General
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Introduction
Web video has become a mainstream phenomenon. Consumer appetite for high fidelity movies, prime-time shows, and the “latest and greatest” user generated web video combined with the convenience of the web’s on-demand experience is continuing to fuel the popularity. In response to the growing demand, traditional (e.g. cable, satellite, IPTV, and mobile operators) and new media distributors (e.g. mobile operators and consumer electronics companies) are enabling their video playback devices for broadband connectivity. All stakeholders are motivated to make their service or products more relevant whether it is to complement their programming line-up, to seek additional revenues, or to keep their products from obsolescence.
- Traditional Media Distributors. Traditional video distribution methods require that the network operator obtain licenses to distribute the content. Generally, the network operator charges subscription or pay-per-view to consumers while royalty fees are paid to the content rights owners. This practice has been “tried and true” since the inception of subscription TV service. The cost structure for operating a “closed” distribution service required that the most popular categories of content be licensed due to economies of scale. As more content become available for free on the Internet and demand for the long tail continues increase, in-house programming staffs will not be able to scale and manage one-on-one distribution arrangements with each content producer, but rather explore alternative options to offer the long-tail content. Further, operating under a closed network - re-encoding content for operator supported codec, storage, and distribution - make it a cost prohibitive proposition to support either a subscription or pay per view models.
- CE manufacturers face greater challenges as they need to solve the infrastructure element of the video delivery equation to enable seamless experience for consumption and personalization on their devices. As Apple has demonstrated the need to offer vertical services, CE manufacturers will be forced to transform its media consuming devices such as TV’s, game consoles, DVD players, into video play back receivers as consumer expectation for on-demand content, seamless media discovery, and personalized management tools determine the success of each product and relevance.
- STB Manufacturers have expanded market of customers, in addition to the traditional network operators: the niche content groups (e.g. churches, special interest groups, and ethnic) and the individual users, as the Internet is transforming into the back-bone for video delivery for high fidelity movies, TV, and professional content. Similar to the CE manufacturers’ faith, STB manufactures must find software infrastructure to support the services and applications to meet customer expectations.
User Experience
Medioh Guide is made available to our customer’s broadband-networked devices so users of these devices can find videos using various filtering tools such as quality, genre, popularity, rankings, relevance, and most recently updated, and more.
The Guide improves the users’ device viewing experience with intuitive search and discovery applications allowing users to dig deeper to find, watch, and share web’s “long tail” web videos on demand. Discovery features include collaborative recommendations based on other viewers’ recommendations and personalized recommendation based on the users’ viewing behavior. Users can create their own channels by subscribing the publishers’ RSS feeds enabling a “virtual DVR experience” on any networked device.
We optimize video for partner platforms by enabling filtering of incompatible or undesirable content, and applying our own QoS metrics to deliver only the highest quality video that can be supported for the best overall viewing experience. Videos can be filtered to support proper video stream files while we the Guide intelligently matches the device environment with the video publishers streaming capabilities.
Medioh Guide Overview
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML-based standard being used for transmitting metadata about Internet media. Publishers can aggregate, manage, and publish media for secure delivery over any network, whether it’s broadband, wireless LAN, or emerging IP-based wireless or broadcast (3G, DVB-H, DMB, MediaFlo) infrastructures
Although there are a wide range of video formats that are typically found on the Internet, most commonly supported file types today are Windows Media (.wmv), Macromedia Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV)1, Apple QuickTime, and MPEG-4(H.264).2 Generally, these video files are streamed across the Internet with corresponding streaming protocols to be deployed on servers and the delivery network as appropriate.
From niche to widely popular video publishers are now available on-demand through HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocal) progressive download. Compared to more complex streaming protocols like RTSP and RTMP, HTTP is simpler, more lightweight, and easier to work with.
Medioh Guide has custom-built spiders and crawlers (“mediohbots”) that find RSS feeds from a constantly evolving list of web’s thousands of video sites. The Medioh Guide uses RSS 2.0 exclusively for the result format. Rich metadata is provided for each video, including title, description, language, keywords, and publication date.3 The video feeds can be accessed on-demand using HTTP. All features of the Guide are accessed through HTTP GET requests which return XML or JSON documents.
The Medioh Guide provides basic search, filtering, and recommendation capabilities for broadband networked devices from our “library” of indexed videos:
- Video Search - is the main function provided by the Guide. Several options are provided for obtaining video results, such as browsing by keyword, and fulltext search. Several filtering tools for results are available, including specified lists of codecs, sites of origin, explicit content, languages, resolutions, durations, publication dates, bitrates, and several options.
- Channel Search - Results for entire channels of videos at a time. Like the video search, channels can be browsed by keyword or queried by fulltext search. Several filtering tools for results are available, including specified lists of codecs, sites of origin, explicit content, and languages.
- Recommendations - Analyzes viewing patterns of its users with a collaborative filtering algorithm. This algorithm can be used to recommend new content to users, both on a per-video basis, and also by analyzing a user's viewing history and providing personalized recommendations. Several filtering tools for results are available, including specified lists of codecs and filtering by explicit content.
The Medioh Guide also provides rich information about video by using MediaRSS extensions. Additional information available through these extensions includes a thumbnail image of the video in addition to a video's width, height, file size, MIME type, duration, bitrate, frame rate, audio sampling rate, audio channels, copyright information, and rating.4 In addition to the above extensions, Medioh also provides additional information through its own extensions to assist in processing results such as: total number of results matching the query, total number of pages of results, and URL to recommendations for the given item (i.e. video).5 Basic Guide feature sets include:
Implications to Service Providers
Any media device that is connected to the internet is a potential delivery platform for the Medioh Guide. Our solutions are flexible and scalable. The Guide APIs gives the operator the control over application development, or Guide Development Services enable our development team to customize applications to operator specifications leveraging our experience working with a number of partners in custom application development.
Medioh Gudie takes care of the gaps in both the technology and business frameworks that network operators and CE manufacturers are finding in their video delivery proposition by helping them solve their particular requirements with services that scale from a set of end-to-end services to a customized system. We’ve designed our services to give our customers an open, versatile approach to the ideal technical solution for their needs.
Conclusion
Medioh Guide takes care of the gaps in both the technology and business frameworks that network operators and CE manufacturers are finding in accessing Internet’s long-tail videos. Our application enables broadband networked devices the access to videos across the Internet including YouTube, Daily Motion, Tudou, Hulu, and more.
Learn More
Give your customers access to web’s videos with the simple media search and discovery service. Find out more at www.medioh.com, or contact our sales team at +1 303.390.0071 x 222. You can also shoot an email to info@medioh.com.
