Streaming infrastructure company Bitmovin is teaming up with ad-insertion vendor Yospace to enable broadcasters to put commercials in live-streaming programming.

By making ad insertion in live streams more seamless at scale, programmers will be able to generate more revenue while assuring marketers an enhanced viewing and advertising experience.

“Live streaming is the apple of the consumer’s eye, and this has expanded beyond sports. What we have found is that for live streaming, quality is everything,“ Stefan Lederer, CEO and co-founder of Bitmovin, said. ”Audiences are happy with a small delay to their live stream as long as the quality is as high as possible, without any interruptions or buffering. Whilst others may chase down the lowest possible latency, at Bitmovin, we want to provide the ultimate viewing experience that delivers a high-quality video to make audiences feel a part of the action. In the new streaming era, this includes seamless advertising.”

More and more viewers are viewing live streams, particularly for sports. The record for concurrent live audiences was broken five times over the past year, capped by the Kansas City Chiefs-Miami Dolphins NFL playoff game that streamed January 13 on NBCUniversal’s Peacock.

”Live events have the power to tap into an audience's collective imagination and create water-cooler conversations that advertisers love but are struggling to find anywhere else,” Yospace CEO Tim Sewell said. “The combination of Bitmovin’s Live Encoder and Yospace’s SSAI creates a very powerful advertising proposition for broadcasters, who can tap into that unique value of live events and maximize advertising revenues at scale.”

Bitmovin, an online streaming video technology company, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding.

The San Francisco startup had previously raised $62.3 million through seed, Series A and Series B  rounds. 

Bitmovin powers online video providers including Discovery Plus, FuboTV, DAZN, BBC, RTL, RedBull Media House, Globo, Cand The New York Times. The company, which has over 400 global clients, is the platform that provides the instantaneous video from any device.

Bitmovin CEO and founder at Stefan Lederer said that the company will use the new funds to address three main technology areas—encoding , universal player support and viewer-behavior analytics.

“We will continue to optimize compression technologies and bandwidth for premium VOD encoding, such as premium cinema content, as well as increasing routes to monetization for live video services.”

Bitmovin will also add support for new consumer devices and provide new ways to monetize online video services through subscription, ad-supported and transactional models.

“First, we will extend our capabilities for device testing through the addition of long-running automated tests (four-plus hours) and a framework for embracing customer streams into our testing environment,” Lederer said in an email. “Second, we will expand our advertising capabilities through the integration of advertising frameworks, such as the Roku Advertising Framework (RAF) and client-side ad capabilities on tvOS. Third, we will launch the next major version of our mobile SDKs (version 3), which will enhance the developer experience and support for the latest mobile technologies on both iOS and Android.”

And with regard to analytics the company “will be developing a POC for a new feature that provides additional information around error codes and messages and expedites the identification of root causes of errors.”

Lederer added that since the company launched in 2013 the online video streaming market has grown by “at least 10 times.”

“More consumers than ever prefer to watch content on any device and at any time rather than in linear programming,” says Lederer. “This trend is further fuelled by advances in connectivity and consumer electronics, along with innovation in streaming technologies.”

Bitmovin saw 174% growth in the number of broadcasting clients opting for OTT over 2020. Due in part to the pandemic, the company experienced a 118% increase in video play with 220% more minutes watched, and a 380% growth in network traffic of video on the internet. This significant increase in demand for high quality video and large resolution video on big screens—smart TVs, game consoles, Apple TV, Roku—put a burden on internet service providers, which Bitmovin says resulted in a 15% slowdown on the average bandwidth available to viewers.

“As a direct result of Bitmovin’s investment in advancing these areas, the company has enabled tier-one media companies to reclaim upwards of 60% of their streaming bandwidth,” Lederer said. He would not name the tier-one media outlets that reclaimed streaming bandwidth.

The technology company also reports new growth-market opportunities have increased by 180% in areas such as online fitness, learning, worship, e-commerce, and others.

“Online customer interaction went from being a tangential offering to an existential service for many businesses in these industries during the pandemic,” Lederer. “With in-person interaction limited, they had to find ways to offer customers valuable offerings over video. The fitness industry is a great example. Although in normal times, the customers of fitness centers and yoga studios would strongly prefer to take classes in person, they were eager to continue their classes online with the in-person option all but eliminated during COVID-19. Suddenly, those businesses were expected to provide smooth, clear, consistent video on par with global streaming media companies from any device. Their customers simply wouldn’t tolerate disruptions to their customer experience.”

Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) continues to be the preferred streaming format around the globe, with 82% of video developers worldwide currently using the format, up 4% from 2017, according to Bitmovin’s latest annual Video Developer Report (PDF).

Usage of the format is particularly high in Latin America, where 95% of video developers have adopted the format. (The adoption rate in North America is 77%.)

Adoption of MPEG-DASH is also increasing, up 5% worldwide to 61% of developers worldwide, according to Bitmovin.

Meanwhile, in terms of video codecs, H.264/AVC is used by 92% of developers worldwide, down 3% from Bitmovin’s 2017 report. Usage of H.265/HEVC, however, has grown to 42% of video developers from 28% last year. Over a third of respondents (36%) plan to deploy H.265/HEVC in the next 12 months.

In terms of platform support, HTML5 in browser was reported to be the top supported platform, with 92% of respondents indicating support. Among consumer OTT devices, Google’s Chromecast is supported by 42% of developers vs. 36% for Apple TV, 34% for Android TV and 23% for Roku.

Surveying 456 video developers at broadcasters, publishers, OTT streaming services, online video platforms and social media platforms in 67 countries, Bitmovin found that latency remains the top complaint among developers.

Around 55% of developers reported latency with their platform—a problem when trying to perform tasks such as streaming live sports. 

Apple TV may be struggling to gain ground in the consumer market against its TV-connected platform rivals, but it’s a big hit with developers in North America, according to a new study from video streaming architecture company Bitmovin.

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In that region, Apple TV is tops with developer in the category, with 38% adoption, followed by Roku (35%), Chromecast (31%), and Amazon Fire TV (24%).

The breakdown differs by region, as Chromecast has the catbird’s seat in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Latin America and Asia Pacific regions, Bitmovin found in a survey of 380 video developers in more than 50 countries.

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Bitmovin also found that Apple HLS is the dominant video streaming format, though developers are also eyeing a move to MPEG-DASH in the next 12 months.

H.264/AVC is still the dominant video codec among those surveyed, with 95% adoption as of Q2 2017, followed by H.265/HEVC (28%), VP9 (10%), and AV1 (6%).

However, H.265/HEVC fits most prominently into future codec plans (40% of developers plan to use HEVC in the next six months), ahead of planned adoption of VP9 and AV1.

“Whatever the use case, these organizations are definitely ready for the upcoming HEVC support on iOS and Mac,” Bitmovin noted in the study. “Android has had support for HEVC playback in native apps for some time, as well as with set-top boxes in closed loop systems where people control the encoder and the playback device, and Android TVs.”

VP9, the Google-developed royalty-free format, is gaining via its reach on browsers like Chrome (Google), Firefox and Microsoft Edge as well as Android devices. Netflix, Bitmovin pointed out, is also using VP9 for downloadable content.

Bitmovin, a streaming video infrastructure specialist, said it has notched a deal to power live and VOD services from Red Bull Media House across all supported platforms and devices.

Under the deal, Red Bull Media House will use Bitmovin’s platform to underpin live events and quick turnaround VOD offerings, while also being compatible with multiple video codecs, including bandwidth-saving options such as HEVC and Google’s VP9.

Red Bull Media House joins a group of more than 200 Bitmovin customers that also include Sling TV, Ooyala, RTL, ProSieben and The New York Times.

Bitmovin’s video infrastructure includes video players and a framework for measuring the video experience and quality for end-users. Those products can be integrated with partner API layers, explained Bitmovin CEO Stefan Lederer.

Bitmovin said its cloud encoding stack, which runs on Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as well as on-premises systems, also supports new formats, such as video reality, 360-degree playback and 4K streaming.

Cloud video infrastructure startup Bitmovin said it has landed a $10.3 million series A round led by Atomico.

Bitmovin said the funds will help it accelerate development of video playback technologies for existing and new platforms, including 360-degree video for virtual reality services and apps.

Also joining the A round are a group of Bitmovin angel backers -- David Helgason, founder of Unity; Chris Kaiser, former VP of Engineering at Netflix and YouTube, and Edward Kozel, a former CTO of Cisco Systems and Deutsche Telekom.

Bitmovin, which provides cloud-powered video encoding services and an HTML5 player for desktop, mobile, smart TV and VR platforms, counts OTT customers around the world such as Toolbox, Bouygues Telecom, Nomads, Flimmit, Technicolor, Genflix, Kronehit (online radio).  

Its tech partners include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft, Irdeto, Wowza Media Systems and ad-tech specialist YuMe.

Its intro-level monthly pricing for cloud encoding ranges from free (capped at 2.5 gigabytes per month with “limited” support, to $29 per month for a “Startup” tier, $59 for its “Business” tier, and $149 for a “Professional” level offering.

Bitmovin also offers a range of “Enterprise” plans that start at $645 per month. The company also has monthly and enterprise plans for its adaptive player based on the number of video views.

Bitmovin, based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Klagenfurt, Austria, is also backed by Dawn Capital, SpeedInvest, and Constantia New Business. It was founded in 2013.