Limelight today announced the new Limelight Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile, an extension of our web content management platform focused on mobile site publishing. Coming on the heels of our August software update, the mobile offering marks a significant step forward for the Dynamic Site Platform.  It lets users create mobile-specific sites, and provides tools for re-purposing content for multichannel delivery.

Features include:

• Device detection — Analyzes incoming browser requests and automatically displays desktop, mobile or tablet formatted content
• Shared content repository — Content is created once, and repurposed across multiple devices, regardless of format, design, look and feel
• Flexible templates — Template logic can be rendered in any text format, with full control over the presentation layer (HTML, CSS, Javascript)
• XML-based publishing — XML is the native content format of Dynamic Site Platform, allowing for fast and simple syndication of mobile content
• Device-specific image re-size — Device detection and template-based re-sizing ensure optimal image weights, regardless of device
• Single domain — Publish web and mobile sites at one URL that adapts to any device

The Limelight Mobility team has been hard at work with a new software update, and a new website dedicated to all things Limelight REACH. The latest software version is Release 4.11, and it focuses on access to REACH through a number of new APIs. New API functions include the ability to:

• create, read, update and delete content collections in a REACH account
• create, read, update and delete videos in a content collection
• check the status of all video jobs associated with a video being processed by REACH

A new update for Limelight REACH went live late yesterday. New features in release 4.10 include:

• RSS notification when videos prepared for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) are complete, even while preparation for other mobile devices is still underway
• REACH Interactive content report, showing percentage of video watched, buffering events
• REACH Interactive campaign report, showing ad delivery and user interaction
• Links to ad creatives prepared for mobile delivery, accessed from OpsCenter
• Playlist containing ad creatives prepared for mobile delivery, independent from video content, for specialized clients
• Video processing optimization

REACH Interactive is only three months old, but we’ve made quick progress in adding features and functions to the portfolio addition. As shown in the chart above, the new video playback metrics provide detail on the amount of video actually watched in a mobile application, and any buffering events that might have occurred. Users can zoom in on different windows of time to see how well an in-app video performed, and whether it held audiences’ attention.

For more information on all of our new features, see the complete 4.10 release notes.

You know those times when closed captioning comes in handy? It’s essential for hearing-impaired audiences, good for foreign language translation, and useful in environments where notching the volume up high just isn’t the most practical or polite course of action. For all of these situations, we’ve added a new closed captioning feature to the Limelight Video Platform. LVP users can upload a caption file, and captions will automatically be added to the associated video along with a list of language options. Controls in the Player Builder menu let video publishers adjust default settings or change the appearance or location of captions for viewers.

You can find details on creating caption files and troubleshooting tips over on the LVP blog. For further help, check out caption file services from 3PlayMedia, SubPLY, and dotSub.

Republished from the Limelight Video Platform blog

There’s no doubt about it- YouTube is great for social networking, but the reality is that you are limited with what you can do in terms of publishing video content to your site.

Have you ever gone to watch a YouTube video and just as you get to the good part it suddenly stops to buffer? Or even worse, it takes so long to load you give up watching the video before it even starts?

You spend so much time creating these videos for viewers to watch, why not make sure your viewers not only watch the video, but also have a good user experience?

LVP ensures that your viewers will have the best video viewing experience with adaptive streaming. The player auto-detects the user’s connection to deliver the highest quality at all times. Using LVP can guarantee that you videos will be watched by your audience and have the best user experience possible.

Using LVP allows you to syndicate to social media sites like YouTube, so you can still reach a broader audience without the risk of hand delivering your potential customers to competitors. On YouTube, after your video finishes playing, it automatically syndicates to similar videos, which more often times than not will be a video of your competitor.  Moral of the story, don’t send your viewers to other sites. Keep them where you want them- on your site!

LVP provides the tools to make your videos viral- or you can choose not to. It’s your choice with easy turn on and off features. If you choose to, our features allow you to share to social media sites, which allows for viewers to post your player on other sites, RSS feeds, or even email to a friend.

Fact: A common goal for company websites is to increase the traffic on their site.

Using LVP is a sure way to guarantee that viewers will spend more time on your site. While your videos may get more views on YouTube, you’re also sending them away from your site. With YouTube, someone can come to your site and when they go to watch your video they are automatically redirected to YouTube, thus leaving your site and diminishing traffic. Rather than sending your viewers away, you can keep them engaged on your site by using LVP.

If you are planning on monetizing your video content with YouTube, you can forget it! Not only is this virtually impossible to do, but it’s kind of hard to generate revenue off your video if it’s being played on YouTube.

LVP, on the other hand gives you the option to monetize through integration with third-party ad-servers/networks serving your own content through the LVP propriety ad-server. It’s as simple as turning on the ads and making money.

Using LVP analytics gives you the upper hand so you can determine the best approach to not only make your video content more effective, but your site as a whole more appealing to your audience.

We can’t stress enough the importance of being in the know. Understanding your audience will give you the insight to what exactly your viewers do and don’t want to see. Having this knowledge will benefit you in both generating revenue and increasing your site traffic.

YouTube does not provide this tool, therefore leaving you in the dark not knowing which content is working and which content is not as successful.

When everything is all said and done, it comes down to whether you really care about the growth of your site traffic and user experience. Yes, YouTube is free, but what good does that do you if your audience isn’t watching because of buffering or leaving your site? Using LVP is a definite way to stay organized and make sure your video content reaches if full potential.

It’s been a month since we acquired Clickability, and while there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, we haven’t be able to report on much from the still-early integration efforts. With that in mind, here’s a look at one of the technologies Clickability brings to the Limelight portfolio. Consider it a product spotlight, and a hint of more things to come from Limelight Networks.

The Clickability Web Content Management (WCM) product provides a platform for web publishing that addresses a wide range of content types and distribution models. Whether you’re publishing a full-fledged corporate website, creating a microsite for your latest marketing campaign, or centralizing control of several websites in one management interface, the Clickability WCM solution offers flexible tools to simplify the process and drive high-performance results. Here are a few of the characteristics worth noting.

• Dynamic publishing and content support: Content doesn’t stand still on the web. The Clickability solution lets your propagate changes instantly throughout your site or sites, or schedule changes as needed. You can also set up business logic rules to tailor content on the fly for different site visitors.
• Template tools: Because Clickability is template-based, it’s easy to feed content to different site modules in an automated fashion. Add a blog, a subscribers-only section, or an area for users to submit their own content, and the publishing workflow is simplified through whatever templates you choose to implement.
• Content sharing and mobile options: If you want to syndicate or share content, Clickability uses an XML-based content repository that lets you customize that content for its intended audience. This works not only for sharing material across different sites, but also for optimizing sites automatically on mobile devices.
• Lots of extras: Your business has its own unique requirements for the web, and we support them with integrated ad serving, search engine optimization, multilingual capabilities, social media tools, reporting and analytics features, and much more.

Limelight EyeWonder Interactive Advertising Services include extensive tracking and reporting features for online ad campaigns. These cover video and non-video interactions, as well as summary reports over time. This is nothing new. However, recently we’ve also added in new AdWonder Ad Visibility Metrics for a more granular look at your brand exposure.

These metrics include:

• Total Visible Time (seconds)
• Average Visible Time (seconds)
• Visible Time to Brand Exposure Time
• Total Time Viewable (in 20% increments)
• Unique Ad Views (in 20% increments)
• Average Position on Page (pixels)
• Average Scroll Position on Page (pixels)
• Average Visible Browser Width, Height and Area (pixels)
• Unique Ad Views by Browser Width and Height (pixels)

Apple has a major event planned for later today, and the widely-held assumption is that the company will announce its next-generation iPad. Both the Limelight Video Platform and Limelight REACH service will support the next iPad on day one.

Video publishers are probably not in a panic about Apple’s announcement because the video delivery specs aren’t likely to change a great deal from the iPad 1. (The Apple HTTP streaming protocol isn’t going anywhere.) However, the next Apple tablet does add one more gadget to the list of connected devices publishers have to track. As complicated as the video delivery process is in the mobile arena, it’s equally difficult to manage the inbound data from all the devices consumers are using.

One element of our Limelight REACH service is the ability to view integrated analytics reports showing activity across virtually every type of mobile device. Reports include details on historical data, most requested programs, user behavior and consumption metrics, and geographic distribution. Above is a graphic from a major media publishing customer of ours showing how video views break down across different hardware platforms. It’s one example of the type of reporting data we can provide. We can also aggregate user views by brand, model, and device ID. A device ID includes a specific configuration of hardware, OS, and browser version.

Note that REACH is also an open platform, which means it supports popular third-party measurement systems like Omniture for extended reports that place video metrics next to other end-user data that publishers may collect.

Analytics are just one small part of the video publishing workflow, but they are an important one, particularly as the mobile ecosystem continues to fragment. Looking for info on other publishing elements? Here are a few links.

• Video ingest and library management
• Player customization
• CMS integration
• Mobile delivery
• Web/mobile acceleration services

Republished from the Limelight Video Platform blog

Limelight Video Platform embed codes now have intelligence built into them that ensures video delivery to all devices including mobile. With video consumption on mobile phones growing rapidly, you will want to be sure that your customers are getting access to your site’s videos regardless of device. The LVP Smart Embed Code does this easily. Once LVP Mobile Delivery is enabled, all a user has to do is drop the code onto a web page. When a visitor comes to that page the Smart Embed Code will automatically detect and deliver the proper transcoded video file based on the visitor’s hardware environment regardless if it’s a PC or a Smartphone including Blackberrys, Androids, HTML5 or iDevices.

LVP Mobile Delivery is standard on the Enterprise Edition, but is also available for a monthly fee on the Professional and Premier Editions. If you have questions or would like to enable Mobile Delivery on your account, click here to contact us.

Copy and paste the Smart Embed Code and your done.

Need a custom video player for your website? You can code your own player skin, or take the easy route. One of the convenient features in the Limelight video platform solution is the ability to clone player templates and customize them with features like watermarks, color changes, and icon adjustments. The picture above shows one completely custom UI (designed by accessing our player API), and several templates that have been tweaked using simple menu commands. Once you create your own, you can publish any video through it using an automatically-generated embed code. Change your player at will, or use different skins for different video channels.