India’s second largest circulated newspaper rolls out video on flagship property: Jagran.com

OFFICIAL WEB WIRE: http://bit.ly/marcellus-jagran

February 02, 2010 – Marcellus Inc. announced today its first major news property sign-up, with the addition of the Jagran Group to its customer base. The announcement follows the launch of video delivery on Jagran.com, powered by the Marcellus platform. Leveraging the Amazon Cloudfront CDN, Marcellus empowers Jagran to serve high quality, buffer-free video experiences to a massive global audience- with a publishing workflow customized to match the enterprise level requirements of a large news organization.

“The history of Jagran speaks for itself,” said Preetam Mukherjee, president and chief executive officer at Marcellus. “With an offline audience of over 50 million daily readers and an online audience of over 1.5 million monthly viewers, Jagran is superbly poised to create exciting new business opportunities with online video. We are privileged to be supporting these video initiatives at an organization that has documented the daily history of the largest democracy in the world since 1942.”

In less than two weeks since the introduction of video, Jagran has served well over 300 hours of programming from its flagship portal, http://www.jagran.com. By adopting the Marcellus Video Platform, Jagran plans to leverage the tremendous scale economics of video delivery from the Amazon Cloudfront CDN, and increase the level of audience engagement across all its online media properties.

“In our search for a video platform, there were a few things we simply could not compromise upon.” said Sukirti Gupta, CEO at MMI Online, which manages Jagran.com. “The first, and foremost, was quality- there is no excuse for delivering inferior quality video experiences to audiences. Second was cost- we needed an economical solution that could help us build a viable business model around our online video initiatives. Third- we needed a platform that could easily integrate with our content management system powered by Yahoo. Finally- we wanted to work with an agile team that is extremely competent with the business and technology of online video”.

“After months of evaluating online video platforms from across the world, we settled on Marcellus as the platform of our choice. They’re an exciting bunch, extremely passionate about this space, with the ability to execute fast. Once we signed off with them, Marcellus took us from zero to launch in three weeks, which was a pleasant surprise in of itself. We are absolutely delighted with our choice and look forward to pioneering the online video revolution in India with the Marcellus team backing us up.”

With the successful launch of Jagran.com, Marcellus continues its pledge to help businesses and web sites across the world deliver high quality video to their audiences, at extremely affordable price points. The company plans to drive deeper into the North American market in 2010, and extend its footprint among small and mid-sized businesses looking to deliver online video- a market where simplicity, quality and cost continue to be an under-served combination.

EDITIONS AND PRICING

The Marcellus service is available in three Editions- BASIC, PLUS and PREMIUM. Each edition offers a set of functionality geared towards organizations with varying needs. In addition, Marcellus offers five Infrastructure plans, from 10 GB to 1.5 TB in monthly bandwidth capacity. Enterprise customers requiring larger bandwidth volumes are set up with custom infrastructure plans tailored to their needs. Using a combination of the BASIC edition and 10 GB bandwidth plan, publishers can get started with Marcellus for as low as 25 Dollars per month.

For a free, 30-day evaluation, please visit http://marcellus.tv/start and start publishing videos in less than five minutes.

ABOUT MARCELLUS

Marcellus is a video platform for small and mid-sized businesses to deliver high quality video experiences from their own web sites. The Marcellus team comprises of former researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, and has over a decade of experience with online video technology and social media.

The company was founded in August, 2007 and has offices in North America and India.

PDF: http://cdn.marcellus.tv/press/2010/january/jagran_marcellus.pdf

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

+1-877-421-0665

buzz@marcellus.tv

http://www.marcellus.tv

Being number 2 isn’t too bad a thing – if you’re number 1 also. James Cameron’s Avatar has become the second highest grossing movie (domestic) behind James Cameron’s Titanic. Congratulations for the number 2 spot and for the Golden Globe win.

Bora Bora is an island in the Leeward group of the Society Islands of French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France in the Pacific Ocean. The island, located about 230 kilometres (140 mi) northwest of Papeete, is surrounded by a lagoon and a barrier reef. In the center of the island are the remnants of an extinct volcano rising to two peaks, Mount Pahia and Mount Otemanu, the highest point at 727 metres (2,385 ft). The original name of the island in the Tahitian language might be better rendered as Pora Pora, meaning “First Born”; an early transcription found in 18th- and 19th century accounts, is Bolabolla or Bollabolla.

Greece attracts more than 16 million tourists each year, thus contributing 15% to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product Economy. Greece has been an attraction for international visitors since antiquity for its rich and long history and more recently for its Mediterranean coastline and beaches.^[1] In 2005, 6,088,287 tourists visited only the city of Athens, the capital city.*

* Wikipedia: Tourism in Greece

Happy 2010 everyone!

We launched a new design for the Marcellus Video Platform last night.
For the most part, we’ve made things a little cleaner, added more definition to containers, introduced consistency where it was lacking, and added a touch of soft aesthetics wherever possible.

You’ll see the changes as soon as you log-in to your account, but we’ve included a few screenshots below anyway.
Enjoy!

mvp- The Dashboard

mvp- Upload a new video

mvp- Customize Video player

mvp- Video Library

A title Guy Kawasaki can use… but the inspiration comes from Umair Haque – “listening beats talking.”

The most significant aspect of a SaaS experience is the relationship that a service provider has with the subscriber. More aptly, the most important control point (for a service provider) is the relationship that the subscriber has with the service.

A sure way to make that relationship a successful one is to let it be driven by customer feedback. It is better to be proactive (in getting that feedback), than having to look reactive (in responding to critique).  The most important thing I took away from the recent post featuring Marcellus (NOSTEALTH) on Techcrunch was that you lose out on interacting with customers when you are in the self-imposed “stealth mode.”

One of the more practical methods of practicing the art of listening is to set up a customer advisory board. If that is impractical for you, then there are tools like Getsatisfaction that make active listening easy. Regardless of how you choose to do it, the ability to listen to validated feedback is your most important weapon. It is practically chapter 1 of your survival guide for SaaS success.

You increase the odds of success in your favor by letting the service be driven by those who are paying to adopt it… your paid customers. Eric Ries made an interesting point in the discussion that ensued the posting:

Customers don’t usually know what they want, but that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful to talk to them to learn about what they need

While Marcellus has a unique product perspective of its own, we also love to listen …a lot of the features in production and in the lab are also customer success stories.

And it is something we are very proud of.

So I was perusing the web, doing my regular year-end survey of the busiest, biggest/slowest/most watched and came across the buggiest software of the year list and it turns out Firefox and Adobe found their way to the top of this dubious list.

Seeing Firefox on top of the list made sense – it is open source, so all bugs are publicly documented; but seeing Adobe up there is not a good thing. Hackers are moving away from attacking the relatively more stable OS to exploiting holes in applications. Application providers unlike OS manufacturers are not used to this kind of security scrutiny… and Adobe finds itself under heavy attack from exploiters:

“During the first three months of 2009, F-Secure discovered 663 targeted attack files, the most popular type being PDFs at nearly 50 percent, followed by Microsoft Word at nearly 40 percent, Excel at 7 percent, and PowerPoint at 4.5 percent.”

Adobe has responded by saying that it will be patching its releases on a regular schedule even though we still wait for Adobe to patch up its latest zero-day hole in Reader and Acrobat.

But in the meantime, please do update your Flash player – it is not only the cool features that you are missing out on – apparently, this is now a critical security requirement.

Excellent write-up by Vivek Wadhwa @ Techcrunch, about stealth mode startups, and if it still makes sense to be doing them.
The general consensus is that aside from a few rare cases, the answer is a big N.O.

Head on over to Techcrunch and check out the article.

We’re excited and blown away: Fierce Online Video just released its Fierce15 list of companies that “provide the skeleton, muscle and flesh of the online video industry”.

Marcellus made it to this list- we’re delighted, humbled, excited and eager to continue our efforts with renewed vigor.

Check out the full list here and read the Marcellus interview here.

Big thanks to Jim O’Neill at FierceOnlineVideo for the nomination!

Enables delivery of high quality video from self-owned web properties, to audiences of any size. Includes a free, no-obligation, 30-day trial. Paid plans start at only 25 Dollars per month.

Marcellus, LLC announces today the public release of its powerful online video platform, based on the Amazon computing cloud. In response to the explosive global demand for video on the web, Marcellus offers an end to end solution for small to mid-sized businesses to deliver video using the award-winning H.264 standard, monetize their content using ad networks or self-served advertisements, track their video viewership across the Internet, and much more- from within a simple, web-based interface.

With a unique pricing model that separates features from delivery capacity, the Marcellus platform enables publishers to get started for as little as 25 Dollars per month. Leveraging the Amazon cloud as its core infrastructure, Marcellus offers a unique combination of low cost, and virtually unlimited delivery capacity on demand.

CUSTOMER QUOTE
“Marcellus has the best combination of quality, price and features to host our paid video content. And most important to the user experience we provide, the video quality is excellent“.
DENNIS SMITH, Founder, iFocusToday.com

“In the month of September 2009, 84% of Americans on the Internet were also watching video online“, said Preetam Mukherjee, co-founder and chief executive officer at Marcellus. “That’s an all-time record in the history of online video. Publishers recognize this, are eager to capitalize on the opportunity, are sophisticated enough to understand what they need to do, but don’t have access to an economical solution which helps them deliver gorgeous viewing experiences, easily. And that’s exactly what the Marcellus platform has woven together: quality, scale, ease, economics, and simplicity.”

SPOTLIGHT ON PLATFORM FUNCTIONALITY

1. Fast video encoding into the H.264 format, with processing performed entirely on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Upload files in almost any source format, including AVI, MP4, MOV, and WMV.

2. Specify target bit-rates for encoding, with automatic optimization of video during the encoding process, for buffer-free viewing experiences.

3. Extremely light-weight, fast-loading video player, with the ability to customize colors, player size, and functionality. Add your own cover image for display before video playback, and include your own overlay branding within the player.

4. Introducing support for pre-roll and overlay advertisements- Easily plug in your Adap.TV, Google AdSense for Video, Atlas or Scanscout credentials, and start monetizing your content in minutes. Or, setup your own custom advertisement campaign, with your own rules to limit visibility, impressions, ad-expiration, and clicks.

5. Dedicated encoding in the cloud for customers using the Premium edition. With a maximum pre-processing time of 5 minutes, this edition is designed for customers who need their content encoded right away, skipping ahead of all customers in queue.

6. Real-time reports on video traffic, impressions and embed locations. Keep track of exactly where your videos are viewed, and how often. Daily updates on bandwidth consumption at a granular level for each video, and at an aggregate level for all your content.

BRINGING THE ECONOMICS OF THE AMAZON CLOUD TO BUSINESSES

“Amazon was a clear choice for us when building up our infrastructure“, said Sunil Chiluvuri, chief technology officer at Marcellus. “Whether you’re a service provider or a content publisher working with online video, you always have two core concerns: scale and cost. Not only do you worry about being able to handle gigantic spikes in video traffic, you also have to ensure that your cost of delivery isn’t overshadowing your earning potential.
Being able to build up a virtualized infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services was crucial to us being able to address both scenarios. The availability of on-demand computing power, coupled with the elastic nature of the S3 cloud, is helping us offer a viable video service at price points that were previously unheard of in this space.”

Marcellus is an official Amazon Web Services Solution Partner, and leverages leading-edge AWS cloud services like EC2, S3, SQS and Cloudfront to deliver a compelling and reliable service to its customers.

EDITIONS AND PRICING

The Marcellus service is available in three Editions- BASIC, PLUS and PREMIUM. Each edition offers a set of functionality geared towards organizations with varying needs. In addition, Marcellus offers five Infrastructure plans, from 10 GB to 1.5 TB in monthly bandwidth capacity. Using a combination of the BASIC edition and 10 GB capacity, publishers can get started with Marcellus for as low as 25 Dollars per month.
For a free, 30-day evaluation, please visit http://marcellus.tv/start and start publishing videos in less than five minutes.

ABOUT MARCELLUS

Marcellus is a video platform for small and mid-sized businesses to deliver high quality video experiences from their own web sites. The Marcellus team comprises of former researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, and has over a decade of experience with online video technology and social media.
The company was founded in August, 2007 and has offices in North America and India.

PRESS CONTACT

Riff Khan
+1-510-868-5279

###