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Ministry Anytime leverages Media Factory to connect Christians

posted by Steve Hulford on 08.02.12 Ministry Anytime leverages Media Factory to connect Christians

February 8, 2012 - Atlanta - Who says you can’t leverage technology to bring people closer to their faith?

Not Ministry Anytime. The Georgia-based organization—one of the world’s first 24-hour ministry social media portals dedicated to connecting Christians online—is leveraging Filemobile’s Media Factory platform, Worship Media Community and personal Broadband Video Player along with the FORscene collaborative, online edit suite to allow users to upload, edit and broadcast their faith-focused ministry and user-generated content.

The portal features more than 100 individual or topic-based ministry channels.

What’s truly exciting about this use of technology is how it will shape congregant communications in the years to come.

This approach could both enhance and transform the way people of faith interact with each other, as well as their traditional interaction with their preferred religious organizations. Filemobile is very excited by the sheer number of faith-based organizations that can leverage social media tools such as the Filemobile Worship Media Community to reach an ever-growing number of followers and grow their communities.

Social media and user-generated content not only allows religious groups to reach the masses, but specifically target key demographics such as older or younger potential or existing congregants. That’s particularly important in an era when many religious organizations are seeing membership numbers dwindle and are having an increasingly difficult time encouraging youth to keep the faith, while many aging congregants are experiencing greater mobility challenges and finding it more difficult to attend worship services.

But one of the most interesting aspects of Ministry Anytime’s initiative is its mobile focus. By utilizing Media Factory, the organization’s community members can share content from anywhere in the world. And when most youth spend the bulk of their time communicating on mobile devices, a web-based tool to support and promote worship among the next generation becomes indispensable.

As smart mobile devices become more ubiquitous in the years to come, rest assured that even more religious organizations will turn to rich media, user-generated content on mobile-friendly platforms to connect their communities in new and more technologically-advanced ways.

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Filemobile is off to Play!

posted by Steve Hulford on 18.05.11

May 18th, 2011, Toronto - Filemobile will be attending Brightcove's Play 2011 Global Customer Conference in Boston May 23rd - 25th. Brightcove, is the leading online video platform, and Play is their first annual global customer conference. More than 400 attendees will gather in Boston for three action-packed days of all star keynote sessions, 30 expert-lead breakout sessions, product demonstrations and fun-filled networking events. Keynote sessions will include guest speakers David Kenny, president of Akamai, Ben Forta, director of platform evangelism at Adobe, and Samuel Chang, general manager at LG Electronics, among others to be announced. Attendees will also have access to the Brightcove PLAY exhibitor pavilion, with flagship sponsors including Akamai, Adobe, LG Electronics, KnowledgeVision, Ektron, TubeMogul, Tremor Media, LeanIn, Twin Technologies, Roundarch, Filemobile, 3Play Media, Telestream, Brainshark, Fig Leaf Software, PLYmedia and Accedo Broadband.

Filemobile will have a booth and will be running a photo/video contest using our contest white label application that is integrated with the Brightcove platform. All videos uploaded into the contest will be pushed to Brightcove and served via the Brightcove video player. This is an exciting new product Filemobile and Brightcove will be selling in the market this year.

Filemobile's Chief Creative Officer Steve Hulford will be speaking at Play about User Generated Content and how to implement successful programs.

If you are planning to attend Brighcove Play 2011 please come see us!

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Filemobile Product & Platform Enhancement Update

posted by Jayson Ambrose on 01.12.10

Toronto, Ontario, Canada - Over the past six months our team has implemented a number of enhancements under the hood of Media Factory that focus on platform scalability and reliability. While scaling transcoder instances in the cloud and updating our search server technology to improve database responsiveness is incredibly important, I want to highlight some of the new things that you can deploy right now for your audience.

Move to the LongTail Video player framework

By adopting the hugely popular open-source JW player from LongTail Video, Filemobile has committed to using best-of-breed technologies that enable us to focus on what we do best. In addition to the JW Player being an active project that releases regular updates, this community of developers has made available a number of interesting plugins and skins.

We have already created two plugins of our own specific to the Media Factory UGC platform. Our related videos plugin displays a gallery of video thumbs at the end of a video, and our playtime tracking plugin actively monitors viewing activity and makes these statistics available in the Media Factory views report. Our plugins have been built to coexist with the Open Video Ads project, bringing VAST-compliant ad support to Media Factory white label applications.

Media Management and Reports

The Media Factory UGC management and moderation system has received a number of improvements in both performance and functionality. Video quality and supported formats have been improved, getting an increased default bit rate and size optimized for our larger web video players and mobile devices such as the iPad.

Content producers can now nest, hide, sort and order channels from Media Factory without touching a line of code.

There is now a dedicated comments report, giving producers deeper insight into user engagement. All reports have also received a very substantial performance boost, reducing processing time from minutes to seconds.

White Label Site Applications

Our two most popular applications - UGC Contest and Media Community - have received a number of enhancements. In both applications, the registration, login and upload code has been greatly improved and continues our commitment to providing the best content submission user experience. Our applications are standards based, so they look great on iPhones, Androids, tablets and smartphones.

Facebook integration is deeper than ever with the addition of the latest Facebook Login system and page tab templates. Now you can quickly and easily bring your UGC contest or community to your Facebook pages and offer visitors to your website the most effective registration experience.

We have a number of innovations in the pipeline, but in the meantime, please take both our UGC Contest and Community for a test drive.

Our gallery of client deployments show what you can do with the Media Factory development platform and our public documentation shows you how to do it.

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Social Media for Business

posted by Marc Milgrom on 26.05.10

May 27, 2010 – Toronto, ON | We hear a lot about social media every day in blog posts, Twitter, traditional media and the like. It’s “the” method of communication for many people, surpassing speaking on the phone, even if it’s mobile. It has become an accepted, effective and growing method of marketing and interacting with customers. So what about within your business?

Historically, technology was developed in the business world, government or academia first, and then later adapted for consumer opportunities. Examples include the desktop computer, email and the Internet itself. Today, what we’re often seeing is the opposite, with consumer products later finding business application, such as desktop search, podcasts, broadband video and mobile applications.

It’s also normal to see consumer software used by employees in the workplace before being formally adopted by IT departments. Want your people to be more productive and lower IT costs at the same time? Find out what your employees like to use and involve them in determining what tools the business can benefit from. Like it or not, changes are occurring in how people think, learn, process information, communicate and collaborate.

Social media is now becoming more widely accepted within businesses to enable people to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge in a more productive manner. LinkedIn and Twitter are two public sites that can be used effectively for specific business purposes such as recruitment or customer support. While management often debates the pros and cons of allowing employees access to popular, public social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, they are starting to see the value of these types of tools and functionality within the organization. You can now have functionality similar to the public social networks inside your organization – to share information in a safe and controlled environment, without the worry of exposing sensitive corporate information to others outside the company.

A few factors contribute to the value social media can play for business. Humans are social and visual creatures by nature. There is a strong move online toward images and video, for management communications, product information, presentations, blog posts and training (see Video Opportunities article for more examples). We are continuing to see communication go towards shorter, searchable and contextual “sound bites”.

Social media can aid in one other business challenge. The loss of corporate knowledge is a growing issue, with an aging population and significant numbers close to retirement, regular employee turnover and the high cost of training new people. When people leave your business, they walk out the door with some of your most valuable assets: applied knowledge and experience. Making it easier for people to share knowledge in a safe and controlled manner and wrapping social activities such as commenting, rating and tagging around online information and dialogues, helps draw out this experience and convert it from individual to organizational value. Capturing just a small percentage of this day-to-day experience and making it searchable within your organization unlocks a knowledge base that was previously inaccessible.

Your younger employees expect to have tools in the workplace that they already use daily. Providing similar, easy-to-use tools within the organization helps break down the traditional cultural resistance to knowledge sharing that many businesses struggle with.

“Social business” opportunities to share what’s important and interesting include:

management communications;
a central place to aggregate, manage, access and repurpose all presentations;
innovation tools;
competitor information;
profiles with documents authored, recent work experience, speaking engagements, areas of interest and blogs; and
online, just-in-time and distance training.

Through the use of video and interactive applications, you help attract, engage, interact and retain your people. You also reduce the time of onboarding, making employees more valuable, more quickly.

Additional benefits of making your business social are:

unleashing creativity and innovation;
reducing time to market;
increasing productivity through quicker access to knowledge;
increasing revenue by delivering broader value to more customers;
significantly reducing email messages; and
improving overall employee engagement.

By building true organizational knowledge, these tools help strengthen brand and corporate loyalty within an organization, thereby increasing external brand value.

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Opportunities | Part 3: The Potential Applications for Video are Everywhere

posted by Chris Becker on 03.02.10

Feb 1, 2010 – New York, NY

Opportunities | The potential applications for video are everywhere

The implications of the growth and interactivity of video is a major challenge for the media industry and is part of debate about the future of media. While digital media is experiencing health growth and provides promising opportunities for content producers, marketers and brands, it is unclear how broadcasters and publishers will capitalize on these changes.

For business in general, the opportunities are more clear. From a competitive standpoint, any business interested in increasing effectiveness, improving efficiency or lowering costs needs to seriously look at video given the changes in the market place, capabilities of technology, and everyone’s expectations, knowledge and use of video.

The power of video to address one or more business challenges is compelling. Imagine if:

product videos with overviews and descriptions were available on demand and searchable on Google;
the knowledge of departing employees was captured on video beforehand;
focus groups and interviews were cataloged by question or topic and made available to the appropriate business functions and management;
customer feedback could be received that includes facial expressions, intonation, and intent;
meetings, events and conferences could be recorded and made available to anyone in the company at any time; or
that great sales pitch, turn of phrase or great conversation was captured, indexed and searchable.

For most businesses, almost every business function can be looked at from the perspective of how video can improve service delivery, customer feedback, knowledge management, marketing, sales, communications, public relations, training … the list goes on and on. A more detailed and longer list of applications for video can be found in “42 ways to use video to grow your business”. This article catalogues many ways to use video to grow business, including a rating of the popularity and growth potential of each idea.

Here are some examples of innovative and new ways to interact with video:

Interactive video | Klickable.tv offers a product that creates a 'wrapper' around any video player, allowing users to add clickable tags throughout any video. This could be used for creating video 'treasure hunts', product tie-ins', character descriptions and more … kind of like creating a video based wiki.
Searchable video (e.g. tags, metadata) | YouTube and Obama use indexed video to enable users to choose specific video segments from a longer speech. Check it out at mybarackobama.com.
Shareable video | Video that is more interactive, shareable and searchable is moving beyond YouTube to anywhere on the web or mobile device. For example, here at Filemobile, we’ve developed several applications that are designed to share and interactive with video including a Media Community application and a Broadband Video application. Sheridan College’s Shine Brighter website uses the Media Community application to collect and share video. Vision TV leverages the Broadband Video application to distribute content online at video.visiontv.ca.
User generated and contextual video | With webcams and video enabled phones, everyone is becoming a video producer. User Generated Content (UGC) can be used to engage customers through campaigns such as contests. Filemobile works in this area with a UGC Contest application. The related meta-data collected along with UGC video can be used to target content and messages to specific groups based upon criteria such as interests or location. Marketers such as Kraft have used UGC to create engaging national campaigns that have a local appeal. One example is the Kraft 10 in 10 contest, asking people to nominate their community in a cross-country competition.
Transcribed video | Speakertext aligns transcript text with video to allow deep video integration with written content. Video segments can be selected and distributed to any website by choosing the relevant transcript text. This requires the manual alignment of transcribed text to video on setup but this transcription can be outsourced to services such Mechanical Turk.

As the old saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth at least a million.

Check out Part 1 | Evolution: Video, Not Just for TV Anymore.

Chris Becker
CEO – Filemobile Inc.

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Vision TV Launches New Video On Demand Service

posted by Steve Hulford on 14.09.09

On September 14th, 2009 Canada's Vision TV launched their Video On Demand product at www.visiontv.ca

This product showcases hundreds of videos from VIsion TV's programming lineup. You can watch full length documentaries, as well as clips from many of Vision TV's best shows.

Filemobile's Broadband Video Player allows content owners the ability to program their player with content, and to monetize it through ads.

When asked about working with Filemobile, Mark Prasuhn (COO ) had this to say: "Working with Filemobile was a real pleasure. They brought industry-leading expertise and creativity to bear on our video player project, and were integral to our efforts to make the player more robust with significant additional content, while remaining user-friendly and easy to navigate. Filemobile added great value to www.visiontv.ca while working within the constraints of our modest budget."

Highlights of the broadband video player include:

Pre-defined galleries including Editor's Picks, Most Recent, Most Popular, Most Commented, etc.
Customizable Playlist feature allows users the ability to customize their own playlist.
Viewers are able to publish their favorite videos to Facebook for friends to see.
Content producers can serve pre-roll, post-roll from a variety of 3rd party ad servers.
The AJAX interface ensures there is no page refreshing and the experience responds like an application in every browser.
We offer geoblocking services to ensure you only showing content in the territories you are licensed.
Serve your video in a streaming format or progressive download.
A scalable gallery to showcase up to 1,000's of video assets.
Organize content however you want with a clip based or episodic based layout.

Check out Vision TV's On Demand video product

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Filemobile Announces Launch of Newsletter

posted by Kristen Bunting on 09.07.09

Toronto, Canada | Jul 8, 2009 | In an effort to provide timely information on interesting news and developments in the world of social media, Filemobile has launched an on-line newsletter. Topics include coverage of recent stories, events, case studies and technology developments in the areas of broadband video, social media and digital content.

Check out Issue 001 | July 2009.

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