Ooyala soft launches Backlot, a video analytics and management tool

Ooyala, (good Fortune post for more info) a San Francisco startup formed by a couple of ex-Google employees just soft launched their video management system, Backlot. Ooyala is a video platform that aims to do more than just show video. Behind the videos is a sophisticated advertising model that you'd expect from a couple of people from the world's largest advertising company. The basic premise is to give people HD-quality interactive video with advertising hooks. Watching a show about fashion and want to buy something you see? Ooyala allows you to grab that item and purchase it from an advertiser. Watching something about Tahiti and decide you want to go? With Ooyala, advertisers could give you subtle touch points that get you started creating your dream vacation. After playing with Backlot I'm really, really stoked about this service. [Screenshot Gallery]

Backlot is the application that advertisers will use to set up the campaigns and advertisements. In addition, it provides sophisticated management and analytics of your video content. Backlot was built using Adobe Flex and uses both a browser-based version as well as a desktop version in Adobe AIR. The application lets content providers upload video as well as set parameters such as enabling specific domains you allow to show a video. That means you can decide exactly who can show your video. With the AIR tool you can upload multiple files and have absolutely no size restrictions.

By far the bread and butter of this service is the analytics. You can customize groups with labels so you can instantly view reports over a wide array of videos. The also support exporting to Excel for any fine tuning you want to do. The application also lets you track where most of your traffic is coming from, in what sections of the video users are rewinding, or at what points they stop watching a video in the middle. This lets you figure out exactly what's working and what isn't in specific videos.

Ooyala itself has done some really impressive stuff with Flash video. They wanted to create the best user experience for people downloading HD content regardless of the bandwidth the user has. In that vein they implemented dynamic bitrate adaption which keys off on the available bandwidth and display resolution. This means that the buffer times for every user will be minimized regardless of their connection. They do this by combining progressive download, streaming, and P2P which gives them ultimate flexibility. It also means that the video can scale up in bitrate as you watch it so the viewing experience gets better as you go.

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Currently the pricing model behind Ooyala is $0.08 per hour of content delivered. They're using Amazon payments, so getting "credits" is easy and you can track how many credits you have left from the application. Because of the way they distribute video, they can afford to be competitors on price. This application and the features it provides are going to be huge for content providers and web publishers of all sizes. Because as opposed to other sites which largely look inward, Ooyala wants to make it easy for people to distribute content across the web. That's a good thing and they've got a lot of helpful features. Check out the screenshots if you want to see it in action.