BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Jul 1, 2015) - Digital strategy managers, industry experts and Ramp partners gathered last week for Ramp Innovations-2015, the company's first user conference, held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Boston. The conference focused on digital audio and video content management, with sessions sharing best practices, industry-wide trends and technical innovations.
Keynote speaker Jim Lundy of Aragon Research described an "era of pervasive video," with video everywhere, both in our personal and work lives. He noted key trends such as using video for social learning, visual storytelling by brands, analytics that make video more searchable and accessible, more apps with video content, and increased video sharing over mobile. Lundy even envisioned a not-too-distant future when drones will transmit videos of our kids' soccer games that we can view live!
Lundy described the ability to live-stream a complete conference from a single tower PC, as Ramp did with its Ramp Video Live solution on SharePoint for all main-stage sessions, as "disruptive" in a time when a conventional live broadcast may cost a business $60,000-$100,000. Aragon's research shows that video is one of the most valuable content types for enterprises, and businesses are looking for ways to better manage increasing amounts of rich media content.
In his keynote, Ramp CEO Tom Wilde noted that video viewing is predicted to account for 80% of web traffic by 2016. He described the Internet's future as the "personal web," where content competes for people's attention, and individuals are the kingmakers. He also noted that the most important target -- getting the right content to the right users at the right time -- would be enabled by Ramp's new Ramp Recommends solution.
In other sessions, panelists from Ramp customers including EBSCO, Polycom, Meredith Publishing, Entercom and EMC shared best practices and observations about the trends that impact their businesses. They noted that enterprises are experiencing "explosive growth," as videos are created by anyone across the organization. One panelist's company used video for a virtual sales kickoff, with 8,000 sales people attending a live webcast. Their next step is re-purposing video to share it with customers. Jim Lundy noted that this approach could represent a significant shift in the industry, i.e., when you can share a "conference in a box."
For publishers, making audio and video discoverable is a primary goal. Quality, speed and user experience with video content were cited as key factors in drawing return visits to a brand's web site, blogs and social networks.
Ramp's executives previewed new and upcoming innovations in both live and on-demand audio and video, including an on-stage demo of Ramp Multicast Engine. Ramp customers shared practical tips from their deployments on the Ramp suite of video management solutions -- Ramp Video Management, Ramp Video Live and Ramp Multicast Engine.
The conference wrapped up with sessions on optimizing networks for video and using big data analytics to personalize content recommendations.
Rebecca Paoletti, CEO of CakeWorks.com, moderated a panel on audio and video in media and marketing. She commented: "I was impressed by the enthusiasm of Ramp clients and partners as well as the clarity and granularity the Ramp team provided about new product features and their support. I think we all aspire to make the video ecosystem better -- both from an engagement and profitability perspective -- and Ramp is clearly doing that, every day."
Ramp employed its own Ramp Video Live self-service webcasting platform to live-stream the main-stage sessions with internal staff via a tower PC and the conference hotel's in-house Internet connection. Viewers of the live-streamed sessions could pause and rewind any session using Ramp Video Live's DVR capability, and live sessions were available for viewing on demand immediately upon their conclusion. Recordings of all Ramp Innovations-2015 main-stage sessions will be made available at the conference website: http://innovations.ramp.com
About Ramp
Ramp provides a next-generation media content platform, making it easy for companies to manage live and on-demand video and audio content across a wide range of industries, from media and entertainment to enterprises in every vertical including financial services, pharmaceutical and healthcare, energy, technology and more. Ramp's end-to-end, cloud-based video and audio content platform delivers a total solution for data-driven viewer experiences with the best ROI of any video platform. Companies benefiting from Ramp's solutions include Janssen Pharmaceuticals, EBSCO, Energy Transfer, Entercom, Levi's, EyeforTravel, FOXNews, Golf Channel, Meredith and many more. Learn more about Ramp at http://www.Ramp.com, and follow us on Twitter at @RAMPINC.