M+E Daily

NAB 2017: Verizon Digital Media Services Readies Media Xperience Studio

Jason Friedlander, director of marketing communications at Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS), knows the phrase “first of its kind” gets thrown around a lot in the OTT and online video distribution services space.

But what VDMS has on tap with its Verizon Media Xperience (MX) Studio might just merit that distinction: a cloud-based “content intelligence system,” VDMS’s new offering promises rights holders an automated online video production and distribution system, one that bundles together an easy-to-launch OTT service with all the data needed to find out how their owned and licensed content is performing.

“We’ve been working on this product for a while now, and since the news of the AOL acquisition we’ve been trying to figure out how to bring all the things we’ve been doing internally to help our customers better monetize, understand and produce their content,” Friedlander said. “That’s where we came up with the idea of this content intelligence system.”

Pushing back against the piecemeal software as a service (SaaS) video delivery services content companies have been relying on, all the capabilities of media asset management, digital asset management and content management systems are folded into Verizon’s Media Xperience Studio offering, Friedlander noted. Combined with a full playout workflow system, an app builder, and a unique level of insights into how content is performing, VDMS is confident it has something unique in hand (especially on the metadata level), Friedlander said.

Content owners using VDMS’s MX solution will be able to input and manage their content on an asset metadata level, “where the second a piece of content is greenlit or acquired, they’re able to put it into the system, and track that piece of content … throughout the workflow, wherever it is at whatever stage,” Friedlander said.

Additionally, the VDMS MX studio has the ability to easily create and launch an application — whether it’s ad supported or subscription supported — all within a single platform, with simple options to create “virtual linear” channels and programming schedules, keeping content availability restrictions in mind, while still micro-targeting consumers.

“As OTT and TV move into the [next] stage, these one-to-one, highly curated linear experiences to every user, we have to provide the tools and technology necessary to allow content owners to spin up those experiences for every users, instantaneously,” Friedlander said.

A syndication offering — which helps rights holders publish content across every service, monetizing across multiple sites and services — is also touted in the VDMS offering, yet the use of metadata in MX, mining user preferences and viewing habits, may be what best sells the service, Friedlander said.

“Whether I’m collecting data from a one-to-one user experience in my OTT stack, or collecting data from a syndicated piece of content through a third party, I’m able to take all that data back into our system, and tie it all back to that original piece of content,” he said. Not only do I know how much it cost me to produce that asset, how much it cost me to acquire that asset, I know how much that asset made me in ad revenue, I know who are the people who’ve been watching it, where they’ve been watching it, where it’s performing best, what position it performs best, allowing for data, in an automated way, to best position the content.”

VDMS will demo its Media Xperience Studio later this month at the 2017 NAB Show (booth SU3605). To learn more about Media Xperience Studio or to schedule a meeting with a VDMS representative at NAB, visit verizondigitalmedia.com/nab-2017.