thePlatform Launches mpx Essentials: Online Video Publishing Made Easy

 thePlatform, an independent subsidiary of Comcast and a leading white-label video publishing company, is making it easy and affordable for any organization to publish and distribute video on the Web and beyond. For the first time, with the launch of mpx Essentials, any mid-sized business or agency has access to a specialized version of the same cloud-based platform used by many of the largest professional media and television companies in the world.

With mpx Essentials, organizations can upload, store, and distribute videos to their own websites, other sites, mobile phones, tablets, and more. mpx Essentials provides a simple Web-based console for managing video, highly customizable video players, optimized video playlists to increase video views, enterprise-grade reliability, and more.

“With mpx Essentials, we’re making our premium video platform broadly available for the first time,” said Ian Blaine, CEO of thePlatform. “More and more organizations are using video to communicate with their customers, employees, and stakeholders, and their needs are rapidly evolving. With mpx Essentials, customers can grow with us, and benefit from an easy, affordable, and reliable system—trusted by many of the most prominent media companies in the world.”

“Online video is not just the purview of TV and entertainment companies, although media and entertainment companies certainly account for a large percentage of the revenue in the online video platform (OVP) market today,” said Melissa Webster, Program Vice President, Content and Digital Media Technologies at IDC. “We see a tremendous and rapidly growing opportunity among organizations and agencies of all kinds that want use video to communicate with their key constituencies and build customer loyalty and engagement. thePlatform’s launch of its new self-service offering is designed to address this opportunity.”

Key Features and Benefits

mpx Essentials provides many of the same features of thePlatform’s award-winning mpx system, in a simple, affordable, and convenient package. Key features include:

• Easy to Use: A highly-intuitive Web-based console, with consistent blade-based navigation and customizable shortcuts, makes uploading and publishing video easy;
• Increased Video Views: Mix and match hand-picked play-lists with dynamically generated video lineups; Improve search and discoverability with metadata toolset and other features; search-optimized feeds for Google and Bing, as well as a Connector for auto-publishing to a YouTube account;
• Custom Video Player Designs: Choose dimensions, skins, colors, layers, social media integration (such as Facebook and Twitter), closed captioning support, and other third-party plugins;
• Playback Across Devices: Smart video players provide optimal video playback on PCs, Macs, smartphones, tablets, and other Internet-connected devices;
• Enterprise Class Support: 24X7 customer support and best-in-class content delivery network (CDN) services for storage and multi-bitrate streaming.

mpx Essentials Pricing
mpx Essentials is available in two different pricing packages, “mpx Essentials 499” for $499 per month, and “mpx Essentials 1499” for $1,499 per month. mpx Essentials 1499 includes added platform functionality and discounted pricing.

thePlatform publishes video and other media to PCs, mobile devices and TVs. Media companies rely on thePlatform’s mpx system as their open, central hub for managing, monetizing and syndicating billions of professionally produced video views annually. thePlatform currently provides online video management services to numerous programmers, leading media companies, and five of the top TV service providers inNorth America, including the largest TV Everywhere deployments.

Additional details about thePlatform can be found at www.thePlatform.com.  [24×7]