thePlatform Unveils New Capabilities to Support Online Video Businesses

SEATTLE, Aug. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Media companies and content owners face an expanding challenge trying to publish their video assets across multiple devices with varying rights restrictions and advertising obligations. Today, thePlatform, the leading white-label video publishing company, launched a suite of new features to enhance its customers' ability to enforce video business policies, monetization models, and content restrictions using the company's mpx Beta video management system.

Specifically, mpx Beta now includes new tools for creating and managing curated video feeds, integrated support for applying advertising policies, and additional capabilities to enforce viewing restrictions for TV shows, live events, movies, clips, and more. In addition, the company published a new security white paper on best- practices, including methods of securing content between storage and the CDN (content delivery network), and in various playback scenarios.

"Today's fractured video environment requires content owners to juggle an expanding list of requirements to deliver and protect their assets," said Marty Roberts, vice president of sales and marketing for thePlatform. "The new enhancements to mpx Beta provide our customers with robust, flexible, and secure tools to protect and monetize their growing premium video libraries across a multitude of devices and platforms."

Introduced by thePlatform earlier this year, mpx Beta offers features to make managing large content libraries easier; versatile tools to enable more business models across an ever-expanding number of websites, mobile devices, and set-top-boxes; and a continuing commitment to enterprise class performance. The new enhancements to mpx Beta features include:

Curated Feeds Drive More Video Views

Feeds provide instant presentations of the playable content catalog, including metadata such as title, descriptions, and thumbnails. The new Feeds service in mpx Beta provides additional capabilities to give content owners more power and flexibility over how content is presented. Specifically, mpx Beta customers can set editorially and dynamic playlists within the feed. Customers can increase their video views by pinning popular content to the top of the playlist and promoting additional videos based on what's new or a content category.

Customers using Feeds to syndicate their video to partners can also use mpx Beta to apply advertising policies and restrictions to all the content in the feed. This ensures the right ads are played for partners and that content delivery requests are limited to the syndication partner.

Advanced Restrictions

Many shows, especially sporting events, have specific, location-based viewing restrictions associated with them that content owners need to manage online in order to comply with content rights obligations. Previously, thePlatform enabled customers to set broad geo-restrictions, but the new mpx Beta enables customers to set much more granular policies.

For example, with mpx Beta customers can now restrict content viewing by country, region, metro code, city, area code, postal code, and set blackout areas for specific audiences within those regions. mpx Beta also gives customers the ability to restrict content by expiration date, referring domain, IP address, and keys. Customers can apply restrictions on content as a global account default, within feeds or on individual videos.

Integrated Advertising Policy Management

Advertising policies establish a set of rules, settings, and connections to advertising sources to ensure video content is monetized properly. mpx Beta enables customers to create and manage multiple advertising policies within the mpx Beta console, streamlining and simplifying the workflow.

With mpx Beta, customers can set policies to call primary and secondary (failover) advertising providers, providing access to a larger selection of ad inventory for any given show or video clip. mpx Beta enables customers to configure specific ad policy settings for advertising bumpers, pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and post-rolls. Customers can also use the console to set the number of ads to appear in any video, the frequency of ads, and whether users can skip ads or not. thePlatform's new advertising policy management features are integrated with a wide variety of advertising company partners.

thePlatform also added additional capabilities to mpx Beta today, with full details available at www.thePlatform.com.

New Media Security White Paper

Concurrent with today's announcement, thePlatform published a free, new white paper outlining best practices to secure content at both the media file and playback levels. The white paper discusses security considerations for storage, content delivery, feeds, URL tokens, availability windows, IP addresses, geo-restrictions, domain referrals, device identification, digital rights management (DRM), and entitlements.

Separately, thePlatform also announced today that it was selected by the Outdoor Channel to manage the programmer's online video publishing efforts. Additional details about that announcement can be found here.

thePlatform publishes video and other media to PCs, mobile devices and TV. Media companies rely on thePlatform as their open, central hub for managing, monetizing and syndicating billions of professionally produced video views annually. thePlatform currently provides online video management services to numerous programmers, leading media companies, and five of the top cable TV service providers in North America, including the largest "TV Everywhere" deployments. In order to support the increasingly complex needs of customers to manage cross-platform video publishing, thePlatform provides robust customer support, including professional services, account management, and industry-leading 24/7 technical support.

Additional information about mpx Beta is available at www.thePlatform.com.

About thePlatform

thePlatform™ is the leading white-label video management and publishing company. Media companies rely on thePlatform as their open, central hub for managing, monetizing, and syndicating billions of professionally produced video views annually. The company's services provide unmatched versatility for designing and supporting video businesses on PCs, mobile, and TV. Customers include: Associated Press, Big Ten Network, Cablevision, Canwest, CBC, CBS College Sports, CNBC, Comcast, Corus Entertainment, Cox Communications, ExerciseTV, Fox Sports Network, HIT Entertainment, NBC Local Media, PBS, PBS KIDS Sprout, Rogers, Sony BMG, Starz Play, Time Warner Cable, Travel Channel Media, and numerous others. With a 10-year history of service, thePlatform is an independent subsidiary of Comcast based in Seattle, Wash. For more information: www.thePlatform.com.

All product and service names listed in this release remain property of their parent companies and do not indicate official support or endorsement for thePlatform or its products and services.

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