EMERYVILLE, CA – June 25, 2009 - TubeMogul, the Web’s most popular distribution and analytics service for online video, announced a partnership with innovative video publishing platform Castfire today.

Under the terms of the deal and resulting integration, TubeMogul’s InPlay technology will track rich video performance data from Castfire’s video player, including how much of a video is actually watched, whether viewers fast-forward or rewind, audience geography, what sites and search terms are referring viewers and much more.

The partnership is made all the more powerful by Castfire’s unique content management system, which allows video publishers to make live changes, swapping content and ads in and out of a video file on demand. This flexibility allows video publishers to experiment with different advertising, branding or cross promotions, tracking the results in audience engagement using TubeMogul’s analytics.

“In industry jargon, this partnership allows A/B testing on video in a way that has never been done before, with the ability to make changes based on live, audience interaction data” comments Brett Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of TubeMogul. “This pushes the frontier of what’s possible in online video publishing and monetization by allowing publishers to compare different types of advertising and measure the effect on the viewer,” echoes Brian Walsh, CEO and Co-Founder of Castfire.

Additionally, Castfire users will now be able to utilize TubeMogul’s syndication technology from Castfire, automatically syndicating their videos to YouTube and up to two dozen other top video sharing sites with the click of a mouse. This feature set will be integrated into the existing Castfire CMS and will simplify and enhance the distribution and syndication of all content published by Castfire customers. This integrated toolset will provide powerful, cross-site analytics and video data whether content is viewed on a publisher’s site, one of its affiliates or on a high traffic site like YouTube.

About Castfire
Castfire is a video and audio publishing platform that helps companies manage and monetize large libraries of media content. The Castfire platform is a one stop white-labeled solution that allows publishers to reach their audience across multiple platforms and devices and increase their audience size by automating complex syndication relationships.

About TubeMogul
TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web’s top video sharing sites. TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched. TubeMogul offers tracking far beyond the traditional metric of video “views.” TubeMogul InPlay, which can be activated within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance — all in real-time.

Feeds

The approach for feeds is to return structured data in a variety of formats. The most popular formats are supported (xspf, rss, mrss) and publicly available. As much as mrss is trying to be a standard, there are unfortunately many “flavors” available, from Truveo to Bebo to VodPod to - too many to list. All of the different “flavors” are available in our mrss feeds. The feeds are not only for your content as a whole or through a hierarchy - channels and content producers - but can also segment by categories, tags and syndication partners.

A fantastic example of this in action on each of the player biography pages Washington Redskins site (example). The flash player is passed a feed with the latest 10 videos tagged with that players name - a process their staff does religiously with each video. It provides a simple solution, to both code and manage, to place relevant videos into a website.

API

We often refer to our API as the leading indicator of traffic for the coming months, as new clients, integrations and solutions will often develop on the API prior to launching. To date, approximately 90% of the functionality available in our CMS is available through the API. Because of this, many of our solutions are built with deep integrations that do not require logging into the Castfire CMS.

From September, 2008 - May, 2009, we have seen a 2193% increase of usage across both the feeds and API. To put that into perspective, the full month of September’s usage was done in just over 32 hours in May! The new solutions currently being developed are all extremely dependent on both the API and feeds, creating immersive experiences for the audience and streamlined workflows for the publishers. We believe that this is key for our clients success.

If you are interested in learning more about our feeds and API’s, let us know.

We continue to see the same amount of growth on those devices across our customer base. While flash delivery of web video continues to be a large portion of delivery, delivery for iPhone, Android, Tivo, Roku and Vudu are growing rapidly. We expect this growth to only accelerate over the coming 12-18 months as these platforms increase their install base and platforms like Yahoo Widgets begin taking hold in the living room.

They broke the list into two categories, New This Year and Classics, with sub categories of audio and video. I agree completely with Chris Albrecht in his commentary at NewTeeVee:

It’s amusing to think of The Onion as “new” and Ask a Ninja as “classic,” but whatever, both make me laugh. And while it’s obvious that both of those podcasts carry an established audience, it’d be nice to know how Apple’s editorial choices match up with the popular choice, but the company’s pretty stingy with stats, listing only the top podcast of the day.

I am a details guy and was intrigued to do further analysis.

Classics: Video

*While Vintage Toon Cast is Indie, their content is public domain cartoon classics. A bit of a mix!

Production reflects Main Stream Media, "Professional" production (Revision 3, DECA, Next New Networks, etc), or Independent.  This is not to say that an Indie property is not professional, rather, it still maintains the 2 people and a camcorder upbringing!  Ads are reported as Online, Offline (downloadable media), Both or None. Hosting is my best guess (after some digging) as to what company, if any, is hosting/publishing the content (hey - we’re a publishing company and I’m interested).

My analysis of ads is only from the past couple of episodes and not over the past year. It does not take into account any of use of non video ads (banners, text, etc) or associated monetization (DVD sales, t-shirts, etc).

For hosting, there are sometimes multiple entries.  For instance, Cool Hunting Video is hosted by Brightcove for flash delivery (online) and on Amazon’s S3 for their downloadable media. I am not wizard enough to tell if there is an additional CMS or publishing system for the self hosted and left it as ‘Self’.

For the Classics, there is quite a spread between Indie, MSM and Pro productions, with Indie pulling a 50% share. 70% of the top ten are using advertising, in one way or another, to support the property. What is interesting in this breakdown, however, is that this is generated by iTunes and only capturing downloadable media and not online plays. Therefore, the monetization for this ranking drops to 50% for the properties.

New This Year: Video

Definitions from Classics apply to the New category.

What is interesting is the definite shift of Indie production to Pro/MSM for new properties. It dropped from 50% in the Classics to 10% in the New category. One conclusion can be that the "Classics" (I guess that is something over a year old!), were founded with a couple of people, a passion and a camcorder. 2007 is the year that production companies and MSM have gone after this segment.  It also makes sense that the newer properties are not monetized as well as the Classics as they are still building audiences and developing ad strategies.

Most important, and not reflected in the analysis above, content is still king. After seeing some of the episodes, I immediately subscribed and look forward to catching up with back episodes. There is a ton of funny, insightful and educational content in these 20 properties. Kudos to everyone involved.

Sampling this content makes me question my Comcast bill for cable that I pay every month!

The Google Chart API is the bee’s knees.  What a great, simple tool for fast web development!  It is so incredibly simple and cool:

50k impressions a day is a limitation that could be challenging, but it is so tempting to incorporate.  My mind is going crazy with the possibilities!

However, API’s also require a certain level of aptitude. The user must understand the basics of programming, know what data to capture, what data to store, etc. In the end, an API may be used by millions but only understood by a small percentage of that.  There is, however, an API that we all know how to use: email.

[Side note: my fiancee pointed out to me the other day that I usually spell it "e-mail" with the hyphen. That's the way it was originally spelled.  She said I was showing my age!]

When we created our ftp functionality, we wanted to incorporate an easy method for publishers to be able to use the URL’s and embed statements in their websites without having to log back into Castfire. To accomplish this, after ftp’ing files to Castfire, two e-mails are sent:

1. Acknowledge the files have been uploaded and provide back the URL’s and embed statement for the new episode.  It also states that these files are not currently ready as they are being transcoded.
2. A final e-mail stating that the transcoding has finished and it is available for publishing.

The email is also "smart" because the directory structure of the publisher’s ftp site mirrors the hierarchy of their account. So a network login sees directories for each content producer and channel, as well as directories for each media type (intro, outro, promo).  Each content producer login sees a subset of the network. So a publisher can upload new episodes into the correct channel without having to log in to Castfire - including shows that have multiple content segments.

In addition, default settings, including filenames, metadata, and status can be set for each channel.  This is a huge time savings for the publisher as you can set it once and rarely have to revisit it.

We view these e-mails emails as the most basic API possible!  FTP and email have been around just about as long as the internet and are accessible to a great majority of web users. While it is possible to log in and publish shows through our CMS, it is many times faster and easier to ftp 10 new videos and get an email back when they are complete.

Online Fame Easy; Ads Harder to Get - TVWeek - News

Near the top of the pile sit Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, who have parlayed their "Ask a Ninja" Web program into about $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing.

Andy Plesser from Beet.tv follows up with:

Seems that Federated Media is doing a good job in selling ads for the show.  And the tiny San Francisco start-up CastFire is doing an impressive job in publishing the video.

Thanks, Andy!  You are correct - FM is killing it! They have taken advantage of Castfire’s functionality to rotate ads through archives and downloadable media to maximize profits for their publishers. We continue to see growth in all properties which is being accelerated with our Bebo, Facebook and video search engine integration.

Congrats to Kent and Doug on their continued success with Ask a Ninja.

If you are not familiar with some of the challenges of working with RSS feeds, there are two key areas that needed to be addressed immediately.  First off, the feeds are generally cached by online feedreaders, stripping javascript and other code from the xml.  This removes the ability for an ad server to directly interact with each impression.  Additionally, the many of the large feed readers do not allow for flash components to be used directly in the reader.

Custom players and tracking codes were generated for each of the sites - both the RSS unit and the 300×250 unit, with each of the 8 videos loaded for each.  Publishers were provided a single block of html to place into their RSS feed, for which Castfire is able to manage.  Castfire’s automation and player templates provides the ability for random videos to be played, or for Federated Media to update/change the creative at any time.

Castfire has also worked with many of the online feed readers to ensure that our video players are whitelisted and allowed to be displayed within the reader.  This is a key to this campaign’s success; without being able to view the player, it would be impossible to watch the video!

Scale is a big issue when looking at a campaign like this - RSS can be brutal and some of the sites have the largest RSS audiences out there!  At the time of this blog post, Feedburner reports TechCrunch’s subscribers at 624k.  For each post on all of the sites, a player is displayed, analytics collected, and a video may be played.  Tens of millions of impressions for this single campaign - not including any of the standard episodic content that is published.

The final piece of the puzzle is analytics to which our data warehousing efforts come shining through.  Castfire creates a separate data warehouse for each network.  With multiple fact tables, tons of dimensions, and incredible detail, reports breakdown sites, player impressions, video plays, click throughs, geo information and more.

While 98% of our customers are publishing branded, episodic content, the value of our audio/video platform becomes more apparent as the system is responsible for more and more uses. It is exciting to see our platform continue to grow and expand. </proud parents>

Next up, the San Diego Chargers launched video content on Castfire, with players on the front page and on individual news sites. Our relationship with the Chargers began many, many months ago when Joel Price contacted us after seeing an interview I was in. We woked with Joel to get the property launched with new content and are beginning the process of adding in their entire catalog. In addition to the videos, we will be working with Joel to bring all of their audio podcasts onto the platform as well. This has a ton of sentimental value for me as I lived in Chula Vista, CA during elementary school. I have such a soft spot for anything San Diego and still love them Bolts! (Though, of course, I have no favorite teams in the NFL…

And to finish out the hat trick, the Indianapolis Colts launched hours later, with a very comprehensive solution to handle audio, video, players, playlists, thumbnails and ad rotation. In a weeks time, we added 500+ episodes of audio and video, designed multiple players, updated meta data, and set up all of the feeds. Working with AJ Macht of the Colts was fantastic — knowledgeable, quick and hard working. It was a great case study for us in launching a site with extensive archives, extensive customization, and high visibility.

Needless to say, we have extremely high expectations for the month of October! Best of all, we are no where close to done launching new, large properties this month. Our dev team (and more than a hat tip; a full on, to the ground bow) is firing on all cylinders and are amazing. As I’ve said before, it takes a team, and I am proud to be part of this one!

UPDATE:
Few weeks ago we were searching for good website to download latest movies, and i found it here: download movies, I recommend to use it for searching films.

It was at that moment that I was happy I followed the lead of our friends at Dogster and had retained Laine Campbell from Palomino DB. In our hurried conference call, with everyone throwing out suggestions, she calmly identified the issue and suggested a simple, elegant solution. With her assistance, we had the fix in 30 minutes later and the all of the servers were back to no load and humming along. Laine has quickly become a part of the Castfire team and works with us not as a consultant, but a full member of the team.

If you are a startup looking at growth and scaling, I pass on the same recommendation that Dogster did: contact Laine! She is uber responsible and quite the wizard. Thanks to Dogster and Laine!

The NFL’s Atlanta Falcons worked with Digitaria and Castfire to relaunch their web presence and we think the both the design and the content are fantastic.  As seen above, the video content is incorporated into the site itself, providing an integrated experience between images, text and video.  As Castfire delivers a single flash video file (flv) and not an xml playlist, custom players throughout the site were easy to build and integrate to provide a seamless experience for the Falcons’ fans.

I have been watching the video work by Matt Moore from the Falcons and have been extremely impressed by the amount and quality of content that he is publishing each day.  The web team for the Falcons, like many of the NFL teams, is small and has very little time. For instance, when the team is playing away: the team is not going to wait for the web team to edit and upload before the bus leaves the stadium! They have to get the content together, edited and posted — sometimes while riding to the airport and uploading via an EVDO connection.

The Castfire platform automates much of the process of publishing content, including transcoding, meta data, multiple formats, jpg and thumbnail images, to offload as much as possible. We have worked with the teams at Digitaria and the Falcons to improve the process, speed and functionality and will continue to make improvements over the coming weeks.

The highlight for me is the incredible series they are producing. My favorite? I know you are thinking it is the Cheerleader Bios, but no: David Irons’ Rooke Diary. It is a fresh and real look into the life of rookies in the NFL.  David Irons’ is extremely funny and hams it up for the camera. You can subscribe here.

Castfire has worked with Federated Media and WebbAlert to launch this new property. In doing so, we worked together to roll out new functionality: media groups and a syndicated player. As building an audience is always key for new properties, they have partnered with a handful of sites and traded promotional spots for placement. To automate this, the two features, while separate, work hand in hand.

A basic building block of Castfire is the concept of a template. While they are standard in website CMS’s, they are quite a new concept for multimedia. We have added a new segment type, Media Group, to our templates that groups multiple segments to one slot. Each time a video is requested, a different media segment is played, allowing for automatic rotation of interstitials. Each of the partner sites will get an equal amount of promotion across all of the video impressions — including rss distribution of quicktime files! This feature works great for not only external promotions, but also cross promoting content within a network. Look for this to be rolled out to many of our clients to promote content across their networks.

Slide out Player for WebbAlert

Originally uploaded by castfire

The second piece of functionality adds a javascript widget that can be placed on partner sites. The widgets displays a jpg image, either a static image or one from the latest episode. Upon clicking on the image, the latest episode will slide out of the image and begin playing. The magic is that this can be set once and Castfire will ensure that the latest episode is always played! No need to know the actual url of the latest episode, having to update html, or having some sort of rss reader figure it out — it is all built into Castfire. This is a variation on the feature that is used by the Killington Ski Resort in their successful podcast.

Congratulations to WebbAlert on your launch! This is definitely a video we will watch each morning…

Additional Coverage: TechCrunch, Fred Wilson, NewTeeVee, Gizmodo, John Battelle

• The episodes themselves are dynamically created using a template. There are actually 6 segments to the show that are assembled into either a single flv or mp4 file. Prior to publishing, we changed the template, updated both the ad segments, and updated the DVD segment — none of which required editing on the desktop!
• This is not pre or post roll advertising! The advertisement exists in the musical credits and as the third segment (interstitial). The placement can be changed at any time and on the fly.
• Each segment can maintain it’s own click through links on the flash player. This provides the Ask a Ninja team to have click through directly to their site as well as the advertisement have trackable click through from the player.
• The Ask a Ninja brand is most important! Download links all point to the askaninja.com domain for them to remain in control of their content.
• Castfire is a white label solution that provides the management, distribution, monetization and analysis tools for both FM and Ask a Ninja.

More coverage here:

• NewTeeVee
• ChasNote
• Searchblog
• Ad Rants
• Additional: James Gross
• Andre Torrez

Saxotech is a very impressive organization that you have probably never heard of! They provide the infrastructure, online and in print, for 400 newspapers worldwide. There website gives small, but impressive, metrics that reflects the power of their platform (as of 4/20/2007):

• 456 Customers
• 10,712 Users
• 13,755,545,896 page views

Castfire will provide the multimedia CMS to allow their customers to reach audiences across multiple platforms and devices: web, iPod, Zune, Apple TV, syndication, etc. In addition, the platform will allow their sales forces to monetize all of the content and provide additional revenue streams to their organizations. We will be working Saxotech to innovate and provide additional outlets for the content. Audiences expect content to be delivered in a variety of formats: print (*real* paper and the web), audio, enhanced audio, and video. This partnership will provide those features, and more, out of the box.

I can say, personally, that our interactions with Saxotech have been outstanding and the possibilities this provides are phenomenal. Their knowledge of the news publishing and our knowledge of multimedia publishing are a fantastic match! We will highlight customers as they become live, which will be shortly.

SAXOTECH and Castfire Partner to Provide an Integrated Video Solution for the Media Publishing Industry

Agreement Allows Media Companies to Reach New Audiences, Drive and Manage Viewership and Realize New Ad Revenue Opportunities

TAMPA, Fla., April 20, 2007 – SAXOTECH today announced it has partnered with Castfire to enable its media company Web sites to launch ad-supported Internet video channels, syndication initiatives and user-generated media campaigns.

SAXOTECH will integrate the Castfire solution with SAXOTECH Online™, an enterprise-class Web publishing platform developed exclusively to enable the rapid flow of content from news sources to dynamic, multimedia Web sites. With the technology integration, the two applications will work together to seamlessly publish video content.

SAXOTECH will offer a one-stop video solution empowering its customers to distribute content in a controlled video player on their Web sites, while at the same time providing additional revenue streams through pre- and post-roll ad spots. The toolset also allows for upload and management of user-generated content.

The Castfire solution is not limited to online video, but allows for the management and distribution of audio and enhanced audio. Castfire was designed as a platform to distribute multimedia content in all formats keeping media publishing companies ahead of the technology curve.

“SAXOTECH recognizes that video is a powerful medium; crucial to online news and information consumption,” said Peter Ibsen, executive vice president of strategy and products of SAXOTECH. “After a thorough evaluation, we are excited to partner with Castfire and believe the integrated video solution will provide our customers with a customizable architecture, robust features, and a templated system that will ensure a cohesive branded experience even with user-generated content.”

“This partnership blends two top media technologies integrated to provide a single environment for distributing news and information,” said Brian Walsh, CEO of Castfire. “Flexibility is key in reaching audiences and Castfire provides the ability to view not only on the Web but through RSS and with devices such as iPods, Apple TV or Tivo. We couldn’t be more excited to be working with SAXOTECH to bring next-generation technologies to media companies and their audiences.”

This technology relationship is a key element of SAXOTECH’s continued strategy for successful media businesses, outlining how next-generation media companies will benefit from a single, focused technology infrastructure and removing the need to manage multiple vendor integration.

The integrated video solution will be generally available in May, 2007.

About SAXOTECH
SAXOTECH is the leading provider of integrated Web and editorial content management software, and online advertising solutions designed exclusively for the media publishing industry. Our scalable, easy-to-implement solutions are used to plan, create, edit, design and publish for multiple channels and are backed by world-class customer support. Today, SAXOTECH’s solutions are in use by more than 450 publishers around the world. For more information on SAXOTECH, please visit our Web site at www.saxotech.com.

About Castfire
Founded in 2005, Castfire provides content management, distribution and monetization tools for audio and video online. Designed for high volume sites with large libraries of content, the system features easy to use interfaces and advanced APIs to allow publishers the ability to reach audiences across multiple platforms and in multiple formats. For more information on Castfire, please visit our Web site at www.castfire.com.

To Christoph: yet again you amaze me, my friend. Castfire would not be here without the super human efforts you continually extend. As always, let’s keep moving on to the next release.

Update: We use Wordpress MU and it is not handling the embed from Podtech very well. I am on it! In the mean time, follow this link.

“The main differnce [between podcasting and broadcasting] … Probably it’s that the relationship you have with the audience is very, very different from the relationship you have with the broadcast audience. Maybe because the internet that brings the programing to you is the same tool you can use to get back to somebody. You hear from your audience immediatly. They are engaged in something that is much more like a conversation.”

While we have been involved with podcasting for over 2 years and agree with this statement, it was fantastic to hear it summarized so eloquently. The same tool that brings the program to the listener allows the listener to communicate back. What innovations can take place to enhance and encourage this?

One of the attendees of the meeting said they were looking for a partner that would continually innovate, bringing new value to their existing business. What did we see in the future? What is our dream? What a great question! As a team, we got to speak about technology innovations that we see in the coming 6-12 months. In my mind, that portion of the meeting was building a foundation for our relationship in the future: trust that Castfire will continue to innovate on their behalf. I have been thinking about that all night and day since the meeting.

What a great way to start each day: how can I innovate for our customers today? I love it.