Ooyala Unbundles Their Video Analytics Solution To Work With Third-Party Players

Video platform provider Ooyala announced the release of a new version of their IQ video analytics product, which is now capable of measuring content performance and audience engagement alongside third-party video players. This is an interesting move as to date, all of Ooyala’s competitors have analytics solutions that can only be used with that company’s specific video player. You can now use Ooyala’s IQ video analytics platform with JW Player, Brightcove, Kaltura, thePlatform, Flowplayer and YouTube. Ooyala believes that in-depth analytics and data-driven insights are necessary for the growth of online video. That it is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather should be a standard and ubiquitous across the industry and I agree. I written a lot over the years about content owners saying their number one request is better and more customizable analytic solutions.

Ooyala IQ was launched for Ooyala’s existing customers in May 2015 and rolled out to those using Ooyala’s platform. Now, the company has taken a big step in opening the solution to any third-party player and/or third-party content management system. With simple out of box adapters that can be plugged into the third-party player, Ooyala’s analytic engine can receive analytic events including play/pause/stop pings and playthrough information seamlessly from the player, which enables a wide range of real-time video metrics. Metadata information from a non-Ooyala content management system can be exported via a simple to use API, enabling Ooyala’s analytic engine to give granular level performance of an asset, or a catalog of assets. With simple to integrate plugins and APIs, all the existing Ooyala IQ features are now made available to companies beyond their existing customer base. With an unbundled video analytics, online media companies can follow their content to get the ROI of their syndication sites irrespective of the players used, which is a nice option to have in the market.

Ooyala built its technology with data and analytics baked into the DNA and has always heavily focused and invested in analytics. This puts them in a unique position in the industry as their analytics solution has had multiple years (founded in 2007) to grow to an enormous archive of data, analyzing billions of video events per day. Ooyala says what makes Ooyala IQ unique is their ability to slice and dice details across multiple dimensions like device, operating system, browser, country, state, DMA (for U.S.), player or traffic source, all processed in milliseconds and provided in one simple view. This is a pointed differentiator, as the industry has largely had to rely on single-dimension queries that were time intensive and costly to set up, and even still could only show engagement on iOS, for example, and separately, engagement in a specific country, but never both at once in real-time.

I’ve asked Ooyala for more details on how their IQ product is priced as well as what it costs and will update the post when I hear back. Updated: Ooyala says that their minimal base license fee includes a stream allocation and is designed to provide a low entry point for smaller customers that may not have the budgets of large media enterprises but want to better understand how their videos are being consumed. For larger customers Ooyala offer stream bundles on top of the base license fee as well as an unlimited stream price level.