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.

Customer Profile:  Streamline  Technologies

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Streamline Technologies specializes in website and ticketing solutions for collegiate and  professional sports organizations.  By providing a comprehensive suite of products and services, Streamline has earned a reputation for developing applications that are easy to use, enhance client  marketing efforts, and expand revenue opportunities.

Goal:

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Alex Short, President of Streamline Technologies needed the optimal video solution for the company’s clients: one that was robust enough to handle the unique requirements of each property, easy and cost-effective enough to publish the large array of media assets these clients maintain, and flexible enough to support potential sponsorship and advertising opportunities as they arise.

The Unicorn Media Solution:

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Unicorn Media’s Media-as-a-Service™  solution allows Streamline clients to simply and affordably publish large amounts of video content to their sites, bringing fans closer to the action.

Says Short, “Our college athletic clients generate a large amount of video content, and converting, uploading, hosting, and sharing this content has always been a challenge.  The Unicorn Media Asset Management System addresses all of these issues in an easy-to-use and cost-effective manner.”  Unicorn Media’s suite of services that include ingestion and multiple format transcoding, content management, syndication, ad-integration, player templates, and detailed analytics give Streamline clients a professional-grade video solution that supports their expanding media publishing needs.  Adds Short, “We selected Unicorn Media because of their focus on publishing video content and the ease-of-use for our customers to upload, transcode, and publish their video clips.  Unicorn showed great interest in working with us and went above-and-beyond in our testing and integration of their services.  We are pleased to offer the Unicorn Media solution to our clients.”

Unicorn Media’s Asset Management System provides users with global online portal access that allows them the ability to manage the distribution of content to websites as well as desktop applications, game consoles, and mobile or other IP-enabled devices, all while enforcing the business rules specific to each unique environment.  This Smart Syndication Technology™, which enables deliver to virtually any destination or device, creates new sponsorship and advertising opportunities for Streamline clients, giving collegiate and professional sports organizations new opportunities to monetize their media assets.

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.