Cloudinary, the image and video platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, announced several new Video API enhancements to speed up management, customization, and optimal delivery of long-form video experiences, such as lifestyle (how-to) videos, product demos, event recordings, and on-demand tutorials. With the new enhancements, including expanded support for advanced compression codecs enabling adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR), Cloudinary is the only video API offering robust programmatic and UI-based automations for both short- and long-form videos.
While brands understand the power of video when it comes to improved customer engagement and conversions, many continue to struggle to deliver video-rich experiences quickly and efficiently. Without intelligent automation, it can take several hours, even days, for developers to prepare a single video for use across a brand’s digital channels, reducing critical engagement opportunities. Through its flexible API-based solution and AI-powered automation, Cloudinary eliminates these complex manual workflows, enabling developers to manage, customize, optimize, and deliver video to any channel or device within minutes.
New features and benefits include:
- Fast delivery of long-form video. Users can now upload video files up to 100GB to Cloudinary and deliver them in minutes by leveraging on-the-fly video encoding and automatic bitrate, format, resolution selection based on device and network conditions – minimizing the need for advanced data preparation.
- Maximized performance. In addition to support for the HLS protocol, Cloudinary’s Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR) capability now supports CMAF and DASH protocols, as well as advanced codecs H.265 and VP9, to offer the most efficient video compression for streaming on desktop, mobile, and more.
- Branded, customized viewing experiences. Cloudinary’s HTML5-based video player can now be easily customized using an intuitive UI. This enables users to deliver branded, interactive video experiences by adjusting video content to meet brand standards, configuring auto-play or looping features, and even selecting between progressive download and ABR delivery methods.
- Faster scaling to mobile apps. New Video Player SDKs for iOS, Android, and Flutter come pre-built with ABR to help developers deliver consistent video experiences to mobile apps, while ensuring superior performance.
- Out-of-the-box accessibility compliance. The Cloudinary Video Player includes chapters, auto-captioning and AI-based histograms to make it easy for screen readers or assistive technologies to provide structured access to content and improve SEO.
- Clear and actionable engagement insights faster. Updated analytics dashboard now offers time-series graphs for key engagement metrics such as views, watch rate, and more to identify trends that guide digital content strategies. Users can also export video engagement insights via API to their own business intelligence tools.
- AI-enabled optimizations for social media. Users can now leverage Cloudinary’s existing AI features to generate eye-catching previews for long-form videos and use AI-based smart cropping to easily adapt aspect ratio to the requirements of each social media channel.
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According to 2023 Comscore data*, Cloudinary’s next-gen video platform is one of the five most popular tech properties for managing video content in the U.S. The report also highlights the largest 100 properties and platforms in the US**, dozens of which are Cloudinary customers, including Discovery and Mediavine. Cloudinary’s unique combination of deep image and video expertise, track record of AI innovation, and commitment to delivering significant customer value in a rapidly evolving digital landscape are foundational to its latest video innovations.
Doximity, a leading digital platform for U.S. medical professionals, relies on Cloudinary to serve news-based video content to its app users. According to the platform’s Director of Engineering, James Hicks, “The number and length of the videos hosted on our platform requires us to have an easy, quick, and reliable way to ensure each one looks and performs as intended in each user’s feed across multiple devices and resolutions, which wouldn’t be cost-effective to do manually. Cloudinary has been instrumental in helping us speed up all aspects of our video management, optimization, and delivery workflows.”
“As video becomes more prevalent and more foundational to the customer experience, organizations must be able to easily manage and instantly deliver optimized videos of any length without significant manual intervention,” said Nadav Soferman, co-founder and chief product officer at Cloudinary. “With support for longer-form videos, faster on-the-fly video transformations and optimizations, improved analytics and more, the Cloudinary Video API is now one of the most powerful platforms for delivering the engaging, fast and beautiful video-rich experiences that consumers love and increasingly expect.”
SOURCE: BusinessWire