The combination of cheap bandwidth, Smartphones expansion and the cultural shift of viewers watching ‘whatever they want whenever they want’, indicates that mobile views of online video are trending up. To accurately sum it, users hold viewing experience of great importance; a small screen and a low resolution stream are now a thing of the past as viewers move towards HD stream of the same content even if it means bracing the annoying buffer sign.
Headquartered in SiliconValley, California with its Indian office in Chennai, Ooyala saw this explosion of online video coming very early on, and knew that the media and television industries would be challenged in new ways as viewing audiences began to move away from traditional TV services and on to mobile phones, tablets and computers for news and entertainment. Ooyala figured that the best way to face this explosion is with Data. Accoutered with this realization, Ooyala focused on integrating sophisticated big-data analytics into their products, thus providing clients with various pieces of actionable information like how videos are being consumed, how long a viewer engages with any particular video, at what point the viewer stopped watching and how many ads were displayed.

This further enabled clients to better understand where and how many ads to place, what kind of content they should invest in and even where they should place the video player within their website or app. “Our customers don’t have to think in advance about having access to all of this data because it is integrated right into our core content management system and video player technology. It has been an integral part of our video offering from the very beginning,” says Ramesh Srinivasan, CEO.

Intelligently Answering Client Queries on Content Engagements
Ooyala IQ, a fundamental dashboard of the company’s video suite shows clients exactly which videos are the most popular at any given moment and where they are being watched- in real time. “We help our customers drive optimization and engagement by giving them a unique, holistic set of granular data about how each of their video assets is performing,” adds Ramesh. Ensuring viewer anonymity, the company keeps the viewer information incognito. Working two fold, Ooyala IQ helps clients answer questions like customer’s video engagements on an iPhone as compared to an Android device and different content consumption across countries. This allows clients to further drill down into multiple queries across multiple parameters like device types, operating systems and locations to understand viewer engagement. Answering client queries related to why viewers drop off videos and not watch a particular content or ad all the way through, Ooyala facilitates clients to better their video engagements.

Ooyala Pulse- Enabling Clients to Study the Pulse of the Audience
Understanding how the audience watches content can help businesses to shape the best monetization strategy and this is precisely what Ooyala Pulse, (the company’s ad server and campaign manager platform) and Ooyala Pulse SSP (the programmatic platform) undertake. Pairing content performance with audience demographics, the platform helps clients to package inventory for higher CPMs thus paving way to generate higher revenue. A video-first ad platform, Ooyala Pulse enables clients to creatively sell large varieties of ad formats and ad types while helping them forecast campaigns better so that they can report in full detail and with the current state and projected success of their campaigns to advertisers. As the world hurries towards programmatic - or automated -buying and selling, the company’s customers use Ooyala Pulse SSP to maximize their exposure to buyers interested in their inventory, causing higher demand and ultimately higher CPMs - all through a very efficient and automated means of trading. Ooyala Discovery, the recommendation engine from Ooyala, showcases videos that are most popular at any given moment within a publisher’s catalog, and can discern an individual viewer’s preferences by knowing what kind of videos each viewer has watched. By understanding not just the content but also the device on which the viewer is on, the solution facilitates clients to tailor- recommend videos that are device-appropriate; for instance, a shorter clip for a mobile phone and a longer one for a laptop or a PC. Furthermore, Ooyala’s discovery engine combines all of these inputs to present personalized videos that can be displayed at various points in the viewing experience. Having been proven to be quite successful at keeping people engaged longer by watching more videos and spending more time within a particular site or app, Ooyala helps clients to not only increase ad revenue but also customer loyalty.

Flexing Media Logistics to Etch Better Revenue Pathways
Ooyala Flex, yet another gem from the company’s basket of offerings, streamlines production workflows while managing video assets. Designed for the multi-screen era, the solution enables clients to effectively manage volumes of content across a multitude of formats while integrating various video systems for ingesting, editing and syndicating content into a unified system. This in turn eases their overall content creation and distribution process. The solution promotes continual capture and flow of data - both operational data about how their production process is working and asset-related metadata to be used for a wide range of purposes like grouping content into categories or making content more discoverable through search and recommendation tools. This further enables clients to uncover problems and opportunities at every step of the way. “This new way of managing production workflow and asset management holistically, with data at the center is what we call media logistics. Think of it as a cloud-enabled, collaborative, automated and open approach to building united video workflow systems, from content commissioning to syndication,” comments Ramesh.

Eagerly moving towards scaling their capabilities, Ooyala is excited to expand both through own organic growth and through major channel partners who are coming on board to help make Ooyala technology part of the foundation for the next generation of TV. Envisioning more and more companies to standardize on its technologies, Ooyala expects India to play an important role in the company’s growth; both in terms of supporting Ooyala’s fast-growing customer base in the APAC, and in providing an important center of innovation for multiple product offerings. Observing the company’s incredible growth graph, it is only prudent to say that Ooyala surely is a game changer in the Enterprise Content Management domain.