UK video software specialist Ostmodern officially launched its Skylark software product this week, one of the three key pieces of software behind the new BBC Player TV Everywhere product.
The BBC has been a leader in iPlayer style players since it used the old Kontikki P2P player in around 2006 and now it plans to offer partners in its TV channels around the world, an OTT service so customers who have paid for the BBC, can consume it on any device online.
Ostmodern has been at the heart of a number of BBC moves, and was responsible for building the BBC store over the past 6 months or so and we spoke to CEO Tom Williams this week to find out about Skylark.
It’s not too clear what Skylark actually is. Williams calls it an “integration framework,” which effectively abstracts content in a CMS entirely from how it will be presented and offers an API to control that look and feel. It comes with its own content management system which ingests from existing workflows and it will help BBC Worldwide customers put together a service to compete with Netflix, or at least to add the BBC content to the OTT pile.
This is the new approach from the BBC, a TV Everywhere product instead of the BBC Global iPlayer, which was withdrawn from the market last year.
“We did lots of work on previous players for broadcasters and we noticed a gap in the workflow, so we tried integrating the back end with content management, and then providing a single API to drive apps and the web. The entire BBC TV Everywhere product is really made up of Akamai CDNs, the Bebanjo toolset (which consists of a scheduling app, one for metadata editing and a workflow controller), and Skylark.”
He struggled further on what Skylark is, “It’s an integration structure with a CMS, an API and multi-platform SDKs, and it comes integrated with a number of third party tools” – so far that is Ooyala and thePlatform – as well as the Stripe payment platform from the Irish ecommerce company of the same name and payments and authentication from Vindicia.
William’s point is that today the number of formats are expanding and you have to have a pure abstraction between the content and the UI design on tablets, phones, the web, laptops and smart TVs, so they can all look their best automatically.
Skylark also integrates with leading specialist video service providers for ingest and distribution, rights management and secure playback or payment processing and CRM and link right the way back to your customer management layer.
“If you end up using a Drupal CMS and do each UI in a bespoke way, that’s very expensive. This way it is all automated.”
“We will roll this out in white label format for the BBC, so that any pay TV clients who offer the BBC channels can also offer them online with a simple authentication. I’m not sure how the BBC plans to monetize that, but I suppose it can charge its partners more for the channel.
“In the US and in Canada we know that a paid version of the player is likely to emerge, so we will see this first in South East Asia.
The 50 man Ostmodern has a track record in these types of projects. It worked on 4OD for a year, Williams himself did the strategy for Project Kangaroo at the BBC, before it was sold off to Arqiva and became Seesaw and Ostmodern built the Virgin Media Player and the football club Arsenal’s Player.
Interestingly Skylark is the first time that Ostmodern has delivered a software product rather than simply working on a services contract and the integrations it has will likely see companies like Ooyala and thePlatform leveraging it for use with their clients, which might move Ostmodern out of its mostly UK customer base for the first time.