As mobile video begins to explode on mobile, the transcoding of content is going through a disruptive, but necessary shift, according to Neal Hartsell, vice president of marketing for RipCode. The company today introduced the TransAct Monetizer to enable real-time insertion of Internet and mobile video advertising for better content monetization. The technology is the latest addition to RipCode’s transaction-based transcoding platform, designed to reduce the costs and complexity of optimizing video across the three screens of mobile, PC and IPTV.
Transcoding has been around for awhile, Hartsell said, but transactional transcoding is just now coming into vogue. As every operator and content provider seeks to serve content to all three screens, they need a technology that works for both on-demand and live content and one that is network aware. Especially as user-generated video is growing alongside an explosion of commercial Internet video traffic – and not just short clips, but full TV episodes and even movies, operators are in danger of being overwhelmed with mobile data traffic in the form of video.
“That’s not what the last-mile 3G network was designed for,” Hartsell said. “It’s great for consumers, but its catering network performance in a big way… It’s not shocking, but how strongly it’s come on in the last three to four months has surprised companies, like NBC.”
Like NBC, content providers need a way to monetize either the content or the advertising associated with it. Hartsell said that while advertising might be welcomed on the mobile screen, it is challenged by the inability of legacy transcoding to customize ads, since they are typically pre-transcoded and then manually integrated into content before being delivered to consumers. RipCode, rather than using a manual approach, uses on-the-fly ad insertion to segment, personalize and localize mobile ads.
The TransAct Monetizer can include pre-roll, post-roll or overlay ads, all of which use policy-based playback control and dynamic tracking and reporting of key metrics for monetization auditing. The technology can also eliminate re-buffering between ad content and user-requested content and integrate with existing ad management systems.
“If you are only dealing with a small number of files, then you get by with today products,” Hartsell said. “But if you believe in this enormous growth of video consumption and production, that simply won’t scale. You can’t pre-transcode content fast enough in enough formats and can’t distribute it to enough locations. Transactional video play is a very different approach with lots of scalability to set us apart.”
