Media Dojo

When I first heard that ooyala means cradle in Telugu (a South India language), I thought about that creepy flick with Rebecca De Mornay who quotes a riff from the 19th century poet William Ross Wallace, For the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

Fortunately, ooyala’s CTO Sean Knapp isn’t as good looking nor as psychotic as Ms. De Mornay was in that film. That’s probably a good thing for video content players like AOL/Bebo, Armani, Joost, Electronic Arts and Glam who trust ooyala with managing and helping monetize their video assets on the cloud.  Sean co-founded ooyala with fellow Google and Stanford alumni Bismarck Lepe and his brother Belsasar Lepe. For a quick run-down on the company, check out the one pager. MD Tear Sheet on ooyala

Sean and I discussed the ooyala’s DNA, how it uses Amazon’s cloud, the trend toward clickable interactive video for clients such as Armani, as well as take-aways for marketers about what is possible here and now with interactive online video.

Media Dojo: What lit the spark for starting ooyala?

Sean Knapp: The original catalyst that Bismarck approached me to solve was how do we build a high level video destination site that would monetize better than with pre/post rolls, in-stream ads or overlays. We looked at it and noticed that we had a good bit of computer vision expertise in the company. We felt that if we could use computer vision techniques to mark up a video and make various elements clickable, we could make them more interactive and engaging, which would monetize better in the end. It’s the difference between having a banner ad and having AdWords where users were proactively engaging with the content and looking for more information.

MD: So where do Amazon’s cloud services come in?

SK: The original idea was to build an interactive video destination site. What ended up happening along the way true to Google engineering form was that we needed to solve a lot of different related problems. The first technical problem to solve was ingestion, or how will be take content into the system very easily from our content owners. So we starting building Backlot along with storage and video encoding services. But as a three man team, it didn’t make sense to start trying to build a network storage system even though we knew we needed one to store a lot of video content. It didn’t make sense to start building racks of servers when it was possible to buy instances of Amazon EC2. I could draw a lot of parallels between what we could buy from Amazon compared to the tools we used when we were at Google. From Amazon, we bought S3 storage services. At Google, we used GSS. We buy EC2 from Amazon. We used Google Borg for much the same thing. Basically, using cloud services made it much easier to grow quickly. Our goal is to help content owners successfully upload, distribute and monetize their video content online. The fact that it’s running mainly on the cloud is great but it’s not the ultimate value proposition. The cloud is simply the enabler that helps us innovate faster.

MD: Let’s define interactive video, what do you mean by it?

SK: Our goal is to make online video clickable. We want to find the points in a video stream where people might want to interact with a piece of content. Perhaps they’re attracted to the particular hat Halle Berry is wearing in Swordfish. They want to find out about that hat and maybe where to buy it. You might have an informational video where it’s even more important for people to be able to click on various items to expand an explanation. So the trick to making video interactive is two fold. First you need to populate it with targets that people can click if they want or skip. Those targets need to be discoverable at the points where people are likely to want something extra in their content. Then you need to link those targets to something else, maybe the latest stats for a college hoops player during March Madness, or maybe an e-commerce link so you can find a jersey or something like that.

MD: ooyala was recently involved in helping Armani create an interactive online fashion show. What happened with that?

SK:We got connected to Armani through an Italian online design shop called Shadow. They had used our technology and APIs previously for work they’d done for an Italian professional soccer team. They’d heard about our push into interactive video. So when Shadow got the contract to build Armani’s online fashion show, they pitched the idea of making the video clickable and Armani went for it.

[editor's note: go here to play with it-- http://www.emporioarmani.com/index.asp?ssp=1&tskay=3FD17CD7 ]

Basically, you choose whether you want to see the men or women’s line. As the models parade on the cat walk, you can mouse over their clothes to get a link to that look in the Armani catalog. It’s a pretty straight forward e-commerce implementation. The main point is that it’s entirely up to the user regarding when they want to engage closer to a transaction. No overlays or interstitials are involved. Just watch the video and when you see something you like, you take action.

From a marketing standpoint, interactive video is about increasing the overall engagement time for the user—but on their terms. Most users like to operate on the assumption they are in control so when they feel like their being interrupted or pushed in a particular direction, they tend to bail fairly quickly.

MD: All well and good—what are the potential gotchas with interactive video?

SK: One of the things that we’re finding is that interactive video doesn’t really work as an out-of-the-box solution. There’s not a default user experience that you can monetize immediately and predictably. We’ve found that every implementation has been custom built because everyone’s content is different. What will trigger user engagement in a fashion show is different than a sports event or a comedy or a drama or even an instructional video. So it’s important for content owners to be sophisticated about envisioning how interactivity can enrich the user’s experience, and by extension, lead to better chances at monetization. What happens, the different calls to action, and what is engaging depends very much on the content itself.

MD: Last question, where’s the money in all this?

SK: We’ve concentrated on the bread and butter issues to get to this point with ooyala. Longer term we see the value proposition expanding to look at how to monetize situations involving different users in different context. For example, if you’re running ads or pay-per-view, being able to dynamically price a view of a video direct to the user or direct to the advertiser could be huge. Should this stream price at 0.05 or 0.15? Well, the answer depends on the user, their specific context, and which ad inventory is available at that precise moment. We’ve all got access to much the same ad inventory. But it’s about who will get higher interaction and engagement because they’re showing the right ads to the right users at the right time. Optimizing at the margin to make milk out of that last 15-20% of possible revenue is the difference between a Yahoo! and a Google.

[Editor's hat tip to Alexa Lee for setting this up]

Comments are closed.