Verizon Adds Analytics to Digital Media Services

Verizon Digital Media Services today debuted a cloud-based content intelligence system designed to simplify, personalize and automate online video production and distribution for broadcasters, OTT providers and online video distributors, using analytics to help them receive insight into performance, cost, revenue and other data points.

The modular platform sits atop Verizon's content delivery network and video processing services and is designed to replace or augment the broadcast ecosystems' current cobbled-together hodgepodge of homegrown, integrated or siloed systems, Mary Kay Evans, chief marketing officer at VDMS told UBB2020.

Media Xperience Studio melds CMS, app creation and analytics in the cloud, she said. Analytics give all members of the broadcast community -- from content producers to OTT providers and everyone in between -- insight into each, individual content-consumer's preferences, she said. OTT providers also can determine the cost and return on their content, a challenge for many cable operators and service providers in an era of on-demand, delayed viewing and multiple platforms.

"What we are announcing today is that next layer in our service stack," Evans said. "If you take the network, the video processing and now you layer on the Xperiance Studio, it's the content intelligence that we bundle together with the rest of our services and app-development and description-management, personalized programming [that's new]."

The platform hooks into providers' existing systems via APIs, she said. Existing or new customers can choose as few or as many components as they wish, Evans added.

"Verizon Digital Media came to market with an end-to-end solution in 2013. The intelligence layer that really moves content management forward has really sat outside, on its own," Evans said. "What we've done is pull that intelligence layer, not into only [the CMS] from the network layer through to content preparation and, on the app side, being able to capture information on a one-to-one session, management for every single viewer, [but also] the amount of information we're capturing and putting in our system and then allowing the customer to see it to make intelligent decisions and create intelligent programming easily, within one system, that is a big innovation. That's the big step forward for us." There are seven components inside of Media Xperience Studio:

• MX: Orchestration – Plans content workflows and monitoring progress
• MX: Apps – Builds, publishes and maintains customized OTT applications
• MX: Subscriptions – Manages users, entitlements and payment for SVOD, TVOD or hybrid models
• MX: Programming – Creates and curates virtual linear channels, program schedules and policies for content playout, availability and restrictions
• MX: Syndication – Publishes and monetizes content across owned and third-party OTT services
• MX: Personalization – Combines user preferences and metadata for tailored content recommendations
• MX: Vision – Tracks and monitors insights, analytics and intelligence

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    — Alison Diana, Editor, UBB2020. Follow us on Twitter @UBB2020 or @alisoncdiana.