thePlatform Unveils New Social Media Player for Professional Video Sites and Content Owners

SEATTLE and SAN FRANCISCO, March 3 /PRNewswire/ -- At the "TV of Tomorrow Show 2010" today in San Francisco, thePlatform, the leading white-label video publishing company, unveiled a new social media player enabling media companies to embed and share premium online video across leading social networks. In addition, thePlatform's newest Player Development Kit (PDK 4.2) provides standard features that enable consumers to more easily share their favorite clips of premium online video, while preserving the financial obligations between content owners, advertisers and distributors.

"With the right tools in place, media companies can embrace the notion of consumers becoming the best distributors of their video," said Ian Blaine, co-founder and CEO of thePlatform. "With our new Player Development Kit, audiences can clip and share a favorite portion of video with a few simple clicks. Historically, there has been some resistance from traditional media companies to fully empower consumers to share their videos across social networks because of the need to maintain some control over branding and monetization. Our video management system gives them this control. The advertisements can travel with their virally syndicated content, no matter where it has been embedded."

Premium Video Goes Social

Customers who use thePlatform's new PDK 4.2 will be able to place their entire video player experience – with all of its features, add-ins and components – into a single Adobe Flash file for embedding into social networks, blogs, and affiliate sites. Customers can immediately launch video players that are pre-integrated with 10 leading social media sites. Customers can also easily expand to more social media sites by using thePlatform's fully documented APIs. The pre-integrated social media sites include:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• Digg
• reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Windows Live
• Yahoo! Buzz
• Vodpod

Users can also share video with simple e-mail-to-a-friend features, RSS feeds and embeddable links. In addition, thePlatform's Community Toolkit enables consumers to comment, rate, tag and create favorites via their players. For Twitter, thePlatform has added additional features including support for automatically adding hash tags based on the video's metadata and short URLs generation to simplify the experience for consumers.

The new social media player also lets consumers legally share specific sections of a video in a manner that preserves the financial obligations between content owners and advertisers.

"One of the most common types of messages when consumers Tweet or e-mail about an online video is to include a note like, 'Watch what happens at 2 minutes into the video – it's hilarious,'" continued Blaine. "Our new social media player provides a win-win for consumers and our customers. Consumers can embed and share the portion of the video that most interests them, but the content owner maintains the ability to show advertising and keep the integrity of the financial model."

"There's no question that sharing and other social media capabilities are becoming increasingly important features for video players, and that's also true on AP's Online Video Network," said Bill Burke, global director, Online Video Products, Associated Press. "Right now, we're building enhanced players for our 1500-affiliate network, and having these features as a standard part of thePlatform's tool set means faster and less costly player development - a real long-term benefit."

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.

Full details about the new PDK 4.2, which is available at no additional cost to customers of thePlatform, can be found 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, BBC, Big Ten Network, Cablevision, 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.

SOURCE thePlatform

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