MediaPlatform Delivers Low-Latency, Flash-Less Webcasts

MediaPlatform is an enterprise webcasting platform that offers live and video-on-demand (VOD) streaming and content management. It allows large organizations to stream events such as town halls, webcasts, corporate communications, internal training and more.

Case Study Snapshot

Industries
Enterprise	Streaming service provider
Products/Services
Wowza Streaming Engine
Use Case
Enterprise webcasts, interactive broadcasts, content management

Low latency is crucial to a positive user experience for interactive broadcasts, such as webinars and town halls. By building on Wowza Streaming Engine, MediaPlatform is able to deliver low-latency streaming at scale, ensuring high-quality, two-way engagement for its very large enterprise customers.

Wowza technology enables MediaPlatform to offer a future-ready solution, since it’s not reliant on Adobe Flash technology. It also supports virtual reality (VR) and 360º live-streaming. Finally, Wowza Streaming Engine’s flexibility allows MediaPlatform to fit into customers’ existing workflow, so they can send a single stream out in multiple, transcoded renditions to a wide variety of end-users’ devices.

To learn more about how MediaPlatform works with Wowza, check out this video from the 2017 NAB Show, featuring Wowza’s Chris Cross and Mike Newman, MediaPlatform’s chief executive:

Full Video Transcription

Chris Cross:

Hi, I’m Chris Cross with Wowza Media Systems, here today with Mike Newman, chief executive of MediaPlatform. We’re going to talk a little bit about enterprise streaming, and how MediaPlatform and how Wowza Media Systems have partnered to create the next generation of enterprise streaming. Mike, can you give us a little overview of MediaPlatform?

 

Mike Newman:

Absolutely, Chris. Thank you very much, and I’m sure everybody’s very familiar with Wowza, so I’d like to just quickly introduce MediaPlatform. For those of you unfamiliar with us, we’ve got about a 10-year history in enterprise streaming, generally focused on very large enterprises. We’ve got Excentra; we’ve got companies like ConocoPhillips. Generally, what we’re doing is enabling them to produce, internally, very large, live webcasts for things like town hall meetings.

Over the years, we’ve managed to acquire a lot of really good recognition from the analyst community, the customer community, and we’re trying to keep building on that reputation. And if I could just have a couple more seconds, I’ll walk you through where our specific focus is. As I mentioned, you’ve got live event streaming. You’ve also got the content management piece of that, which is portal and administration and authentication. And then two areas where we also excel is on the delivery piece, and we’ll be getting into a lot of that as we talk about the Wowza/MediaPlatform integration, as well as quality of service, which is something I know you know a lot about as well Chris.

 

Chris Cross:

Absolutely.

 

Mike Newman:

Thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it.

 

Chris Cross:

Glad to have you here. I understand you’re coming out with a next generation of WebCaster, a new product. Can you tell us more about that?

 

Mike Newman:

Sure. WebCaster, I should say up front, is a key component of our revenue and our business. It’s a defining product, and so certainly, as we look to move it from our legacy WebCaster to the next generation, we’ve thought about everything very, very seriously, including our go-to-market partners.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

With the new WebCaster, there are a couple things we really focused on—one of which was ease-of-use. And that would sound intuitive, but, at the end of the day, we’re helping organizations create really complex and sophisticated live webcasts. They could be going out to 20, 30, 40,000 people, so we’re enabling to do that in an intuitive, easy-to-grasp way, maybe enabling them to delegate certain tasks to people who aren’t technical.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

A big area of focus, another thing I’m sure we’ll talk about a lot, is Flash independence.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

Flash is going away, and that’s been a driver for a lot of innovation in our industry as a whole. Then also, just enabling a customized audience experience. Not just, “Hey, here’s what you have to do.” Also, “What do you want to do? What different elements do you want working together, and what do you want that end-user audience experience to be like?”

 

Chris Cross:

Yeah.

 

Mike Newman:

Lastly, where we’ve invested a lot of time—and it’s been enormously rewarding—is in the Wowza partnership, so I’m sure we’ll talk about that.

 

Chris Cross:

Outstanding. Outstanding. How did Wowza—you mentioned that Flash is going away, and we have a Flash-free world. Previous versions of your product were built on other technology. I’m sure you did an exhaustive search, and you landed on and selected Wowza as your technology of choice. Can you help me just with some ideas about why you made that decision, why you made that selection?

 

Mike Newman:

Sure. Imagine, I’m coming into the company as a CEO, and I’m shepherding a product that’s very, very successful.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

We’re going to move to an entirely new platform, and there are a lot of risks associated with that, so literally, looking back at 2016, this was our biggest bake-off, our most important bake-off from a vendor perspective, and we had the usual suspects. I don’t need to go through them, but there’s a handful of players in the space. A few things really differentiated Wowza, and all of them were important to me as CEO of the company.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

First of which was really the flexibility, the workflow, that we were then able to extend to our end-users. They are in very high-stress environments, very high accountability. Little things can trip them up.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

It was clear Wowza’d put a lot of time and investment into the workflow of enabling people to be successful with live video. You’ve also got to model that—and this is exceedingly important for us—enables us to scale dynamically, and to be able to pass that benefit through to our customers, so every six weeks, as they look at the number of attendees growing and maybe doubling, tripling, they’re not running all sorts of math, and redoing amendments to contracts and things like that. We’re dynamically scaling with them. And that’s something that was near and dear to my heart, because I think it is something that enables us to be successful as partners and as vendors is, the team we worked with was just fantastic. It was an engineering team; it was a marketing team; it was a legal team.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

Just not tripping over ourselves as we try to bring something important to market—I think because of that, we’re ahead of schedule. The integration’s been a seamless experience, and I think it’s fun to stand up here with you, having worked so hard in the trenches, and just talk about it finally, and get to pat ourselves a little bit on the back.

 

Chris Cross:

And talk to these folks about it as well.

 

Mike Newman:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

 

Chris Cross:

Cool. Given all of those considerations, the things that you just described, and then that landed on the selection of Wowza. How does Wowza, and how do Wowza and MediaPlatform then—how does this partnership benefit the enterprise?

 

Mike Newman:

Yeah. Maybe we can tag-team that question.

 

Chris Cross:

Sure.

 

Mike Newman:

Because I think we’ve both been working on it. One thing I should have touched upon is, Wowza’s got a very clear commitment to innovation.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

We’d like to think of ourselves as a thought leader in large live webcasting. What can we pass through that you’re innovating to our end customers? And so, because we’re talking every day, because we’ve got those hooks, not only can we scale, not only can we provide a professional workflow, a flexible workflow—but you’ve got all that innovation where it’s 360 video, VR. It’s bringing the live webcasting experience to, really, the masses within these large organizations.

 

Chris Cross:

Right.

 

Mike Newman:

I think it’s super important. But not just looking at the future and the present, being able to take that single stream, and you’re transcoding it for any device, any place, any time, and having a very successful webcast. I mean, I can’t tell you, as elegant and easy as that may sound, you’ve taken a very complex process, made it easy for us, and for us to be able to then bring that to the end user.

 

Chris Cross:

Yep.

 

Mike Newman:

I’ll tell you, whether it’s Garner, it’s Forrester, it’s Frost & Sullivan—they recognize the fruits of those labors, and endorse the products.

 

Chris Cross:

Absolutely. From a Wowza perspective, I’d like to take just a minute and look backwards, all right?

 

Mike Newman:

Yeah. Sure.

 

Chris Cross:

Because Wowza’s been in business 10 years. We’ve been the leading media server, streaming video server, for 10 years, and that’s the foundation that we built on. In addition to that, and having a legacy product that is very robust and has a proven history in the industry, you know, 20,000 customers worldwide on six continents, 170 countries. The important thing is, we haven’t stopped; we haven’t rested. We continue to be leading-edge. We continue to be bleeding-edge even at times. Where I would say, three years ago, we were a streaming video server company, where we’ve come from there to today is now we offer a full portfolio of capabilities to builders of products like yourself, to allow you to bring that core value of Wowza—but then add the icing on the cake.

 

Mike Newman:

Absolutely, and I will say as an organization focused on the enterprise, we worry sometimes that we won’t get a fair shake from companies that also cater to media and education and government, but I have to say, whether talking about some of the things maybe coming down the pipe, like low latency—there is so much we’re excited about. We see this partnership as yielding dividends for us, for our customers, for a long time coming.

 

Chris Cross:

Absolutely.

 

Mike Newman:

Congratulations on a fantastic innovation and thanks for being so supportive of this partnership.

 

Chris Cross:

Thank you very much. We’re glad to have you as a customer, and we look forward to rolling out some great new technology—360 video, user- and employee-generated content, low latency, virtual telepresence, things like that. It’s going to be a good ride. We look forward to many, many years of working together.

 

Mike Newman:

Fantastic.

 

Chris Cross:

Thank you Mike.

 

Mike Newman:

Thank you Chris. Appreciate it.