OVP stands for online video platform and refers to the technology needed to ingest, manage and distribute video through a streaming service. This generally includes hosting, video transcoding, storing, management and playback of videos over the internet.
A company that provides an online video platform must provide the highest quality video and audio for its customers through its solutions. OTT businesses typically partner with providers of technology to cover the entire spectrum in order to offer a complete OVP solution.
Some well known Online Video Platform providers are Brightcove, Kaltura, Comcast Technology Solution and Vimond.
Several components and functions are required for an online video platform to serve its purpose adequately. For anyone starting up, moving or updating their systems, every case has its differences. Depending on the size, location, and how you want to monetise your videos, an online video platform provider needs to take this into account when setting up the video service.
From ingest to distribution there are several important components included. Usually, an OVP requires the following components:
There are many great online video platform options available in the OTT market, making it hard to pick the one that is right for your business. In order to save you time and effort, we are going to guide you through 10 different online video platforms in the streaming industry making the landscape a little less confusing!
Note: the article is based on information from each company's website to provide an overview of the players in the OVP market
The first OTT platform on our list is our very own Vimond VIA - one of the best OTT streaming services out there.
Vimond Media Solutions has been around since 2011 when they emerged from one of the biggest broadcasters in Norway, TV 2. Vimond Media Solutions provides video management and distribution software that delivers cloud-based solutions to broadcast, telcos and other content-holders in the media industry.
Through Vimond’s background in broadcast, combining technology with storytelling workflows, they’ve seen, and driven, the pivotal digital transformations the media industry is experiencing. With their intuitive and efficient workflows, they enable high-quality over-the-top streaming solutions. Vimond is focused to provide products that are flexible, open, and tailored for the customer's needs through its own video CMS and partner integrations.
Video CMS: Vimond's core offerings are its OTT video CMS (named VIA) which gives editors the ability to manage all their video assets. Using VIA, editorial teams can add metadata, structure content and organise video files into the correct categories and catalogues.
Video Curation and promotion: the service offers a great blend of automatic, dynamic and manual options for creating different ways to present content to audiences, promoting popular content, or helping viewers find something to watch quickly.
Open APIs: Vimond VIA has a wide range of APIs for customers and partners to connect to, enabling flexibility and integrations with other systems, as well as automation of tasks from metadata updates to scheduled publishing and updated monetise offers.
In addition, VIA offers a set of Content Delivery APIs, which connect the audiences directly with content, from searching for content, playing content, and resuming playback. The Content Delivery APIs are designed to be cost-efficient and scalable, meaning that the computing power you need is always available, whether you have a handful of connected viewers, or several million.
Monetization: Vimond VIA caters for all OTT business models, from AVOD to SVOD and any other VOD monetization module you might be able to dream up.
Vimond markets to broadcasters, telcos, sports and other media-rights holders.
Highlighted features
Customer-specific enterprise plans. Pricing is available upon request.
Brightcove is a global and large-scale provider of cloud services for video. According to Brightcove it services over 5,000 clients in over 70 countries with its digital video distribution technology.
Through its OTT offering Brightcove Beacon, Brightcove provides an end-to-end OTT offering. Brightcove’s official statement on Beacon is “Brightcove Beacon helps you grow and retain global audiences with flexible layouts, monetization options, and unmatched reliability — all in one industry-leading solution.”
Note - we have only focused on OTT offerings in this article.
A standout module in their suite is Brightcove Live. Live event streaming is a service within the OTT marketplace that some providers struggle to deliver and Brightcove Live does this well with many features including Live-2-VOD, Live Clipping and Live Streaming to Social.
In addition Brightcove offers the following features:
Brightcove has listed pricing on AWS Marketplace - Brightcove Video Cloud - AWS Marketplace. Besides that, Brightcove pricing plans are not available on their website. You need to contact them directly for customized quotations.
Kaltura state that its mission is to “power any video experience”. Their wide array of video solutions is deployed globally across thousands of enterprises, media companies, service providers, and educational institutions, leveraging video to teach, learn, communicate, collaborate, and entertain.
Kaltura offers products for customers of a wide range, in any industry, for handling virtual events, town halls, video portal, video messaging and meetings. Kaltura also has industry solutions for Media & telecom and Education. In addition, they offer Media Services for developers. Kaltura offers products both for large enterprises that needs customised solutions and smaller businesses looking for white-label offerings.
Communication and Collaboration (Enterprise video solutions), Education Customers, Media and Telecom.
Kaltura cloud platform: customizable online video platform allowing for personalized live and on-demand experiences for consumers on any screen. It offers a modular migration path to paid services by supporting ad, subscription and rental business models in the same app. The cloud platform includes:
Depending on your needs, Kaltura offer several payment options. For enterprise and custom needs, get in touch for pricing.
Accedo is a global video service provider that promotes itself as “helping world-leading video services providers to deliver and grow engaging video experiences.” They achieve this by providing a combination of products and services needed to support customers during every stage of the video business journey, from strategy and conception through to delivery and post-launch optimization.
Accedo One (SaaS VOD platform for tier 1 Broadcast and OTT): a all-in-one online video platform that allows the customer to take full contract of the design and layout of their end-user platform. Accedo One also provide access to Accedo’s partner Market which contains a large range of expert video technology vendors, enabling the Customer to scale and customize their offering as the market and your needs evolve.
Accedo Play - Sports: specifically designed for rights-holders, federations, and clubs. Accedo’s out-of-the-box Sports Video Solution enables sport organizations to launch a service as speed and to manage and monetize their content. Accedo Play - Sports is a video centric hub that allows sports organizations to augment and enhance their existing video and social media strategies
Accedo Play: Accedo Play is a SaaS “turnkey” end-to-end VOD platform tailored to Content Rights Holders. As per the Accedo Play - Sports product, Accedo Play is a video centric hub that allows rights-holders to augment and enhance their existing video and social media strategies.
Accedo Engage: automated and data-driven personalisation and user-insights tools
Accedo XR: Next-gen VOD experience tools
Professional Services: Strategic Advisory, Innovative UX and complete Managed Services
Accedo offer nearly a full suite of product and services for the Broadcast and OTT market. The key features and ones that make them stand out from the rest are:
Front-end design flexibility - native apps and customizable UX experiences that you can style and configure to create a video service that is unique to your brand.
Business Insights tools - adaptive tools that provide an aggregated display of service analytics that help you make better decisions and optimize performance based on user behaviour and preferences.
Partner Marketplace - a marketplace ecosystem consisting of a wide range of expert vendors that can be easily integrated as your service evolves.
Accedo offers price plans for any budget. Contact Accedo for an estimate.
24i was founded in 2009 and promotes itself as spearheading the global OTT revolution as one of the leading front-end TV app developers in the world. 24i’s platform supports most aspects of a pay TV or OTT service with live channels, catch-up and nPVR on multiple devices and build and build of custom apps.
In 2019, 24i and its sister company Amino became part of Aferian plc (London Stock Exchange: AFRN). In 2021, Nordija (Pay TV platform) and The Filter (recommendations and personalization engigine) were acquired by 24i.
24i offers 3 tiers of OTT solutions:
24i offer a range of additional modules (Mods as they call them) which can be purchased as add-ons to the 24i OTT Studio platform. The core and highlight of their platform is “Backstage” which offers a cloud-based console with a neat UX, asset console and app statistics view. Backstage is also offers easy publishing and scheduling functionality.
Pricing is not published - contact 24i for commercial offering.
Firstlight Media founded in 2004 is a Canada-based company that provides managed services for the distribution of premium VOD and live video. The company's cloud-native platform powers video services for Tier 1 streaming providers, among them aha, Rogers Sports & Media's Sportsnet Now, and Struum.
Tier 1 customers and content providers across the globe, including Sport, media and entertainment.
Video Pipeline: Firstlight media offers a video pipeline that's built to handle high volumes of content while offering advanced functionality required to operate in the complex media landscape. The video pipeline offers live and VOD streaming capabilities.
Video CMS: The video content management software from firstlight offers human curation as well as recommendations and personalization to audiences and content to drive user engagement. Included in the video CMS, is datastore that handles metadata, curation and rules for distribution. To create editorial or personalized carousels, dynamically target different user segments, devices, or regions, and experiment with A/B testing to maximize engagement the video CMS uses Storefront. In addition, the video CMS comes with user management that defines user access, subscription packages, and billing and payment methods.
Get in touch for custom pricing.
Redbee offers managed media services and media experiences for an audiences worldwide. Through its end-to-end offerings, Redbee Media offers solutions across the entire content delivery chain. The company is owned by Ericsson.
White-label OTT platform
One of Redbee's key offerings is a white-label OTT platform for brands and content creators that want to deliver broadcast-quality live and pre-recorded streams from anywhere to anyone. Their white-label OTT offerings allow users to create a destination for their audience, where the customer can monetize their content and be in control over their video content.
Content discovery
Redbee offers content discovery which enables users to find the right content using search and recommendation technology.
Access Services
Access Services provide pre-recorded captions, sign-language translation, and audio descriptions, allowing viewers who are hard of hearing, partially sighted, or simply prefer captioned content to watch.
Playout
The playout services let content creators stream their content to its audience, making sure the content is accessible on the correct device, such as smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.
Post-production
Redbee enables post-production services with varied toolsets for the different use-case.
Live and remote production
Enables you to broadcast live events.
Media Management
Using Redbee´s cloud-based video management, users are able to find all asset in one location making it possible to edit and access assets anywhere in the world.
Distribution
Utilize a global distribution network to distribute content worldwide. The distribution services make it possible for users to keep track of how, when, and where their content is being distributed.
Get in touch to get quotes
Uscreen started in 2015 with the mission to create a all-in-one platform for video distribution and monetisation. Today Uscreen exist of a team with over 100 individuals located all around the world helping over 25,000 creators, brands, and businesses monetize and distribute videos
Through Uscreen, video content providers are able to monetize and distribute videos on demand as well as live content globally.
For beginners and pros, and everyone in between. It’s ideal for organizations looking to grow their web-based video presence.
Video distribution: Deliver content to an audience worldwide with multi-screen on-demand and live video distribution
Video Monetization: Monetize videos and add subscriptions, rentals, pay-per-view, bundles, lifetime access, and free trials
Video Content Management: Video CMS to manage video content
Video player: HTML5 video player that works on all devices and is responsive
Website builder: Create and launch your own branded website quickly with a customizations website builder
User security: All information shared in a channel is encrypted, ensuring the viewers' privacy is protected 24/7
OTT apps: Launch branded OTT apps available on a range of destinations, including iOS, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Android, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV devices
Basic
$79/mo
Growth
$159/mo
Uscreen Pluss
Custome price
Founded in New York City, JW Player is the maker of the video player software of the same name. The player is used to embed videos into websites and is used by news outlets, video hosting services, and for self-hosted web videos to connect content with audiences.
From startups to large media companies, the platform is a good fit for everyone wishing to scale and monetize their video content.
JWplayer offers different pricing plans depending on needs and size of the company. Starter plan start at $10 a month, while enterprises can get a custom pricing plan. You can also get a free 30 day trial
Zype, a Backlight business, claims to be “the infrastructure for digital video, providing an API-first SaaS that helps product teams solve mission critical streaming video challenges with a robust platform that includes monetization, CRM, business analytics, automation, and integrations with thousands of SaaS applications.”
Zype empowers Enterprises to drive revenue and engagement by providing the most connected and reliable cloud-based video content management and distribution infrastructure to stream video on the web, mobile, OTT & Connected TV, and social media. This is broken down into product areas which is reflected in the pricing.
Zype claims to have Solutions targeted towards the following verticals:
Zype has a broad product suite but its core product is a Streaming Platform with multiple components including metadata management, analytics, 3rd party connecters, encoding, and content delivery. Zype X caters to a low entry point marked with an all-in-one streaming platform for live and VOD targeted at lower-tier customers. Playout focuses on a drag and drop interface that allows you to create linear streams from VOD assets distributed both to broadcast and digital platforms.
Zype X: $500 per/month + usage fees. Includes Video CMS, Video CRM, HQ On-Demand Streaming, HQ Live Streaming, Video Web Player, Video Paywall, Video & Consumer Level Analytics
Network: $2,500 per/month. Includes Zype X + Video APIs, WordPress Plug-in, Zapier Installation
Premium: $3,500 per/month. Includes Zype X, Network, + Content & Player Rules, Live Multicastnig to Social Platforms
Enterprise: $5,000 per/month. Includes Zype X, Network, Premium, + EPG, Custom 3rd Party SSO, Custom Consumer Metadata
In this post, we looked at a number of platforms and discussed their main features, along with their pricing options.
In the event you have read this far, we can only assume that you are probably looking for an OTT solution for your company.
Let us give you a walk through on how you can ingest, monetise and distribute your video content worldwide using our online video platform. Simply slide us an email at play@vimond.com or fill out the form below!
