Ooyala now powering ESPN's Billion-Plus video streams

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Today, on the basis of mountain view Ooyala, rapidly growing online video services provider, announced that it has landed a great content partner: the so-called "worldwide leader in sports, ESPN. These avid sports fans among us, you may have noticed some changes to the look and speed of the video at ESPN.com. Over the past few weeks start Ooyala video integration technology in ESPN's Web site and officially now supply all sports MEDIA behemoth streaming video content.

This is a major feather in the CAP and the confidence to run video 4 years as ESPN is one of the largest producers of online video content, with 400 unique visitors hitting play on ESPN Video every second (and serving more than 1 billion streams per month), in accordance with the Ooyala co-founder and President of Bismarck Lepe product. For Ooyala, Lepe said, this partnership with ESPN proof that he has achieved scale and in the overall picture shows that the online video industry at the point where the main building blocks available and can support a viable, healthy business.

ESPN Vice President, technology and product development Jason Gunther told TechCrunch that the company uses its own video system based on technology of Disney (ESPN is owned by Disney) and experimentation with several different video platforms and technologies. However, the company is at the point, He said, in which she really wants to start focusing on the content and the overall user experience of their digital platform, and not have to worry for the technology necessary to service billions of video streams or clarify its own video player.

Vice President of tech said that after checking a number of third-party platforms, Ooyala "landed a little higher" than its competitors, because it allows sports giant to reduce download times and take advantage of the video Bit rate, which can deliver HD up to 2.8 Mbit/s. ESPN's new Flash-based player, although users can use HTML5 version on their iPadsi provides dynamic video quality that configures the network connection for individual users, throughput, etc. in order to serve better the video quality in accordance with the possibilities of each spectator.

First of all, our video technology helps ESPN to deliver the best possible fan experience on the Internet. Ooyala-powered video incredibly fast download and have exceptional playback quality. As a result of ESPN can attract more fans and keep them look bigger.

For ESPN Ooyala not only speed up boot times and increase the quality of play, but video launch also allows sports broadcaster to make better use of domestic resources through the rationalization of the governance of their video and related data, in accordance with the statement made today by Ooyala blog. Ooyala also offers its customers real-time analytics engine, with detailed videos and individual users reporting on-demand and live video streaming, as well as integration with payment systems so that customers have the ability to run both paid and ad supported video business model.

ESPN typically lags behind its competitors of major media in terms of its use of social media, so that Ooyala visitors makes it easy to share videos through Facebook and Twitter from the player, a great social impetus for ESPN.

He told me that the scaling was the great challenge for ESPN.com, and the technical team is looking for ways to take advantage of new mobile channels, also retain the contents of consistently high quality on the Internet. Ooyala allows ESPN to serve effectively videos-steady quality platforms and scale. Moving forward, "he said, ESPN will look for innovation on the basis of its new video platform, as well as to explore ways of beef and promote its API.

In General, it's great to see ESPN finally offers a quality player with fast load times and more linear experience of demand, in which video and layouts feel akin to TV viewing experience – and can compete in ease of use videos from YouTube. And for Ooyala, who recently signed a contract with Yahoo! Japan and will soon account for more than 50 percent of all Japanese online video size, according to Lepe, is yet another sign that he reaches this elusive tipping point.

But don't worry, Ooyala has change is planned. You'll see what I mean below:

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Twitter comes alive with activity streams in real time

MG Siegler wrote to TechCrunch since 2009. It covers web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, in fact all. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, mg attended the University of Michigan. He had previously lived in Los Angeles, where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where ... ? Read More

Since its inception, the content on Twitter is largely displayed the same key. It is linear, reverse chronological stream of Tweets. Two new sections to be added to the service are going to change that.

In particular, in the @ mention at twitter.com is replaced by two new tabs: "@ username" and "activities". These two threads will add an additional layer of Twitter and Tweets, the layer showing social activity around them.

@ USERNAME (of course, the user name will be replaced with your Twitter name) stream will still show your @ replies, but it will also show things like when someone follows you, someone favorites one of your Tweets when someone retweets your Tweets, or when someone adds you to the list.

In the work flow will show you all these things, but related to all the people you follow on Twitter. In other words, you can see if you retweeted tweet, or if someone new, etc.

If you are familiar with Instagram, this double activity stream is similar to the concept that they use to cover the events in the service after the photos are in the main stream.

All this information into these two new Twitter streams in real time. And what you can do as a reply, retweet and most importantly for Twitter, follow directly from within those threads.

This is the key to this change: this is yet another step to Twitter to mass their social graph. And this one is clever because it will make Twitter feel more alive. At the same time, they're keeping main stream intact as a simple, standard reverse chronological stream. Mixing @ replies of other activities will likely piss some users — most people hate after all the changes, but overall this is a smart move.

This change can significantly change using Twitter the same way. So far almost as old as Favoriting Tweets, Twitter itself is a function that has always been under-represented and under-utilized. This is because Twitter never gave him a purpose, and more importantly, never had a good way to show how others use it. Now they're giving the last exposure.

It seems that most people use the Favorites button for years, or bookmark it or make it really their favorite Tweets. This will lead to an increase in the number of services such as Favstar. In the light of the recent favorite email notifications Favoriting finally got some Twitter social juice. Now these new threads should throw use your loved ones as a way to show someone you appreciate their Tweet — how "button, if you will.

Twitter will start rolling out these changes for a very small number of users today. The introduction will be continued during the next few weeks, if all goes to plan. Again, it's only going to twitter.com now, Twitter is considering how to cover the same information on their mobile applications, but notes that it may be different for different devices.

Twitter, founded in March 2006, (publicly launched in July 2006), Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams is a social networking and micro blogging service that allows users ...

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