Ooyala Video Scheduling - New Flight Time Feature

You may have noticed that I use Ooyala to power the videos on my site for the past several months.  It is fast becoming one of my favorite video platforms next to blip.tv, brightcove, and a few others (granted that I have not tried every service available these days - soo many companies).

Every few weeks lately it seems that they are releasing more and more new features to the platform.  Just yesterday they just released a cool new feature called "flight time" that basically allows you to schedule videos to become available at a certain day and time. You can also schedule the videos to end if needed.

I really like this feature because it is nice to be able to post an announcement of a video that is "coming soon" and tell your readers they can revisit the page.  It will save you the time of having to come back to the post and add the video at a later date. Within the backlot application, you can choose to schedule a video in the video editing darkroom by specifying a start time and an optional end time for a video.

Here are a few practical applications:

• Scheduling a video to air only after it has aired on television or elsewhere
• Scheduling day-parting video webisode series -(e.g. starting at 6p.m.)
• Expire videos that are only available for a limited time.
• Expire videos that are time-sensitive and relevant - (i.e. no longer valid information)

The following is what the embed code renders (countdown) when the video is to be scheduled for a later date:

When the video is expired, it merely shows the thumbnail image with the overlay text "Video No Longer Available"

Very cool.  Thanks Ooyala