YTD February Roundup: Free Trial Now Available, New Generic Payment Provider API, Ads, and More!

What have been the biggest changes?

After a relaxing holiday break we burst into the new year curating 3 big, new features we know you’re going to love: Free Trial, Generic Payment Provider API, and support for Ads!

You have probably noticed the “Get a Free Trial” buttons on our website, but did you know they are new? We want you to be able to see our products/features first-hand and follow our in-product guides to see how Vimond VIA can help you easily ingest, manage, curate, and distribute your content. Once you have a free account, you’ll be updated as more products/tours are made available. Happy exploring!

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Looking to change/add payment providers and worried they aren’t supported by our platform? Don’t be! Our new Generic Payment Provier API makes it easier for you to integrate the necessary payment flows with the provider of your choosing. Our new API supports flows for new subscriptions, subscription renewals, conversions, and cancellations. Sure, we worked really hard on supporting our existing providers but this improvement will make it easier for us to add the new features and flexibility you need to support your providers and payment flows.

This Release Roundup is brought to you by Vimond's new SCTE-35/SSAI support! Get videos ingested today with VIA Orchestrate and start including ESAM manifests (SCC and MCC) to create those SSAI enabled streams. Side effects may include increased ad revenue, increased ad-free subscription upgrades, and a general feeling of bliss. Future releases will expand support to include ad service configuration through your profiles with MediaTailor. Now back to your regularly scheduled Release Roundup…

Additional Improvements to Kick-Off 2023 in Style

If you thought those features were great, wait until you see what else we have added in releases 1-3:

Vimond VIA

Content Manager:

• NEW: Improved Chapters timeline editor to easily drag and snap your chapters into place
• NEW: Improved functionality of Chapters keyboard shortcuts and the guide is directly in the UI so you don’t have to reference the user guide. Get the in/out markers into your video without having to take your hand off the keyboard!
• NEW: Improved Chapters logic to prevent unintentional saves of invalid chapters.
• NEW: Added support for adding images to the Image Bank when uploading from local storage
• NEW: Added support for collapsing/expanding the video player when opening assets and Vimond VIA will remember your preference so you can save some screen real-estate and show more of what you want to focus on (like metadata updates, for example).
• NEW: We overhauled our snapshot functionality to get images into your assets with ease but then you had to make sure you had selected the right stream in some cases and that isn’t the convenience we hoped for. We imroved the player to use the highest configured stream rank.

Admin Search:

• NEW: Added support for special/reserved characters
• NEW: Added support for sorting assets by broadcast date in List Views as well as enriching the list elements with date information, making it easier for Vimond VIA users to find and manage content
• NEW: Added ability to search for published and unpublished live assets scheduled between a specific date and time range
• NEW: Improved visibility of Live vs VOD assets in search results
• NEW: Refresh your search results by pressing Enter in the search box

Services:

• Improved: Content Discovery error handling for invalid accept language headers
• Improved: We have rewritten the full catalog resync workflow to decouple it from our REST API, increase resiliency/fault tolerance, and enable parallel processing so that very large catalogs can be processed without having to manually scale up any resources or worry about memory errors.

VIA Orchestrate

• NEW: Improvements to feed ingest to better support long-form content
• NEW: Feed Ingest Dashboard and self-service stop/retry so you can easily find and fix bad feeds without having to enter into a without having to enter into a whole week-long cycle of finding the issue, fixing your feed and then pushing a new one.
• NEW: You can now filter on ingest status and date range to make it easier to find the feed ingests you are looking for (like what has failed since yesterday, for example)

Platform Improvements

• Improved back-end storage strategy of your source files, including configuration for retention to deliver cost savings on files that are rarely used
• Improved how we handle what happens behind the scenes with the Asset Importer Service when you delete a feed so that you aren’t left with old ghosts

Maintenance

Korben Dallas might not want his 6 month overhaul but we like to keep our machine well-oiled and up-to-date!

Bug Fixes

Addressed several pesky gremlins that were causing trouble behind the scenes. We've sent them packing and things should be running smoothly now.

Congratulations, you have finished this roundup! Your reward is a joke from ChatGPT:

Why did the editorial team switch to Vimond?

Because they wanted to Vim-PROVE their workflow!

I’ll see myself out

Sky Knippa

Agile Coach