As more states across the US announce plans to re-open businesses, many fitness studios may be wondering if there is still a need to maintain their video streaming service. In short, the answer is yes.

We have seen a huge influx in the demand for fitness streaming services since stay-at-home orders were enforced back in March. Thousands of gyms found themselves needing to transition to video to keep their customers engaged and generating revenue, and while many of them are now in the process of reopening their doors, we recommend maintaining video streaming services to cater to the different needs of their customers.

Companies like Facebook and Google have already announced plans to allow the majority of their workforce to stay remote through at least the end of the year. People will continue to spend most of their time in their homes, so it is unlikely that streaming habits will be changing any time soon.

Schools will also have a longer journey back to normalcy, so parents will continue to have to stay home with their children. They may not have the flexibility in their schedule to attend in-person classes even after their studio reopens.

Those that are able to return to their old gyms will most likely be very skeptical about being in close quarters. A study from RunRepeat.com, featured on Athletech, found that 50% of Americans do not feel comfortable returning to their gym if it were to reopen. 

As we approach three months of being at home, people have adjusted to this new normal. They have chosen their favorite online workout to do before work or on their lunch break and have settled into their remote routine. Many may prefer working out in the comfort of their homes to traveling elsewhere for an in-person session. In fact, at-home fitness has been trending long before COVID-19, with companies like  Tracy Anderson and Crunch Fitness  pioneering  virtual fitness solutions that are aligned with their brick-and-mortar locations.

The advantages of a fitness streaming service stretch beyond convenience for customers in quarantine, especially when you incorporate digital video infrastructure.  A powerful video CMS and CRM can extend your reach and amplify your fitness business. When clients are given access to a full content library and the ability to choose what they want to watch versus a set class schedule, it allow fitness companies to collect  important data that can be used to inform decisions.. Zype offers  fitness companies  an Analytics dashboard for evaluating consumer engagement and behavior, so they can tailor their content, both in and out of the studio, to match what’s most popular with their customers.

Relying exclusively on physical studios may limit your addressable market to members that are living within traveling distance. A robust video infrastructure allows you to distribute to fitness enthusiasts everywhere. Zype’s Embeddables enables easy online publishing of workout classes that members all over the world can engage with and enjoy, and our templated apps simplify OTT distribution. 

Fitness streaming has grown exponentially due to COVID-19 and is expected to continue for years to come, and businesses that don’t  elevate their video strategy, may miss out on the massive opportunity to better connect with their viewers. Taking advantage of video infrastructure designed for fitness businesses is an important step toward reducing risk and enabling durable long term member engagement for both the digital and brick and mortar fitness business. 

Will Fitness Studios Still Need Video Post-Pandemic?

Will Fitness Studios Still Need Video Post-Pandemic

Retain customers by allowing them to pause their subscriptions in Stripe

Zype has expanded its existing Stripe integration to accommodate subscription pauses. With this feature, video product managers can more effectively retain customers they might otherwise lose to subscription cancellations by allowing subscribers to put a temporary hold on their subscription.

Leveraging Zype’s APIs, teams can create simple workflows to allow customers to pause and resume their subscriptions by integrating the “pause subscription” functionality into your web and native apps. 

As shown in our flow diagram, when consumers initiate a pause on their subscription, Zype pauses access to all prepaid subscription content and Zype’s API interacts with Stripe to ensure that the subscription payment is paused as well.

Learn more about pausing subscriptions in Stripe here.

Zype customers can now update playlist keywords via API, enabling faster, more automated metadata management. Additionally, if a customer has  a large playlist library, there is  improved performance when using our Playlist API. Learn more about Zype’s APIs and access our Playlist API  here.

Zype now supports series-based episodic content in XUMO distribution. Video content publishers can publish videos to XUMO in episodic order without having to configure feeds manually. Facilitated feed generation saves time and allows for distribution of content to XUMO in a more organized fashion. Learn more here.

Zype adds new features to help customers save time and retain subscribers

Leveraging Zype’s APIs, teams can create simple workflows to allow customers to pause and resume their subscriptions by integrating the “pause subscription” functionality into your web and native apps.

Multi-CDN has been a "thing" for a number of years, latency remains a buzzword, and buffering is the enemy of us all (especially if we have kids)! We talk to a group of experts who are focused specifically on ensuring that publishers, CDNs, and telcos can provide the best quality of service to the consumer.

Zype at Content Delivery Summit: Multi-CDN Strategy

Industry Chat with Zype, Amazon Web Services & THEO Player

1) How has the current world situation affected the adoption of cloud and streaming technology?
2) How is the streaming industry making it easier, or more difficult to, adopt a new cloud based infrastructure as a part of their business model?
3) “Streaming to TVs has more than doubled in the past few months” – what will be the long term effects of this increase in engagement?

Adopting Cloud and Streaming Technology During a Global Pandemic

Chris Smith, Zype's Head of Product is joined by Adam Butler, Vevo's Director of Brand Insights & Measurement to discuss how Vevo uses Zype Playout to stream billions of hours of music videos to viewers everywhere.

Zype + Vevo talk Playout and vMVPD Distribution at the Virtual NAB Showcase

There’s an overwhelming amount of negative headlines circulating these days. With so much going on, it can be difficult to make sense of what is actually happening  in our industry, so we thought we’d share some positive updates from our corner of the universe here at Zype. 

Our customers have seen incredible growth in video consumption over the past month – on average there is an 150% in viewership in the past 30 days; with some experiencing growth rates upwards of 3000%.

We are working hard to continue innovating solutions that power these video services that are keeping the world connected.   We’d like to share some trends we’ve been observing behind the scenes. 

In short, we’ve seen a huge increase in video consumption. The graph below represents the trend in  video player impressions across all of our customers. These are unique requests for video players through Zype’s API.  When a web page loads, or someone chooses a video on an app, a request is registered.

You can see the stark contrast in growth from March to April in 2020 compared to 2019.  The same period last year was relatively flat.  As consumer behavior shifted quickly to more in-home viewing, the growth trend this year is obvious. This ramped up viewership has continued through April and we expect it to be durable for at least the next few months, if not for the foreseeable future due to structural change. 

Beyond video player management, we have seen continued growth across our Video API. An important part of our technology stack creates and manipulates video streams that sit behind video players.  We generate manifests (like a container ship would have a manifest of goods, our manifests list out all the video chunks that go to the video platform or consumer player). These Video APIs service video players we manage, as well as third-party video players and platforms like Pluto TV and Roku directly. This area continues to grow as our customers are offering more video services to market, and viewers are engaging more. 

We have also seen interesting trends on the devices people are using since the shift to remote life. The chart below  shows the breakdown of video impressions by device.

Roku has the most share of requests, which is consistent with prior months for customers that use our Video API to manage their OTT players, but Desktop has taken a bigger share than IOS (combining both native and browser based requests), which is unusual compared to prior months.  

Desktop consumption has grown by nearly 50% in the past 30 days, which is likely  due to the fact that people are spending more time on their computers in their homes.. However, despite the lack of commuting, mobile devices combined (iOS Native, iOS HTML5, Android Native, Android HTML5) are still dominating consumption share at 41.7%, and are also on the rise.  iOS Native impressions have increased by 102% and Android Native by 97% (month over month), so needless to say, people continue to rely more and more on their mobile devices to watch video. 

There’s clearly a massive demand for video these days. We are thankful for the opportunity to help our customers stay connected to their viewers. This is a pivotal moment in digital video, and while we remain thoughtful and concerned for the global community, we are optimistic about our role in providing a highly scalable and connected video infrastructure to our customers.

Want to see our platform and products in action and hear from our customers? Register for our Virtual NAB Showcase on May 6th!

Behind the Scenes: Streaming Insights

There’s an overwhelming amount of negative headlines circulating these days. With so much going on, it can be difficult to make sense of what is actually happening  in our industry, so we thought we’d share some positive updates from our corner of the universe here at Zype.

Zype's CEO on DEW Webinar: Optimizing OTT Distribution

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Zype's CEO on DEW Webinar: Optimizing OTT Distribution

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Will Fitness Studios Still Need Video Post-Pandemic?

Zype adds new features to help customers save time and retain subscribers

Zype at Content Delivery Summit: Multi-CDN Strategy

Adopting Cloud and Streaming Technology During a Global Pandemic

Zype + Vevo talk Playout and vMVPD Distribution at the Virtual NAB Showcase

Behind the Scenes: Streaming Insights

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