Blog

Two interesting stories across the web this week regarding the raging debate over apps vs browser-based HTML5 experiences.  The first article from Paid Content covered the FT's completing their shift from app to 100% browser-based HTML5 experience.  The stat that really jumped out at me was that the web-app user base exceeded the iOS app user base within the first three months, along with the added benefit that the FT will no longer need to share 30% of their subscription revenue with Apple.  The FT went so far as to acquire the developer shop that produced the FT web-app and has created FT Labs to further develop the offering and perhaps creating a web-app platform others can use.

Back in March, when RAMP launched its Developer Portal and a plethora of new APIs and SDKs, we promised that this was just the beginning. Our plan was to be responsive to the needs of our customers and the market and make sure that the updates came fast and furious. Well, we are pleased to announce a number of updates to the RAMP Search API as well as a new set of integrations for the RAMP MetaPlayer Framework available immediately in the RAMP Developer Portal.

Great article today by Josh McCoy on SearchEngineWatch regarding internal linking.  This is an often missed component of a good SEO strategy, and is especially hard to execute on very large, dynamic sites.  This is a core component of our Content Optimization approach. Josh provides a good description of what's needed.  

At SXSW last week we announced the launch of our developer portal, which now provides an entirely new way for customers to leverage the benefits of our MediaCloud platform. Our new API's now allow developers to easily enhance their existing applications and user experiences with the rich metadata, search and related content capabilities RAMP has become recognized for.  

• Metadata as the Foundation: The theme we heard over and over again was the difficult of building a comprehensive search and discovery capability when most video assets have poor or lacking metadata. Further, virtually no one has scene-level metadata and thus a timecoded augmented television experience is nearly impossible. This type of metadata can of course be created manually, which many have tried. However, in every case the resulting ROI on such an approach was negative. What’s needed is an approach that is mostly automated but with full editorial overrides. RAMP of course has been preaching this since we launched. Industry Readiness Grade: B

Wow, hard to believe its been 3 months since the last blog post.  In that time we have practically circled the globe.  We started in London, and it turns out we ended in London.  We hit the Atex user conference in Sep, then to IBC in Amsterdam, over to LA for Digital Hollywood and the SharePoint Conference, down to NY to visit with the Magazine Publishers Assn, and then back to London for the Mozilla Festival.

While of course we are really excited today to announce Media General as our newest customer, but equally excited to show how local media can solve the puzzle facing them in terms of the digital transition.

Media General is a classic cross platform media publisher, including television stations, newspapers, and magazines.  They produce a tremendous amount of content day in day out including audio, video, text and images.  This content production is largely a sunk cost activity.  Once you shoot the newsclip or write the story, you have invested virtually everything you are going to spend on that content object.  The question becomes, how do you leverage all of these asserts to deliver increased revenues over their useful life?  We've had the privilege to work with some of the best companies and people in the local media space including Cox, Entercom, and now Media General, and we have seen what works and what doesn't.  Here's a quick list:

I recently came across HBO's Game of Thrones interactive video experience on their TV Everywhere service called HBO Go (GigaOM also has a nice writeup here) and was really blown away by the quality and depth of the experience, but was also excited to see the concept of "lean-forward" video being more broadly adopted.  Yesterday we previewed RAMP's MetaPlayer 2.0 metadata-powered video player at the Elevate Online Video Advertising Summit in New York, where we demonstrated how publishers and advertisers can deliver these kind of interactive video experiences at scale with their existing content.

In the Game of Thrones "enhanced" experience, viewers are shown interactive features alongside the video contextually, meaning the interactive features are tied to the video timeline and triggered appropriately.  I was discussing this at the conference with someone who told me that 40% of users were choosing and engaging with the interactive features according to HBO.  This is really stunning and also shows how quickly users are adopting to the new experiences online video, and specifically the multi-touch tablet form factor, bring to the table.  It also raises the bar across the board for all publishers when someone like HBO so prominently creates this type of user experience.

The progression of online video is interesting to think about.  We first had the content "snacking" phase, driven by short form and UGC clips, dominated mostly by YouTube, then moved into the long form entertainment phase driven by Hulu and Netflix, and are now witnessing the start of a new metaphor for online video, which goes beyond video as CONTENT and looks at video as CONTEXT.  Metadata is a critical component to driving context.  If you missed our demo at the show, stay tuned for more announcement next week!

"The Semantic Web is a "web of data" that enables machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web.^[1] It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pagesby inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users.