'TV Everywhere' for Programmers Simplified by thePlatform

By Calvin Azuri, TMCnet Contributor

All programming networks are confronted with a number of technical options and requirements when they evaluate their "TV Everywhere" plans. To help make things easier, thePlatform, a popular white-label video publishing company, reportedly announced a new suite of features that is designed to help programmers provide "TV Everywhere" capabilities on their own Web sites. Networks will now be able to do this, and also preserve their financial and content rights arrangements with TV service providers.

Most of the public discussion about "TV Everywhere" has been aimed at the "authentication" of subscribers. In other words, the focus had been on how a programmer's Web site knows whether an individual consumer is a subscriber to a particular TV service provider. The solution offered by thePlatform (News - Alert) addresses that challenge and then adds the capability to validate and authorize the playback of individual shows.

“In a world where multiple service providers offer multiple subscription packages on multiple platforms, programmers need a simple, flexible solution that helps reduce complexity and meet the expectations of their service provider partners and consumers,” Ian Blaine, CEO of thePlatform, said in a statement.

The company offers a range of different tools to improve online viewing for consumers and also supports adaptive content discovery and monetization policies to support various business policies between programmers and service providers. There are many media companies that use thePlatform's media publishing system as their open, central hub for managing, monetizing and syndicating billions of professionally produced online video views annually.

“This is a natural enhancement of a very successful business model between programmers and TV service providers,” Blaine said. Consumers win because there will be far more online video than ever before, and both programmers and service providers win because they can extend their video to the Web in a secure manner.”

The company's services provide unmatched versatility for designing and supporting video businesses on TV, PCs and mobiles. In addition to this, thePlatform's mps provides programmers with a wide variety of other online video tools, which include optimized content delivery network policies, comprehensive video management, advertising campaign system integration and support for all major video playback technologies such as Move Networks, Adobe Flash, Microsoft (News - Alert) Silverlight and others, reporting capabilities and more.

Calvin Azuri is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Calvin’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Amy Tierney