3. The Importance of Open Standards for Online Video Player Applications 1
The Online Video Syndication Trend
For advertisers, syndication may be
The boom in the availability of high-definition content along with growing broadband
the best way to get the numbers up
penetration has whetted consumers’ appetites for high-quality online video. Consider
while still enabling the kind of precise
these statistics:
targeting that they’ve come to
• According to ComScore, 11 billion videos were viewed online in April of 2008 by
expect online2.
Web users in the U.S. alone.
• Nearly 71 percent of total Internet users watched online video that month.
• By 2013, around 1 billion people worldwide will consume video content delivered
over broadband, according to ABI Research1.
For media companies and advertisers, capturing this valuable audience and the
attendant ad dollars is of the utmost importance. The challenge is that, with the rare
exception of YouTube, audiences are fragmented. Instead of accessing a single site,
consumers are viewing video across a multitude of popular video destination sites such
as Metacafe, Hulu.com, and the Web sites of major TV broadcast networks.
These trends have spawned a new and fundamentally different approach to video
distribution, one that analyst and VideoNuze.com publisher Will Richmond describes
as the “syndicated video economy.” In this economy, the traditional model of tightly
controlled distribution points is replaced by an emphasis on proliferating content to
far-flung audiences. In other words, content owners must reach audiences wherever
they reside in order to maximize digital media revenues. And to attract advertisers,
publishers need to aggregate an audience that is large enough to make it impactful
for advertisers. As agencies begin to invest more funds in video advertising, one of
the key requirements is to reach the largest possible target audience while
streamlining their media buying.
THE SYNDICATED VIDEO ECONOMY PRESENTS CONTENT OWNERS WITH
THE OPPORTUNITY FOR ‘DIRECT TO CONSUMER’ DISTRIBUTION MODELS
“…more and more industry participants’ strategies—in both media and
technology—[are] starting from the proposition that the broadband video
industry will only succeed if video assets are widely dispersed and revenue
creatively apportioned” —Will Richmond, analyst and VideoNuze.com publisher
4. The Importance of Open Standards for Online Video Player Applications 2
Technology Challenges and
Barriers to Growth
As is evidenced by a number of sites and initiatives, such as Hulu.com and the syndica-
tion strategies of companies like MTV Networks, companies are increasingly seeking
to widely syndicate their video assets and engage in advertising revenue-share deals.
However, in spite of the growth of online video syndication and the maturity of online
distribution, two fundamental barriers stand in the way of further success:
• Complex distribution workflows
• Lack of standard video player applications
Complex Distribution Workflows
A media company that owns valuable video content—like news or sports highlights or
full TV episodes—likely has two key goals:
1) Publishing content quickly for maximum audience impact
2) Distributing the content broadly through partners to maximize revenue and
audience reach
Unfortunately, many companies struggle to quickly distribute content because of their
reliance on manual processes related to content preparation (transcoding and metadata
creation), content ingestion, approval (editorial), policy and publishing. Adding distribution
partners further complicates the distribution process. For example, companies may need
to offer multiple content formats, and associate a variety of meta data and business rules
with their content, such as around revenue sharing, geographic restrictions, and release
windows. All of this information must travel with the content.
To meet these objectives, companies need fast, automated distribution workflows, with
full support for transcoding, meta data, business rules, and advertising.
Lack of Standard Video Player Application
To date, companies have used video player applications—either built from scratch or
based on proprietary third-party technology—to suit the requirements of their own site
and advertising technology solutions. The requirements of the new syndicated economy
complicates matters. Now, in order to enable creative advertising revenue splits and third-
party syndication deals, video players need to support the advertising rules and technology
used by both content owners and syndication partners. In addition, to keep content fresh
and interesting for viewers, video players must be able to automatically receive and publish
new content from multiple third parties.
By definition, proprietary video player applications are inflexible when it comes to
accommodating different ad technologies, creative changes, and business policy
modifications.
As a result of a lack of standardization across video players, many companies are
rebuilding their video players to include the ad logic and rules for their distribution
partners. Not only is this manual effort extremely time-consuming, it’s not scalable
from a business perspective.
Video player applications developed leveraging popular video formats such as Adobe
Flash and Microsoft Silverlight enable content owners and publishers to deliver high-
quality content in a branded player that promotes user engagement. However, while
these development platforms offer complete creative flexibility and ownership of source
code needed to represent and control branding, they require coding and developing from
scratch. The result? Lengthy time to market and high development costs. In addition,
integrating video publishing with video advertising providers and ad servers is difficult,
especially as publishers and developers tackle these projects on a one-off basis.
These issues impede the growth of video advertising on an individual site level
as well as for the industry overall.
5. The Importance of Open Standards for Online Video Player Applications 3
The Solution: Standardized Workflows
and Video Players
As with any emerging market, industry-wide success depends on the adoption of
standards. For example, Macromedia, Inc., (now Adobe) the Interactive Advertising
Bureau (IAB), and key advertising serving companies like DoubleClick, Inc. helped the
industry standardize on a single way to build Flash ad banners so that they could be
tracked across different sites. They simply encouraged the best practice of inserting
a dynamic ‘ClickTag’ into a Flash banner that the ad server could populate with the
correct URL when the ad was delivered. This provided ad agencies with a standard way
to build ads that could be leveraged across multiple Web sites, and enabled publishers
to accurately track metrics for their online media campaigns. This and other industry
standardization efforts such as the IAB’s ‘universal ad package’, while seemingly simple
measures, were key drivers for the proliferation of advertising online.
With that in mind, Akamai—along with leading companies in the online video
ecosystem—have created a resource to help media content owners and publishers
address the new requirements around publishing workflows and video player
applications.
The Open Video Player Initiative
For the last decade, Akamai has had the unique opportunity to work closely with top
Media & Entertainment companies as they move their entertainment strategies online
and play a key role in the Internet evolution from largely static flat sites to sites rich with
video, and dynamic content and applications. Leveraging this experience, Akamai has
accrued a considerable knowledge base around delivering high-quality consumer video
experiences—iincluding best practices for video player application development.
With a goal of sharing this knowledge with the industry and the development
community, Akamai and its partners have launched a Web site dedicated to this
initiative. The site—www.openvideoplayer.com—is a community resource for
developers wanting to build online video players using Adobe Flash or Microsoft
Silverlight. On the site, developers can access open code-based player references and
resources that will ease the process of video player design and implementation, and
simplify the process of publishing and syndication. As a result, companies will find it
easier to support advertising-based business models and benefit from the syndicated
video economy.
HULU.COM’S FEATURE-RICH VIDEO PLAYER APPLICATION (BASED ON ADOBE FLASH
AND THE AKAMAI MEDIA FRAMEWORK) IS WIDELY EMULATED IN THE INDUSTRY
6. The Importance of Open Standards for Online Video Player Applications 4
OpenVideoPlayer.com Resources
The goal of the site is to offer resources that promote best practices around video
player application development. The following are available via the site:
• Reference Implementations and Sample Code
Player source code to speed development of video players as well as code and
documentation to connect Open Video Player-based projects to leading
advertising technologies.
• Community Best Practices
A forum for the exchange and sharing of community best practices.
• Developer Forum
an open exchange of ideas and expert advice on player development through
a forum staffed by interactive designers and leaders in the Adobe Flash and
Silverlight developer community.
• Developer Resources
A library of documentation and video tutorials that explain how to utilize
Internet standards to build professional-grade online video players.
Akamai Media Framework: A Foundation for Standardization
A key component of the Open Video Player community is the Akamai Media
Framework, a software development kit that can be used to solve common
problems encountered when building media player applications in Adobe Flash
and Microsoft Silverlight.
Key Benefits
Key Features
• Promotes best practices and open
• Network and delivery management
standards
• Playback management
• Reduces complexity (time and cost)
• Metadata management
• Extensible and flexible
AkamaiConnection
AkamaiLivePublish
AkamaiMediaRSSParser
AMD/FMS
User Interface Application Logic
AkamaiBOSSParser
AkamaiEnhancesNetStorage
HTTP DELIVERY
HTTPBandwidthEstimate
THE AKAMAI MEDIA FRAMEWORK FOR ADOBE FLASH: A FOUNDATION FOR MEDIA
PLAYER APPLICATIONS
7. The Importance of Open Standards for Online Video Player Applications 5
Industry-standard Publishing Workflows
To scale and syndicate their content across multiple distribution partners, companies
need to leverage industry-standard publishing workflows. To that end, more and more
companies are turning to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) as a tool for managing and
publishing their video content.
The Akamai Media Framework includes an RSS parsing class, enabling companies to use
the industry standard Media RSS to publish content to their video player. With support
for metadata, RSS enables users to search on metadata to find videos of interest.
Organizations can plug RSS feeds into players they have created, or can deliver them via
the Akamai Stream OS media management solution, which integrates with the Akamai
Media Framework. When video content is uploaded to directories in Stream OS, the
directories are automatically added to the correct RSS feed for a hands-off approach to
publishing. Additional distribution channels can be added simply by creating another
RSS feed.
Industry-standard Video Player Applications
By leveraging the code included in the Akamai Media Framework, companies can
focus on adding value to the player experience instead of on the more mundane ‘under
the hood’ aspects of video player development. The framework provides free source
code based on an open source license, minimizing hours spent on coding, debugging,
and QA.
The framework also enables companies to develop and standardize on a core media
player that can be leveraged by multiple partners in a distribution network. Companies
simply re-skin the player and distribute it for use. Because the underlying framework
remains the same, the process of distributing content to new channels is greatly
simplified.
Facilitating Third-Party Integration
With support for standardization around business logic, the framework facilitates
integration of third-party solutions, such as ad serving through ‘connectors’. The Open
Video Player site offers sample code-based reference implementations from leading
advertising technology companies for easy integration and support of video ad formats,
ad servers, and even ad networks. Publishers simply download code and documentation
to leverage for their video player applications. Inaugural partners include:
Ad Servers Ad Technology Providers Ad Networks
• Black Arrow • Eyewonder • SmartClip
• 24/7 Real Media • Panache • Scan Scout
