thePlatform Wants to Socialize Video
Colin Dixon, Senior Partner, Advisory
March 3, 2010
One of the things mainstream media produces have been slow to do is embrace social media. In particular, content providers have been shy about allowing their online viewers to share clips of favorite videos with friends through social sites like Facebook and MySpace. thePlatform aims to change that today with the announcement of their new social media player at the TV of Tomorrow Show 2010 in San Francisco.
Marty Roberts, VP of Marketing at thePlatform, explained that there were two reasons for this reluctance:
He went on to explain that thePlatform has fixed both of these issues with the new social media player. In addition to content geographic and release window restrictions being supported, ads can be inserted either at the beginning or during the video clip playback.
The solution supports 10 social sites “out-of-the-box”, including Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live and Yahoo! Buzz. It can also be extended to support any others a user might care to use through the service (Google Buzz springs to mind.) The features are also available through thePlatform’s PDK.
Marty demoed the feature to me using a clip from the upcoming “A-Team” movie (like we need another ‘80s TV remake!) Using the feature is very easy. You select the beginning and end of the clip you want to share, click the icon for the social site you want to use and it’s automatically launched with the appropriate link embedded and ready to go. Twitter works by embedding a “tinyurl” in the tweet with ready-made, standard hash tags for easy searching.
The only announced customer for the new features today is Associated Press but Marty assures me many more are on the way. Keeping in mind that thePlatform is one of the major vendors to cable for TV Everywhere services, we can only hope that the likes of Comcast and Time Warner Cable embrace the features and bring the mainstream content providers along for the ride.
If you’re interested in this subject and you’re in the San Francisco area this week, join Marty and me at the TV of Tomorrow for a panel discussion on Thursday afternoon. We’ll be discussing “OTT vs. TV Everywhere” along with Herve Utheza of RCDb, Ian Valentine of Miniweb, Vic Odryna from ZeeVee, Guy Tennant from Irdeto and David Allred of Sezmi. With such a diverse and vocal group it should be a lively discussion. We’ll debate whether TV-E and can stem the OTT tide. Subject liable to come up in the discussion include the social side of video, of course, along with cord-cutting, the role of Blu-Ray players, Internet enhanced TV and host of other interesting and contentious topics. Look forward to seeing you there.
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