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Verizon and Comcast's thePlatform to Jointly Sell Integrated Multiscreen Video Offering

By Frank Griffin
TMCnet Contributing Writer

The mergers and acquisitions taking place in the cable and satellite industry are reducing the number of players to less than a handful. The recent purchase of Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable by Comcast, and the pursuit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp of Time Warner, has many wondering if all this consolidation is good for the market, or if it will eventually be responsible for creating just sequels. Although the collaboration between Verizon (News - Alert) Digital Media Services (VDMS), its cloud video unit and Comcast's thePlatform (News - Alert), the online video publishing firm owned by the cable giant is not an M&A, the alliance will allow them to deliver multiscreen video.

The growth of smartphones, tablets and smart TVs is giving service providers the ability to deliver content on multiscreen across different platforms. The new agreement between Comcast (News - Alert) and Verizon is going to let them jointly sell integrated multiscreen video offerings using thePlatform's mxp video-management system. The unified multiscreen video publishing system is going to rely on a single adaptive streaming format and distribution system along an integrated workflow.

With features such as dynamic ad insertion, closed captioning, and analytics, it will enable customers to control and manage a wide range of functions for the delivery of content on a variety of IP-connected devices, including tablets and gaming consoles.

The mpx is a complete video management system with enterprise-class performance that simplifies the process of media publishing to PCs, mobile phones, and TVs. It is built on top of the company's service oriented architecture with a new approach for an online video platform for managing content more efficiently with personalized workflows and automated publishing. It allows users to get started quickly and scale with unlimited possibilities to cover the growth of video delivery. The applications include:

• The mpx Essentials – a streamlined solution tailored for businesses with smaller video libraries providing all of the features and services required to help reach audiences.
• The mpx accelerate – delivers easy access to high-quality mezzanine files with a Media Library and rapid file conversion with Elastic Transcoding.
• The mpx Dev Kit – helps manage entire video publishing life cycle with its powerful REST-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and add capacity, isolate issues, and plan for growth with greater scalability and reliability.
• The mpx platform is used by some of the largest media companies in the world including, Comcast, Cablevision Systems, Cox (News - Alert) Communications, Time Warner Cable and more.

"Our customers will benefit from thePlatform’s industry-leading video management system and digital asset management capabilities. And thePlatform’s customers will benefit from our game-changing single-format video acquisition and distribution service," said Chris Carey, chief product officer of VDMS.