Ooyala Upgrades Flex Media Platform With VR360, HEVC Streaming

Ooyala announced a suite of new capabilities and features for OoyalaLIVE, its application for creation, management, delivery, and monetization of live streamed events and linear TV channels on any device.

Among other developments, Ooyala’s Digital Video Playout solution now enables the Ooyala Flex Media Platform to support VR360 content. Exhilarating immersive experiences for viewers are now possible, including live streaming with OoyalaLIVE, VOD content with OoyalaADAPT and playback support on all major platforms and devices leveraging OoyalaPLAY, Ooyala’s video player. The open and extensible Ooyala Flex Media Platform allows media companies to better optimize the content supply chain with customizable workflows, seamless integration of third-party tools and a common data set across the entire video operation.

“We are at the forefront of our industry, recently providing the workflow infrastructure for the VR360 experiences of the 2018 Winter Olympics as well as high quality and low bandwidth HEVC streaming solutions,” says Jonathan Huberman, CEO, Ooyala. “Providing the best live video experience is a major part of our mission, and we’re leveraging best-of-breed Ooyala Flex Media Platform solutions to realize that objective for our customers.”

The new features include:

• Multi-audio: The ability to deliver multiple audio streams in a single player, enabling multiple language tracks, additional audio commentary, or even audio description for the visually impaired, both for live streaming and VOD content.
• HEVC Streaming: The addition of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2 offers approximately 30% bitrate and bandwidth savings, enabling users to reduce bandwidth costs or deliver higher quality for the same bitrate – and making 4K delivery a reality for more consumers.
• VR360 Support: Ooyala’s Digital Video Playout solution supports the ability to stream, upload, store and play VR360 content, offering viewers an immersive experience, live and VOD, in both monoscopic and stereoscopic formats.
• Enhanced Live Clipping: Building on OoyalaLIVE’s existing capabilities users can now open live streams in OoyalaMAM to clip up VOD assets and highlights during live events, with timed markers and rich metadata. Leveraging the Ooyala Flex Media Platform, it is now easier than ever to automate syndication workflows for VOD assets, orchestrating distribution to multiple platforms with a single button-click, saving manual steps and reaching eyeballs faster.
• Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI): Support for Google DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) brings monetization opportunities to DFP subscribers. SCTE-35 markers are now supported providing frame-accurate and unique, per-user localized frame-accurate ad insertion.

The latest Digital Video Playout updates follow a combination of late 2017 updates, including real-time monitoring, improved support, and back-up systems and scheduling tools, collectively offering content providers a 99.95% uptime for their video streams.

Ooyala’s Digital Video Playout solution has been designed with a focus on ease of use to help broadcasters and other TV and video content providers, operators, and online media publishers reach and monetize their audiences with high-quality and highly reliable live streams. The integrated solution provides all the advantages of the Ooyala video platform, including content management; analytics; monetization; publishing; and player management for channels, events, and live-to-VOD recordings.