Over the past few weeks, I’ve been discussing what makes Unicorn Media’s Media-as-a-Service™ solution unique from all the rest of the online video platforms in the market.  While my discussions here are certainly not exhaustive, we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I wanted to take a minute to boil it down.

I’ve mentioned before that Unicorn Media isn’t just a player with some snazzy features attached.  We’ve really set out to build a whole new way of looking at the online video ecosystem.

But what does that really mean for our clients and partners?

It means that we deliver more than just video.  We deliver profits.

Unicorn Media cuts costs two ways: by providing actionable information to our customers and by improving their operational efficiencies.  Our analytics technology gives our clients the ability to make intelligent business decisions on the spot, in real-time.  Our syndication model simplifies processes and significantly reduces deployment times.  Our transcoding technology allows for high quality viewing at a lower bitrate, and our pricing model only charges our customers for what they’re actually using (no hefty licensing fees here).

We’ve said before that Unicorn Media does OVP the way we think OVP should be done.  So you can certainly call us that if you’d like..but you won’t find another OVP that scales to the needs of your business-like we do, or allows for real business intelligence-like we do, or one that significantly cuts video delivery costs-like we do.

So call us an OVP if you’d like, but expect something different…because at Unicorn Media, we’re in the business of delivering more than just video.

Live streaming has quickly become a staple within the Internet ecosystem. While video on-demand is a necessity for most media publishers these days, there’s also something about our voyeuristic tendencies that draws us all into what’s happening now. The idea of bringing live content into our proverbial living rooms is the new norm.  Who hasn’t taken at least a glimpse of the adorable pups on the Ustream Puppy Cam?

(I know I was asking for it by linking to live puppies in my post. Go ahead…watch the puppies. I’ll wait…)

Puppies aside, the Unicorn team has put in countless hours to bring our clients and partners the best Live Streaming solution out there.  After all, our Media-as-a-Service™ solution wouldn’t be complete without it.

The Unicorn Media solution allows our clients to choose from any Flash streaming or progressive protocol, optimizing stream delivery through profiles that allow the player to adjust according to viewers’ unique network and hardware resources.

Bottom line?  Our technology provides maximum flexibility.  We empower clients to make decisions based on price and performance for each individual template, easily delivering an optimal video experience based on available bandwidth and system performance.  Our clients and their viewers get a crystal clear picture that doesn’t break the bank.

The cherry on top?  Our analytics technology allows clients to analyze audience and traffic in real-time, enabling them to make intelligent business decisions on the spot.  It just doesn’t get any better.

Unicorn Media will be providing our live streaming technology for some great events coming up, so stay tuned for that announcement!

(OK, I’m done.  You can go back to the pups.)

A lot of people might argue that the transcoding process isn’t the most electrifying of topics…but we aren’t those people.

The fact is, transcoding isn’t a science.  It’s an art.

So I sat down with Rikki Carls, Director of Software Architecture and the Picasso of Unicorn Media’s transcoding architecture to get the ins and outs of how the Unicorn transcoding system was built.

What did we set out to accomplish in building our transcoding architecture?

Rikki: We started with a couple of basic tenets in mind.  First, to encode videos to a world-class standard of quality at a lower bitrate than previously thought possible. Second, to have a dynamic profile system that would enable our customers to choose the video output that best meets their business needs, and lastly to create the architecture in such a way to allow it to scale-anywhere from a single hardware farm to multiple “cloud computing” infrastructures.

So, we know what we want the end result to look like.  Where did we go from there?

Rikki:  Well, to accomplish the first goal, we spent several months in research and development.  We needed to find the best H.264 encoder in terms of quality output, configurable settings, and ongoing development.  We then went though and “tweaked” every imaginable configurable setting combination until we found what we think of as the perfect combination of encoding speed, quality, and bitrate. We then ran a battery of test content through, making additional configuration changes until we were sure that we had the best quality encoding on the market at any given bitrate.

So we’ve got the basics down, how did we accomplish the dynamic profiles and scalability?

Rikki:  Our second and third goals were actually much easier to accomplish. Instead of relying on a prebuilt software package to do our encoding, our system was custom built in a modular fashion.  This not only allows us to quickly add new functionality on-the-fly, but also allows us to keep up with the ever-changing video codecs required to read and transcode the wide variety of video types we receive. On top of that, we can quickly scale out our infrastructure to meet any customer’s demand, from a small video publisher with a couple hundred assets up to a large syndication company with tens of thousands of assets.

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As Rikki mentioned, we set out to build a transcoding system that would bring our customers the highest standard of quality video at lower bitrates, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.  But you don’t have to take our word for it, the proof is in the pudding.  Head over to UnicornMedia.com and check out this video-quality comparison.

Unicorn Media's Analytics System, including a view of the infamous "Magic Frisbee."

So you’ve syndicated your content out. (That was easy, right?)

Now for the important stuff: Who’s watching it? Sounds simple enough, but we’ve found that the answer can be a surprisingly difficult one to answer.

Analyzing video content on the Interwebz has traditionally been a complicated endeavor.  Content publishers often need two or even three vendors to derive answers to pretty simple questions about their content.  They’re left with high costs, hefty bandwidth logs, and a limited perspective into how the content they’re analyzing is actually performing.

We saw this as a huge void in the video ecosystem, so naturally, it became a huge focus in developing Unicorn Media’s Media-as-a-Service™ solution.

Our analytics system isn’t a traditional reporting system.  It’s a real-time data warehouse and provides unfettered access to key data points, allowing content owners and publishers to view metrics by video reach, content, consumption, domain, or geography.

So what does that mean to content publishers? It means that UMedia Analytics provides unmatched visibility into how your business is actually working…in real-time.  How much revenue did that video generate?  How many end-users watched that piece of content?  Where in the world is this video the most popular?  Is this particular title profitable?  Whether you want to compare end-user behavior to content performance, or revenue generation to delivery cost, the Unicorn Media solution allows you to create custom reports on-the-fly.

In other words, we’ve created an analytics system that just doesn’t exist anywhere else.

We’ve all heard it time and time again.  It’s a story that’s been told over and over throughout the last several months.  The OVP space is crowded.  The field is saturated.  There are too many players at the party.  (It only takes a quick look over at any TechCrunch article covering an OVP to see what I mean.)

Needless to say, there’s a lot of hype.

So, what is it that makes Unicorn Media stand out from the rest of the crowd?  What is it that makes us think we’ll outlast the hype?  We think it comes down to this:

Unicorn Media does OVP the way we think OVP should be done.

You see, Unicorn Media isn’t just a player with some cool features attached (which is why we think a lot of other players in the space look so much alike).

Providing a player is the easy part.

Unicorn Media was founded because we saw a void.  It just took too many vendors to get a video online.  From CDN and distribution partners, to the right player, from syndication to a useful and effective analytics system, content owners often find themselves jumping through several hoops to get to one final product.

Unicorn Media manages all the hoop jumping.  We’ve  built the most robust system, a solution that provides everyone from the Web 2.0 startup to the largest of media companies with the tools to upload, manage, syndicate, analyze, and monetize their content online.

We know there are a lot of companies out there that say they do it all.  So we don’t just expect you to take our word for it.  Over the next few weeks we’ll be providing you with the Unicorn Difference, showcasing the ins and outs of what truly makes us the most robust system in the OVP space, all the things that make us extraordinarily unique.

The Unicorn Difference is more than just a feature set.  It’s a new way of thinking about the video ecosystem.  So stay tuned, and check back tomorrow for our first installment, “Syndicate or Die: The New World of Hyper-Syndication.”