Marketplace to include the most MRSS-based distribution endpoints in the industry, allowing customers to generate and manage specification-compliant feeds for streaming TV providers, like Pluto TV and XUMO. Through Verizon Media Streaming, Zype helps video teams use existing encoding or delivery infrastructure to build and manage new and innovative video products.

These latest video integrations highlights Zype's commitment to help teams build awesome video experiences - resulting in the company picking up Product of the Year at NAB Show 2019 for Zype Playout and Company of the Year at OTT Executive Summit.

Beyond showcasing its latest product enhancements, Zype's Steven Tripsas will present "Evaluating & Testing CDN Suppliers for Performance & Unit Economics." at Streaming Media West, Tuesday, Nov. 19, at 1:30 p.m. local time.

Zype is offering exclusive demos at the event. To schedule a meeting, please register at https://zype.com/events

Zype Rolls Out New Video Distribution Integrations at Streaming Media West

When building a startup from the ground up the idea of going global comes around at various points during a company’s life cycle. It can happen when there’s financial growth, team expansion, or an increased level of product awareness. Usually when this idea come along it’s not easy to put into action.

At Zype we began the process of going global a few years back. It started with the intention of building a distributed workforce to gain access to unique and capable candidates from around the world. The goal was to find individuals who could bring in different perspectives and ideas based on their experiences, education, knowledge, and personalities.

It’s not an easy thing going global, at Zype we’ve been really careful to get it right. As we continue to understand the ways of international companies we’ve taken a few things into consideration to help us be successful.

One of the benefits of going global is having access to a larger pool of candidates to choose from. Since your employees may be collaborating with colleagues and customers from a variety of global locations, it is important to look for a specific skill set from the people you hire. Candidates who are adaptable, emotionally intelligent, confident in their abilities, independent, driven, and know how to embrace multicultural environments are those who perform best in a global working environment. The more diverse your team is the better equipped they will be to handle problems when they arise as everyone can pitch in with creative solutions.

At Zype we now have Zypesters in a variety of different places including Argentina, Mexico, Russia, Japan, Italy, Brazil, and the United States. We take into consideration the skill sets above when hiring but also go one step further by searching for people who have our core values : courage, hard work, awesomeness, resourcefulness, and thoughtfulness. Our team is one-of-a-kind, and I can honestly say each person I work with has individual pieces of knowledge and experiences that help add value to our company as a whole.

Once you’ve hired the right people it’s important that your company culture helps them thrive. When you have people working in various parts of the world it’s a little more difficult to accomplish this. First you need to ensure your team feels whole. This means making sure each person feels just as valued as anyone else in the team no matter their location by acknowledging both their individual and group achievements. You also need to ensure your employees stay connected. Thank goodness for technology! Lastly it is important your employees are open to learn, experience, and understand life outside of their own. You can do this by encouraging travel, education, reading, and other forms of stepping outside of their comfort zone.

At Zype we value individual and group achievements both during our Global Monday Meetings as well as via virtual high fives using Karma in our Slack chat rooms. We also encourage video communication with conference tools like Zoom, and even go one step further by visiting our remote Zypesters or encouraging them to come to our NYC headquarters every so often. On top of that we encourage our team members to ask their colleagues to turn their video on during meetings, to make things feel more personal and present. Although we have Zypesters in various parts of the world, it feels as if they are one office space over. Moreover, we know the importance of encouraging the people who make up our team to continue learning and exploring as we believe this helps create well rounded and accomplished individuals. We do this by offering unlimited vacation as well as a personal education budget that can be used to watch lectures from Udemy, to buy books about our roles and the industry, as well as to attend courses and achieve certifications that promote individual advancement.

The move towards a global company can be difficult but it’s also exciting. Understanding how grand our world is and the extensive amount of opportunities it brings really puts growing our business internationally into perspective. We have an awesome team full of members who are constantly being challenged which allows them to advance professionally. Their individual growth impacts Zype’s growth in more ways than one. We’re eager to see how our team continues to expand and the new people that will be brought in to help us move mountains. Will you be one of them? We are hiring!

Building a Global SAAS Video Company

Staying updated on all the tech talk in video engineering is no easy feat. From new video codecs to platform-specific lingo, it can leave your mind feeling a little boggled.

That’s why we’ve put together this video engineering dictionary.

AAC, or Advanced Audio Codec, is the follow up to MP3, consider it MP4 for audio :).  It is more efficient than MP3 so you get better sounding audio at the same rate (usually 128 or 192kbps). It is very widely supported in almost all devices.

 Audio Codecs (IMF, MXF, AS02, MP4, TS containers. J2K, ProRes, MP2,. ATMOS, Dolby E, AC3, EC3 

All of the terms here are different containers,  and containers are the thing that “contain” the codec, and have instructions on how to play the video file. An example is the container says where the metadata is for the video vs the actual video components themselves, vs the audio components like stereo and 5.1, etc.  Some of the above are intended for studio use only and are made for editing very large files, while some of these are consumer facing and you play them on your iDevice every day.

Bitrate is defined as “ the number of bits per second that can be transmitted along a digital network.” but what it really means in video is the amount of data I can send you reliably for you to watch the video.  If you want to watch a video in HD, it will take a higher bitrate than SD, but a lower bitrate than 4K because of the amount of information that’s trying to be sent to you. To put it another way, a 1080p stream will have a higher bitrate compared to a 720p stream because you’re sending much more information per frame.  In general, you might see a 3mbps bitrate on the 720 but a 6mbps bitrate on the 1080 one.

DRM is a way for companies to know that their video is not being pirated.  Before DRM, if a video leaked, it could be uploaded and played by anyone. With DRM, content owners can decide who/when/how/what gets played.  If they only want you to be able to watch something for a week, they can. Not watchable offline? No problem. Can’t watch outside the US? Done.  DRM is also able to be used down to the user, so the same file can work for one login and not for another. It's very powerful but expensive, so mostly the valuable content (movies, TV Shows, etc.) gets DRMed.

Encoding is the process of taking a video signal (usually from a camera or mixing board) and “encoding” it into a stream of data.  Think of it like taking the camera signal and putting it through some very impressive mathematical formulas so we can digitize it. One other goal of encoding is to reduce the amount of data in the signal yet still have it look great.  For example, we might take a camera signal that's 1 gigabit per second of data and compress it to only 10 megabits per second of data. The encoder is the thing that is converting that video from analog to digital.

FFmpeg is a piece of free software that does the actual encoding.  You type all of the settings that you want into a command line command, and then it runs and produces the finished video.  It is very powerful but has a steep learning curve. The training wheels version of FFmpeg is called Handbrake and uses a GUI.

FPS is a measure of how many times per second a video frame is made.  In the USA we standardized on 30 frames and now 60 for 4K. In Europe they standardized on 25 FPS and 50 for 4K, so you can see we needed different converters in the US and Europe to watch the same show.  The internet has made some of this moot, but it’s still a big deal in movies and tv.

H.264 is a video codec, and is the most widely used one today.  Almost every device (TVs, Mobile Phones, iPads, etc) can playback H.264 video files efficiently.  It has been surpassed by a more efficient technology called H.265 or HEVC, but HEVC has been hampered by patenting issues.  If you needed to encode a video to stream online, this would be your best bet to reach as many devices and users as possible.

H.265, or HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Codec), is the follow-up to H.264 and is the current “new thing” in Codec’s.  Apple has provided support for it, which should help its adoption and usage, has a very complicated patent/license setup that makes it expensive and scary to put your whole video library into.  Technically, H.265 can produce 2x as good of a picture at the same bitrate, or and equivalent picture at half the bitrate, when compared to H.264. This is due to the encoding complexity, it takes much more CPU to encode and decode H.265 vs H.264.

Adaptive streaming means the same video is produced in different quality levels that the user can change between based on their bandwidth at the moment.  If you’re alone in a coffee shop on the wifi you will probably get the highest quality stream. If a group of gamers come in and start using up all of the bandwidth then your quality level might drop and the video won't look as good.  This way we don't have to try and pick a one size fits all approach, you can watch a video on your phone while on the bus and then when you home finish watching it on a big TV and both will look good.

A Linear Livestream is basically like a TV channel.  you're watching whatever is live at the moment, as if you had turned on your TV and just watched whatever channel it was on.  You cannot fast forward or skip the commercials, it is live.

Metadata is the information about a video, such as title, year made, genre, etc.  It can be made very rich and can help a lot with searching for videos based on keywords.

DASH is a container, and contains a CODEC, usually H.264 or H.265.  The benefits of DASH over things like HLS is in the complexity of the manifest that is delivered with the video chunks.  DASH made some great improvement over HLS, but is more complicated and therefore hasn't taken off as much as expected. Also, Apple has kept up HLS so it has stayed the dominant container.  The largest companies use DASH, and so about 50% of internet video traffic is in the format.

An MRSS feed is a media feed of data that's used to syndicate videos from one company to many others.  So if MTV wants to send our their videos for other people to watch on their site, they would send an MRSS feed and that’s how people would know where to get the video and all of other metadata (name, year,etc).

OGG is an open source and free version of MP3, so you don't need to pay any licenses to use it,  it’s not as good as MP3, nor AAC. it has some device support but should be an option and not the only option for audio on your project.

OTT, or Over The Top video, is the idea of not using the cable box to send video into the home.  It might seem weird in today’s world, but it used to be that if you wanted to watch things at home without a VHS/DVD player, you needed to watch it through your cable box.  When the internet got fast enough, we started to see video delivered “over the top”, meaning not through the cable wire going into your home, but through the internet wire instead.  This was a big problem for the cable companies, who wanted to be your only link to the video in your home.

Transcoding is the practice of converting a video from one format to another.  For example, you have to create a certain file format to use on Apple devices, so a transcoder might take something created for XBOX and convert, or transcode, it for use on Apple devices.  You can think of encoding as getting a signal from analog to digital, and transcoding from digital to digital.

VP9 is very similar to H.264 but was bought by google and is used on some YouTube videos because it takes less time to encode into VP9 vs H.264.  It has been superseded by VP10/AV1.

AV1 is based on VP10, but is also the new codec du jour in the industry.  It is royalty free and very efficient, although very cpu intensive. Expect to see this in products from Google/Facebook/Amazon etc.

A Video Content Management System is a tool that media companies use to tag and manage their video so they can find things easily and approve/deny things for air in the same system.  They are very powerful and at the enterprise level can be set up to approve or deny a cable company or even individual user from accessing content based on date and last payment.

A Video Origin is where a media company keeps their video files.  Some people keep them in a data center that they own and control, and some companies keep them on the public cloud, but it's the place that the CDN's go to receive the content from the content owner

Encoding codecs are the different formats that the analog to digital conversion can end up in.  Examples are H.264/5, VP9, ProRes, etc. All of these have pros and cons that are a little out of scope, but generally, there is a trade-off between how much CPU it takes to encode/decode and how much power is available. For example, a CODEC might take lots of CPU to encode and decode but have a very small file size.  The problem is your cellular phone only has so much battery, so while the picture looks great it's eating up all of your juice to watch it. The goal is to find a midpoint between CPU cycles and file size.

VAST is a way for ad servers and video players to be reading and writing from the same playbook.  It makes a standard for ads to be delivered so that the ad companies know the video player has all the information it needs, so there is no finger-pointing.  Before VAST, everything was a custom implementation and things were much slower to get done.

The Video Engineer Dictionary

Zype Wins Third Stevie Award for Customer Service and Support

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Introduction to the Zype Video API

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Thinking About the Content Management Lifecycle

Zype Rolls Out New Video Distribution Integrations at Streaming Media West

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