Maintain Your Video Provider Preferences without Interruptions

We know what business we are in, and we know what business we are NOT in. Video is not our business, it's yours. We won't force you into a particular provider, because odds are it wouldn't be a good fit for your workflow. We've worked with TV stations for years, we understand the challenges. We know you aren't going to want to swap video trans-coders and train an entire cohort of staff just to bring in a better CMS!

We are confident we can support you current video provider. We have supported both ViewNexa (owned by BitCentral) and we have supported Field59 (now owned by BLOX), and we can use *.m3u8 HLS streams directly from your in-house transcoder. We have found, being in this business for a few years, that every video provider will want to push you towards whatever CMS they are affiliated with, but it's just not necessary. They all have a variety of poorly-documented APIs available for use, and we are experts at putting them to work in whatever way you need. We are comfortable talking to them as well if we need them to fabricate a new tool for the job as well. One of the reasons this is possible, is we maintain our own video library of your content. Every time you add a video to your video solution, whether it is housing static videos or clips to be re-sorted as VOD content, there will be a "unique identifier" string. Both ViewNexa and Field59 have specifically added buttons for this purpose, at our request.

Then you just copy/paste it into a field in the story editor, that looks like this:

That's it. It's added to the media carousel for the story, and all necessary metadata is fetched by our servers, and saved in our DB, forming a relationship between the video and it's data that lives on the third-party's servers.

Now it can be used freely through the CMS, on pages, stories, categories, and any view you might want us to build for you! We don't store it, and if you want to change the underlying video you can use your preferred interface your video provider. We think keeping your CMS and your video-provider completely separate is a very good thing for you, and we think it's a good thing for us. You can pick the one that suits your company's needs, and we don't have to maintain any equipment.

One final thing, video-provider migrations. Video migrations can be tough, but we've done it many times before and we always make sure to maintain 100% dual support during the transition period. This is important because we know what's happening at your station (I was working in one when I started building Viking CMS, I saw the need). The IT department is pulling their hair out fielding calls about the equipment, the Content department is still having problems with the new software, and the VPs are fussing about some deadline they have. It's a mess on your end. It's not a mess on our end. By maintaining 100% dual support during that transition, accepting new videos from both providers at the same time, your producers don't have to learn anything new in the CMS. They are already familiar with it.