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At last year’s Streaming Media West conference, I had a chance to catch up with David Morel, who has worked for a number of content delivery networks (CDNs) and streaming platform providers in his career. Morel is a strategist and a fixer of complex problems so when he’s excited about something, I listen carefully and am often not disappointed. This meeting was no an exception, as he took the chance to talk about Unicorn Once, Unicorn Media’s new media manipulation technology and the problems it solves.

“Did you know that HLS works best in five-second segments on some devices,” he asked, “but in others it makes more sense to use the ten-second segment approach? We’ve figured out which devices do better in particular playout scenarios,” Morel said.

Having spent a few weeks in mid-2011 doing playout testing on a number of Android devices, as part of a set of reports commissioned by Adobe, Morel’s comment about different approaches for different devices piqued my interest, especially since his timing was spot on: a pressing concern had just arisen about Android playout, as during Streaming Media West 2011, Adobe announced development of Flash Player for Mobile was being discontinued.

At the same time, Google was announcing support for Apple HTTP Live Streaming in its newest Android operating system, Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich. In addition, MPEG DASH was winding its way through ratification for fragmented MP4 (fMP4) HTTP delivery, leaving the overall mobile video delivery market in a state of flux as to whether to stick with Flash Player or move to other solutions.

When I asked Morel how many devices they were working on, his answer floored me: it turns out that Unicorn had figured out the best playout profiles for a variety of iOS, Android, and other mobile devices, plus a number of set-top boxes and smart TVs.

Morel claimed that Unicorn can provide up to 4400 customized strings that covered over 500 different devices (and here I was happy I’d been able to test 14 and present my findings at Streaming Media Europe) but he also was quick to point out that no more than 100 mobile devices account for about 99 percent of all video content consumed in the marketplace today, and that globally no more than 500 devices are used except for very fringe cases. This matches up with my testing, where we determined about 400 different device permutations were needed to adequately cover the existing Android devices in mid-2011.

With the customized strings in hand, Morel said, Unicorn was able to create Unicorn Once to customize the experience for almost any user of any video-equipped mobile device.

“We are able to generate the appropriate format from a single high-quality file at the time of request, which is where the Once name comes in,” Morel said. “Give us a file once and we’ll make sure it’s delivered to the user’s device in the best possible format. And we’ll do it via a single URL.”

Just doing real-time conversion would be interesting enough, but Unicorn Media had its sights set on a higher prize: the ability to add multiple interstitials (read, commercials) into long-form content, with each user receiving a customized mix of interstitials based on the currently available advertising inventory.

“We generate the unique content for a unique end user at the time of request, instantaneously, with a full feature-length film with 20 commercials taking about one second to push through our Dynamic Permutation Layer or DPL,” said Morel. “We don’t do it through transcoding, but through direct file manipulation, effectively stitching together a seamless single piece of content with all the interstitials integrated directly in to the single piece of content.”

It all sounded a bit too good to be true, so like all good skeptics, I put the Once technology conversation aside for a few months. Last week I followed up again, asking Morel to elaborate with a customer example. Morel mentioned AccuWeather and another customer, Screen Media.

“For our customer, Screen Media, that has a library of premium long-form content, we do up to 28 interstitials for delivery to a Roku set-top box,” Morel said. “We’ve been told by Roku that no one else is doing that many interstitials, and certainly no one is doing it with delivery of different commercials to each unique user.”

Morel noted that Unicorn isn’t really stitching content together, although there are some devices that expect a playlist of content. Because Unicorn can “directly manipulate several pieces of video content into one seamless file” via their DPL, the ability to instantly change up advertising inventory is feasible.

“The moment a new commercial is available in inventory, we can begin serving it as part of our rotation,” he said, adding that a live version of the technology is also in beta release.

Today, while clicking on a video on MSNBC regarding the South Carolina Republican primary, I noticed the URL that briefly appeared was prefixed by once.unicornmedia.com.

The two images here show the page just before clicking the video link and just after clicking it.

Is MSNBC about to announce that it has become the newest Unicorn Media customer? If so, what will be the impact of a news organization being able to monetize live streams online in the same way that it monetizes breaking news (by adding in commercial breaks)?

Unicorn won’t confirm whether or not the MSNBC.com iPhone delivery is a beta test or a full-blown move away from bigger name CDN partners to the Unicorn Once technology (served through a Unicorn partner CDN, since Unicorn itself is not technically a CDN provider). It appears, however, at least a portion of MSNBC’s current videos are being served via Unicorn Once.

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Video Marketing

With the iPad-2 blazing its way into the tablet war, Kindle Fire can heave a sigh of relief with the introduction of Unicorn Media’s cool gizmo.

Arizona-based digital media management and solutions provider Unicorn Media announced yesterday its patented-technology platform – the Unicorn ONCE.

The latest breakthrough provides non-conformal creativity support for the newly-introduced Kindle Fire, the first touch-screen, full-color gadget from Amazon’s Kindle tablet series that will be up for grabs in the US for $199 starting Monday.

A patented technological gizmo, Unicorn ONCE brings on the table total ease in ad assimilation, high-resolution video and real-time analytics to the Kindle Fire tablet.

These cool features simply prove Unicorn ONCE’s capacity to ‘future-proof’ the delivery of quality video for Unicorn Media’s clients, giving fast and efficient support for new technologies and shifting operating protocols that will enable video entrepreneurs to capitalize on their online content.

The new platform allows video marketers to internalize (ingest) their content – once- and receive a single uniform resource locator (URL) in return.

The process enables delivery of video to any gadget or device with internet connection with progressive ad- integration across popular platforms, like the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Tivo, Roku, Smart televisions, among others.

According to Unicorn Media founder and chief executive officer Bill Rinehart, their clients are able to market and monetize their video contents on the very day of the platform’s release on the Kindle Fire without any extra development needed.

“We have created the Unicorn ONCE to give our clients the means to profit from their video content on every gadget or device and future-proof their investments in the process,” Rinehart said.

Unicorn ONCE is not a server-linked media platform or client of a software development kit (SDK), otherwise known as “dev-kit”. It is a video platform that lets Unicorn ONCE users to incorporate video content once while getting a URL in return.

A “win-win” solution, this new video solutions offering potentially enhances video publishers’ profits across all types of online platforms through a convenient yet effective integration of online ad content.

Among Unicorn Media’s products are Unicorn Vision, which also offers the same functions and dynamism of Unicorn ONCE and Unicorn Elements – a module-suite of enhancement tools for optimum video design and customization.

The Unicorn ONCE is a timely piece of upgrade for the Kindle Fire to go head-to-head in today’s raging multimedia confrontation.

For more information on Unicorn ONCE visit our website.

You can also view the original article at http://www.videomarketingtactics.com/unicorn-once-brings-more-energy-to-kindle-fire.html

Online Video and Music Network to Launch Cloud-Based Website for Greater Digital Marketing Success

San Francisco, CA– September 27, 2011–Sitecore today announced that Music Choice, the multi-platform video and music network, is launching a new website powered by Sitecore’s Web Content Management System (CMS) and Customer Engagement Platform and Microsoft Windows Azure Platform. In addition, Unicorn Media, Inc., a digital media management provider, will allow Music Choice to deliver live linear broadcast streams via its patented Unicorn ONCE™ technology. The move to a cloud-based platform will reduce time to market for new content and streaming services while adding support for multiple devices. The website is expected to launch in Q4 2011.

“We are very confident that a cloud-based Web platform will deliver more flexibility and convenience to our growing customer base,” said Dave Del Beccaro, president and CEO, Music Choice. “Leveraging the Windows Azure platform as a service model provided a distinct advantage over other cloud platforms due to its simplified development model and reduced total cost of ownership. Furthermore, Sitecore’s commitment to the cloud builds on all the advantages of Windows Azure while helping us achieve our branding and marketing goals.”

Music Choice delivers its music programming to millions of consumers nationwide through televisions, the Web and mobile devices. Sitecore’s Web platform enables Music Choice to achieve its digital marketing goals with a rebranded website. In addition, Sitecore provides the Music Choice team with an intuitive Web interface, allowing them to be more responsive and nimble, as the fast-paced music and entertainment market constantly evolves.

“The Windows Azure platform helps ensure that consumers will be able to enjoy the wide range of services and content that Music Choice offers,” said Prashant Ketkar, director of product marketing, Windows Azure, Microsoft. “A Windows Azure-based website is the ideal solution to meet market and competitive demands with reduced cost and risks.  We look forward to working with Music Choice as it re-launches its brand and expands its services.”

The Microsoft Windows Azure platform extends the Sitecore solution to the cloud, to easily and quickly scale websites to new geographies and respond to surges in demand. With the Sitecore mobile ready architecture, Music Choice can support millions of mobile users, as well as tablets and PCs. Content and messaging are delivered consistently across all devices and every channel of engagement.

“Unicorn Media has created a virtual and personalized instance of Unicorn ONCE™ for Music Choice, that allows them to streamline content delivery to any Internet-connected device, and dynamic ad insertion and analytics across any platform,” said Bill Rinehart, founder and CEO, Unicorn Media. “Our technology platform was built for scale with media companies such as Music Choice in mind.”

FINANCIAL EDUCATION COMPANY MANAGES MEDIA AND MONITORS CONTENT PERFOMANCE WITH UNICORN MEDIA

Tempe, Arizona – September 21, 2011 –Unicorn Media, Inc., a digital media management provider, is handling the delivery of online video for Rich Dad Company, a leading provider of educational materials about personal finance. Rich Dad Company selected Unicorn Media’s modular technology platform specifically for its ability to monitor content performance in real-time as well as its optimized ad integration technology.

Rich Dad Company provides financial education via books, seminars, videos, coaching, social media, innovative technology, and the board and Web game, CASHFLOW®. Unicorn Media’s technology platform, Unicorn ELEMENTS™, provides them with media management tools that quickly and efficiently ingest, manage, syndicate and analyze their content. Rich Dad Company also has the capability to deliver their content to any Internet-connected device such as iPhones, iPads, Android, Blackberry, set-top boxes, game consoles and more through Unicorn Media’s patented Unicorn ONCE™ technology.

Unicorn Media provides Rich Dad Company with real-time analytics through Unicorn VISION™, which allows them to monitor content performance to maximize profitability. Unicorn VISION™ is unique in that it provides detailed analytics such as video reach, content consumption, domain or geography-within seconds of real-time and across any platform including browsers, smart phones, tablets, set-top boxes and more. Unicorn customers can create custom reports on-the-fly ranked by streaming time, skips, number of plays, ad completes, location, date, etc. Unicorn Media’s technology also allows the Rich Dad Company to easily place ads and track performance while allowing for content or ad changes on-the-fly to best monetize content.

Brett Bottesch, Executive Producer at the Rich Dad Company states, “For the first time, we can better serve our customers by knowing exactly what they are watching and how long they view our Rich Dad content.  We will soon be reaching over 5,000 hours of footage. We are confident that this system will help us better manage our video assets.”

“Rich Dad Company has a rapidly evolving video strategy and our patented technology platform takes the complexity out of their current workflow as well as making it simple to syndicate to other Internet-connected devices. Our technology was built to scale with our customers evolving needs, Rich Dad Company is well-positioned to grow their business,” says Bill Rinehart, Founder and CEO of Unicorn Media.

LEADING WOMEN’S LIFESTYLE NETWORK CUSTOMIZES VIDEO DELIVERY SOLUTION WITH UNICORN MEDIA’S FLEXIBLE TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM

Unicorn Media, Inc., a digital media management provider, is powering the delivery of video for Womensforum.com, a leading women’s lifestyle network reaching 17-20 million unique visitors per month. Womensforum.com selected Unicorn Media’s workflow optimization tools and modular technology platform for a customized video delivery solution tailored to meet their unique requirements.

Womensforum.com is one of the Internet’s leading communities for women. The Womensforum.com network consists of articles, blogs, forums, and videos featuring information pertaining to women, such as parenting, food, health, style, living, entertainment, love and relationships, and more.

Womensforum.com chose Unicorn Media’s technology platform after testing dozens of video platforms and players and determined that Unicorn Media was the only company able to meet their unique enterprise class delivery requirements with features including sophisticated scheduling capabilities, dynamic playlists and more. In addition, Unicorn Media also had the capability to build additional features and functionality that Womensforum.com requested.

Unicorn Media’s technology platform, Unicorn ELEMENTS™, provides Womensforum.com with all the tools necessary to quickly and efficiently ingest, manage, syndicate and analyze their content, and enables the network to deliver media to any Internet-connected device as their mobile delivery strategy expands. Unicorn Media provides Womensforum.com with unique scheduling capabilities, which other providers could not deliver. The solution also includes Unicorn VISION™, Unicorn Media’s real-time analytics, which allows Womensforum.com to quickly and easily pull reports to analyze usage and consumption and better optimize their video model for maximum profitability.

“After testing multiple platforms and video players, Unicorn Media was the only technology that could deliver the solution we needed. It’s allowed us to implement our video model and deliver videos in a way no other platform could permit,” says Jodi Beck, Editor in Chief at Womensforum.com.

“Womensforum.com had specific requirements which we were able to meet due to our modular design and extensive rest API technology, allowing us to easily customize solutions for video publishers on any scale. Our workflow optimization tools and real-time data warehouse were designed to allow our customers to quickly and easily deliver video anywhere, anytime and on any device,” says Bill Rinehart, Founder and CEO of Unicorn Media.

In addition to Unicorn’s suite of workflow optimization tools, its patented Unicorn ONCE™ technology enables content owners to ingest and deliver video to any Internet-connected devices such as iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, game consoles, set-top boxes, etc. while providing dynamic ad integration and real-time analytics across any platform via Unicorn VISION™.

About Unicorn Media, Inc.

Unicorn Media, Inc. is a digital media management provider that helps companies deliver media to any device, any time, anywhere, while providing real-time analytics on any platform. Unicorn’s core services include Unicorn ONCE™, which allows content owners to ingest media one time and deliver everywhere and Unicorn VISION™, which provides real-time analytics across any Internet-connected device. These services are layered on Unicorn’s core technology platform, Unicorn ELEMENTS™, which is a modular suite of workflow optimization tools that enable publishers to customize their online video strategy. Founded by Limelight Networks founding CEO, Bill Rinehart, and headquartered in Tempe, AZ, privately held Unicorn Media, Inc. has offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and London. For additional information, please visit: http://www.unicornmedia.com

About womensforum.com

Womensforum.com is one of the Internet’s leading communities for women, reaching 17-20 million unique visitors per month. Founded in 1996, Womensforum.com has provided women around the world with personal and social interactions by engaging audiences in conversation and thought using the Internet. The network consists of articles, blogs, forums, and videos featuring parenting, food, health, style, living, entertainment, love and relationships, and more. http://www.womensforum.com

Phoenix, AZ, June 8, 2011 – Phoenix NAP, a next generation datacenter and network access point, today announced Unicorn Media, a digital media management provider, has added to its colocation space within the Phoenix NAP facility to help address rising demands.

Unicorn Media decided to expand its presence in Phoenix NAP due largely to the comfort and service levels it has received from the datacenter since its initial colocation space procurement in March of 2010.

“Our customers expect the most from our cloud-based technology and it’s imperative that they receive reliable service. When it became clear that we needed to expand our back-end services, the state-of-the-art facility and superior customer service at Phoenix NAP made it the obvious choice,” said AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media.

Unicorn Media is using the additional space to provide its growing customer list with its patented technology, which includes unparalleled device support via Unicorn ONCE™, real-time analytics via Unicorn VISION™, and superior cloud-based workflow optimization tools via Unicorn ELEMENTS™.

“It is great to see companies thrive in today’s economic landscape, and the range of services Unicorn Media provides is obviously filling a need in the market. We are thrilled to be supporting Unicorn’s successes with our datacenter’s infrastructure, and look forward to the continued growth of both organizations,” said Ian McClarty, president of Phoenix NAP.

Phoenix NAP is a PCI DSS Validated Services Provider and a SAS 70 Type II certified facility.

About Phoenix NAP

Phoenix NAP, LLC (www.phoenixnap.com) is a privately held organization of operational, networking and management professionals that have worked in the datacenter and IT fields since the early 1990s. The company employs a unique approach to providing flexible datacenter solutions that are tailored to meet the differing needs of small businesses and large enterprises. For more information, visit the company’s website at www.phoenixnap.com.

About Unicorn Media, Inc.

Unicorn Media, Inc. is a digital media management provider that helps companies deliver media to any device, any time, anywhere, while providing real-time analytics on any platform. Unicorn’s core services include Unicorn ONCE™, which allows content owners to ingest media one time and deliver everywhere and Unicorn VISION™, which provides real-time analytics across any Internet-connected device. These services are layered on Unicorn’s core technology platform, Unicorn ELEMENTS™, which is a modular suite of workflow optimization tools that enable publishers to customize their online video strategy. Unicorn Media’s workflow optimization tools and real-time analytics revolutionize the process for running a profitable online media property. Founded by Limelight Networks founding CEO, Bill Rinehart, and headquartered in Tempe, AZ, privately held Unicorn Media, Inc. has offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and London. For additional information, please visit: www.unicornmedia.com.

Family Entertainment Channel Manages, Syndicates and Analyzes Video Content with Unicorn Media.

Unicorn Media, Inc., a digital media management provider, is powering the delivery of video for GMC, formerly known as Gospel Music Channel, America’s favorite channel for uplifting music and family entertainment. GMC’s website receives about 750,000 monthly page views from 250,000 unique visitors. GMC ingests, manages, syndicates and analyzes content through Unicorn Media’s modular suite of workflow optimization tools, Unicorn ELEMENTS™, which is layered on its powerful rest API technology.

GMC features uplifting music and entertainment, including specials, movies and series that the whole family can enjoy. In 2010, the Parents Television Council awarded its Entertainment Seal of Approval to GMC for being “an authentic family-friendly cable network,” making GMC the only television network to receive the highly coveted honor last year.

The network transitioned to Unicorn Media’s technology platform because their prior system was costly and somewhat cumbersome. The Unicorn ELEMENTS™ platform provides GMC with all the tools necessary to quickly and efficiently ingest, manage, syndicate and analyze their content, and enables the network to delivery media to any Internet-connected device as their business expands. Unicorn Media easily integrates with existing systems and its workflow optimization tools resulted in streamlined internal workflows for GMC.

“The seamless pipeline from upload to encoding and publishing provided by the Unicorn system has made it possible for our online journalists to easily upload video content while on-site at events, while the catalog management features have streamlined overall editorial management and made for a better video experience for our customers. Unicorn was able to provide all of this while significantly expanding our bandwidth without any increase in cost over our old system,” says Philip Manwaring, SVP, Strategic Planning, Research and Technology at GMC.

“We are happy to have GMC as a customer. Our technology allows them to run more efficiently while also providing them with the tools they will need to support future syndication requirements to deliver rich video content to their viewers regardless of how or where they are watching,” says Bill Rinehart, Founder and CEO of Unicorn Media.

In addition to Unicorn’s suite of workflow optimization tools, its patented Unicorn ONCE™ technology enables content owners to ingest and deliver video to any Internet-connected devices such as iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, game consoles, set-top boxes, etc. while providing dynamic ad integration and real-time analytics across any platform via Unicorn VISION™.

Digital Hollywood Spring, Marina del Rey, California
Date: Monday, May 2nd – Thursday, May 5th, 2011
New Location: The Ritz Carlton Hotel, 4375 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, Califorina 90292
Phone: (310) 823-1700

Please join us for

Track III: 11:05am – 12:20pm Salon III
All Video-All the Time: Content & Advertising – Next Generation in Media Technologies – Broadband and Mobile
The broadcast and cable industry has always been – at its heart a video delivery technology bringing greater programming options to the consumer. And 75 years after its start, at its heart, the television industry remains true to its word – but how things have changed. Video is now more than television. Video is at the heart of how consumers experience their daily lives. Video represents all-access all the time programming from a world of entertainment and information providers. Video is broadband and that represents video access to hundreds of millions of video websites. Video is mobile, video is how consumers share their home movies and personal photography with friends. Television has created a video infrastructure – across platforms, from high definition to mobile that learns and responds as the needs of the consumer communications lifestyle emerges.

Zvika Netter, CEO, INNOVID
Michael Shehan, CEO, SpotXchange
AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media
Jonathan Cobb, GM and CTO, Mobility and Monetization Solutions, Limelight Networks
Will Bunker, CEO & co-founder, vChatter
Dan Greenberg, CEO, Sharethrough
Roy Baharav, Co-Founder and CEO, SeamBI
Luke McDonough, Co-Founder and CEO, RealGravity
Allison Dollar, CEO, Interactive TV Alliance, Moderator
For Session Description & Speaker Bios Click Here

I’m often asked how our Unicorn ONCE technology is different from existing mobile solutions. The fact of the matter is that Unicorn ONCE is actually about much more than mobile – as we can reach any IP–connected device capable of playing video. We all know that mobile is a hot space and there are a lot of technology vendors vying for attention. The biggest challenge that I have with answering that question is that because mobile IS such a rapidly moving space, there isn’t a lot of good information that exists about the challenges OR the solutions available. That makes it difficult to compare and contrast Unicorn ONCE with other solutions in the market until I explain a little bit about how some of those other solutions work, as well as some of the challenges people face with mobile delivery as they scale. I promise I won’t go too far into the weeds.

THE CHALLENGES:

Challenge #1: Workflow management
You’ve made the decision to go mobile: now what? We find that most of our customers who have tried to DIY a solution in the past have run into two key workflow challenges:

1.   Formatting content
Formatting content sounds pretty innocuous on the surface. If you’ve tackled this problem in the browser world you are probably used to the ubiquity of Flash and the no-brainer decision to use that for media delivery. In the past this meant that formatting content really consisted of managing a single transcode to a single format and delivering it to your Flash player. You had to decide on size, quality etc., but it was a fairly straightforward problem to solve. In recent years, the advent of adaptive bitrate technologies made this process slightly more complex: you had to transcode the file to 3-5 different bitrates and then manage each of those files. This meant that the management problem was roughly 5 times harder to solve than for a single bitrate. Manageable.

Now you start to look at the mobile space. With mobile you need to deal with at least one transcode for each major device group (let’s call that 10 to use a round number) plus, if you want to take advantage of Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming protocol (HLS) to do adaptive delivery, you probably need to add at least 5 additional transcodes to the mix. In addition, if you are using HLS you also need to segment the content (chop it up into lots of tiny pieces). So for a 5 minute piece of content, you have to go through 20 steps (transcoding and segmenting). As you can see: formatting content for mobile can be challenging!

2. File and version management
In the above example, I talked about the issues of formatting the content- but it’s important to also consider the fact that my output from the above process for a single 5 minute file would be 165 files using 10 second segments! This of course does not even reflect other delivery mechanisms like Adobe’s Flash Segmented streaming or other new technologies: you can easily end up with thousands of assets for a single piece of relatively short content. I think you can see how we can easily end up – and very quickly-  (especially for longer content) with thousands of files to manage for each asset. This poses a significant hurdle in-and-of–itself with file management – knowing which assets belong to which original piece of content, where they are stored etc. Add to this the complexity of versioning files if you make a change to the asset and then having to deal with CDN caching and synchronizing those 20 transcodes/segmentation processes and the issues here quickly become apparent as well.

Challenge #2:  Ad insertion
In the browser world, ad insertion, while complex in it’s own right -is a fairly straight-forward problem to solve. Lots of good solutions exist in the market for inserting linear video ads into content because in the browser world we have the power of easy software distribution to a rich client in the form of technologies like Flash and Silverlight which are relatively ubiquitous. For the most part ad delivery to a browser is just a function of choosing a partner and integrating their plug-in into your player. The mobile world is much more fragmented. Even in the realm of “smart” devices like those that run on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, significant differences between versions of the operating system and a wide variety of hardware capabilities make it challenging to deploy software to the client. Of course, for devices not running on one of the aforementioned platforms, this problem is significantly worse! Because these challenges make it difficult to support a strategy of delivering software to the client: we are often forced to rely on the native media player on the device. These media players typically don’t support any kind of native scheme for making outside ad calls, so we’re stuck with just playing back our media without ads in many cases (leaking cost) or denying access to the content from these devices (leaking revenue opportunity).

Challenge #3: Accountability
The final piece of the puzzle is accountability, namely: how do we track and report on usage and monetization? Much like with advertising insertion; in the browser world there are a number of ways to approach this problem in a straight-forward way because we can put a client on the desktop that reports back on what the user is doing. The questions in the browser world really come down to a question of how much detail your business model needs to be able to sustain itself – and having set that baseline, deciding how you could benefit from additional business intelligence like what’s found in Unicorn Media’s real-time analytics package.

EXISTING SOLUTIONS
If you choose to purchase a solution for mobile delivery, it has typically come in one of two flavors: client side or server side. Each has pros and cons that I’ll briefly outline below.

Client Side:
This type of solution is often referred to as an “SDK” or “plug-in” solution and is typically paired with some sort of server side software. The major differences really depend on who you’re buying the solution from. If you are buying it from an OVP, the OVP will attempt to solve challenge #1 for you with their base offering and then provide an SDK to allow *you* to solve the other two challenges for yourself. Basically: they are giving you a jumping-off point from which to build your own client. If you buy it from an ad network: you are typically on your own to figure out the content formatting and device detection issues.

Pros:

• Typically strong support for pre-roll advertising
• Typically have some analytics included in the package
• Can target ads dynamically

Cons:

• Requires a high level of development expertise for the various platforms to integrate the SDK
• Client code must be maintained/versioned on an ongoing basis
• Typically do not support mid-roll linear video advertising
• Does not provide support for other platforms

Server Side:

This type of solution is often referred to as a “stitched” solution. Basically the idea is that by encoding ads *into* the video itself (stitching) you can create a single file that can be delivered to a wide variety of clients without having to put code on the client.

Pros:

• Wide device support
• No client required

Cons:

• Lack of visibility into client behavior, so analytics are typically very high-level. This is most meaningfully felt when advertising plays are reported inaccurately.
• Limited ability to run ads because of the transcoding time/expense involved in changing ads
• No ability to target ads

Unicorn ONCE
So we’ve outlined the challenges and some of the ways that others have tried to solve these issues. In the spirit of full disclosure: until the advent of Unicorn ONCE, we advocated a plug-in approach and provided our clients with SDKs. The frustration of our clients with the limitations of that approach though, spurred on our R&D team, and as a result Unicorn ONCE was born.

Unicorn ONCE is a series of patented or proprietary technologies that give our customers the best of both worlds. We do not require client side code (though Unicorn ONCE can be used in conjunction with a client to support use-cases like interactive advertising) however we can still dynamically insert advertising to each user on-the-fly. We also capture analytics information from the server side without the need for a client to report back to us. These technologies are all built on top of Unicorn’s sophisticated workflow management services which manage all of the formatting/versioning/device detection etc.

No more client side code. No more platform limitations. No more static advertising. No more hassle.

Essentially: with Unicorn ONCE, you give us one file, one time and we give you a single URL that can be used to dynamically deliver monetized content to thousands of devices with Unicorn Media’s industry-leading analytics package automatically integrated. It’s just that simple.

- Bill Rinehart, CEO, Unicorn Media

Unicorn Media announced that its patented technology platform and robust API now support leading mobile app company, Handmark to syndicate video content to thousands of mobile devices including BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, webOS and others.

With more than 10 years of experience, Handmark has a rich history in creating many of the industry’s top downloaded apps including TweetCaster and Pocket Express. The company also specializes in full service mobile solutions for hundreds of the world’s largest media brands like Zagat, Oxford University Press, Thomson Reuters, London Evening Standard and others. 

Handmark selected Unicorn Media to support its need for a solution that optimized workflows and supported syndication to existing and emerging mobile technology.  Unicorn’s patented technology platform allows Handmark to syndicate content for a large and growing list of its partners, a testimony to Unicorn’s capability to deliver content to a massive audience of disparate devices. Unicorn’s media management tools enable Handmark to create customized licensing rules that don’t increase workflows, yet allow for sophisticated and complex distribution of content to multiple destinations.

“As the industry’s only full-service mobile application solution across all major mobile platforms, we needed a solution that would scale as we grow. Unicorn Media’s portfolio of media management technology provides us with an arsenal of tools to keep us at the top of the market,” says Tim Massey, VP Software Engineering, Handmark.

“We’ve dedicated a lot of time and effort to creating solutions for media companies such as Handmark, our goal being to make it extremely easy and profitable for content publishers to syndicate to literally any Internet-connected device,” says Bill Rinehart, CEO, Unicorn Media.

Unicorn Media offers access to an array of tools and technology that enable content owners to publish their content to any Internet-connected device or destination, analyze its performance and monetize that content for maximum profitability. Unicorn offers ground-breaking, patented technology such as Unicorn ONCE™ which enables clients to ingest content once and deliver to devices everywhere; including mobile devices such as iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, webOS, Roku and more, while also providing dynamic ad integration and analytics across all platforms. Unicorn’s media management tools also include, but are not limited to, global upload, transcode, asset management, player management, distribution, ad integration, syndication and analytics.

To learn more about Unicorn Media, visit us at www.unicornmedia.com.