Clearleap, a venture-backed Atlanta company started early last year by Tandberg Television and N2Broadband veterans Braxton Jarratt (photo below) and John Vecchio, has introduced its first set of software-based content management and advertising products.
The first, called "Clearflow," is aimed at speeding the process of distributing content from a programmer to a multichannel operator's video-on-demand platform or broadband portal.
"It's focused on the pain points in distributing content between a content owner and operator," says Jarratt, who serves as Clearleap's CEO while Vecchio is EVP of technology. "Our mission is to shrink the time it takes to get content in on-demand platforms from weeks to minutes."
The Internet-based system handles content acquisition, management and distribution and fully integrates with existing VOD and linear TV infrastructure. It also offers both proprietary and third-party transcoding tools for both repurposing content for new-media platforms and up-converting Internet video for display on a TV screen.
"We can take things coming right off Internet feeds into the headend, and push them out to VOD within the house," says Jarratt. "We have the capability to do that very easily and very quickly."
The company's second product, "Clearprofit," is intended to make it easier for operators and programmers to monetize VOD content. Designed to work with existing VOD control software, Clearprofit will make it easy to insert both local and national avails in on-demand programming, says Jarratt. He noted that inserting ads easily into VOD has long been a stumbling block for operators, though he didn't give many details of exactly how Clearprofit works.
The software-driven Clearflow and Clearprofit products are supported by data centers that Clearleap has developed in New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles, says Jarratt, which means the hardware required at the headend to implement either is minimal. Clearflow has already been deployed by at least one operator, while Clearprofit should roll out in the next couple weeks.
"We pull most of the computing requirements outside of the headend and put it in the data centers," says Jarratt. "That's our biggest advantage, that it's managed in the network rather than at a specific headend."
Clearleap has raised some $9 million in venture funding to date from firms including Trinity Ventures of Menlo Park, Calif. and Noro-Moseley Partners of Atlanta, as well as private investors such as former Time Warner Cable CTO and OpenTV CEO Jim Chiddix. The company also secured $3.3 million in venture debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank last fall. It plans to exhibit at the NCTA show in Washington next month, where it will demonstrate Clearflow and Clearprofit, and formally announce customers later this year.
