New deals, new dashboard, now what?
as JD says - it’s time to watch and optimize the numbers. My role here is within the player and I as well as several others plan on making the experience
- more enjoyable/easier to use for the viewer
- more profitable for blip.
These will not be easy tasks, but this has been a long time coming. We intend to make our player shine as a de-facto standard in web video playback. Because we power thousands of (the best) shows - I expect that these steps will have a huge impact in their numbers as well.
in short we have built the technology - now it is time to make the technology work just like we want it: fast and cheap.
Be on the lookout for lots of new player features and optimizations and as always, do not hesitate to let us know your thoughts, as the viewers and the producers: your opinion drives our quest for innovation.
So since all of my cohorts have already tumbled the big news to death, I’ll speak about where do we go from here? At blip we considered this somewhat of a coming out party. We’ve built all this stuff, we’ve made all these deals, and we’re here in a big way.
So what’s next. Well we’re going to continue building new stuff of course, more distribution, more dashboard, some exciting new player stuff. But more than that we’re going to start playing a numbers game.
We’re a bigger company now, and now it’s time to optimize. Everyone here is going to be in some way responsible for a number, the most important ones being our CPM (cost per 1000 views), our RPM (revenue per 1000 views) and our number of views. It’ll be my job, for instance, to drive down that CPM number without affecting quality.
How do we do this? First we need information. We’re already back at work building a dashboard for CPM so we can see day-to-day how the number changes. Second, we negotiate with our partners. We’re riding high now and you can bet that Mike and Dina will be on the phone this week driving our costs down with lures of long-term relationships. Third, we make the technology better.
To that end I’ve declared WAR ON PLAYBACK! People declare WAR here from time to time, a move that tells everyone that it’s all hands on deck until something in particular gets acceptably resolved. I’m convinced that we can not only reduce our costs, but increase our quality at the same time. We’ll do this by standardizing our encodes, adding features like pesudo-streaming, and making our player smarter about the amount of bandwidth it uses. This and a bunch of other great stuff that I can’t talk about yet.
