Video > Castfire

Video

Video is one of the most powerful mediums to communicate your message. The proliferation of technologies, from Flash to portable video players, have made the medium even more attractive and effective. However, as your library grows, how do you manage the content to keep your branding up to date, formats available and rotate advertising? Castfire's mediacasting platform solves your audio, enhanced audio and video needs all from the same console.

Show Assembly

A simple, drag and drop templating system allows you to manage all of your content without editing a single file. Have thousands of episodes? The console handles modifying each episode without you firing up your copy of Final Cut Pro. This provides you the ability to update old episodes with your new branding, rotate advertising through your evergreen content, and provide promotional messages that drive traffic to your other properties.

Our advertising engines goes beyond templating and allows you to target the advertising based on a variety of criteria. Ad units can be pre-roll, post-roll, bumper or interstitial. You should be able to provide your advertisers with a variety of options to meet their needs, and Castfire provides that for you.

Metadata

The metadata in your mpeg4 tags seem so simple. For most, there are 8-9 fields that are managed. You fire up your video editor and type them in, time and time again. However, mistakes are human! Those mistakes become evident to your audience on their portable players and computers.

Castfire manages all metadata related to your content through a single interface. All meta tags are maintained through the same console and can be templated for your data. Want to make a change to all of your meta tags? Enter it into the form and press save. Done! Have 2,000 files in your inventory? Done. It happens instantly, even adding images to the meta tag.

Meta tags are just the beginning of what we do with that data. We transform that same data into playlists in multiple formats: rss, mrss, and xml. Your audience is enabled to listen to your content on different players and devices automatically. You can build services and interfaces on top of these feeds. Most importantly, it all happens from a single data store so that the audience experience is consistent no matter where they are listening.

Multiple Formats

Providing video in multiple formats can enhance the experience of your audience. Flash is quickly becoming the defacto standard playback on webpages, while mpeg4 is the defacto standard for portable players thanks to the iPod. Castfire automatically encodes your video into multiple formats for you. Selecting a different format is as easy as changing the extension on the filename.

Analytics

Our analytics package provides insight into your audience as well as the data to integrate into your existing systems. There are flash reports that will provide you with up to the minute reports of each and every episode and series. You can drill into the charts to learn more about your content and your audience. What is hot today? Last week? How do people listen: online or offline? Those are all provided through a clean, simple interface.

Analytics are often managed in existing systems. Why should you be forced to view them through two separate interfaces? All of our analytics are available to you in csv and xml, through the console or through our api. This is your data. You should have access to the raw and summarized data when you want it, how you want it. Enjoy!

Flash Players and Syndication

Videocasting is founded in RSS, which enables the aggregators and portable players to get new content. It is limiting, though. You are asking your audience to learn the entire process of subscribing, downloading, and finding your content before they have even seen any of it! Castfire helps your get your videocast out of RSS and put it in front of your audience. Get them hooked on content, then teach them how to subscribe. We have developed a flash player that can be custom skinned for your needs. A simple play button encourages your audience to listen immediately. Try it out. Sample it.

The player goes so much farther! It provides the audience with the ability to subscribe to your rss feed through their favorite aggregator or directly through iTunes (arguably the most popular aggregator). Want a copy of the file? Download it from right there. What if your audience would like to share this with their family and friends? They can syndicate the player to their blog right from the player. And if an audience member discovers your content on someone else's blog? They can find your website -- right from the player!