(Newser)
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There's a startup company you've probably never heard of, but chances are you've seen its work, writes Michael Humphrey in Forbes. It's called Ooyala, and it powers an enormous number of videos across the web. ESPN highlights, Miramax movies, videos that appear on the sites of Rolling Stone, TV Guide, and many more are all managed by Ooyala. The company racks up 200 million video views a month, and its future is all about making sense of the avalanche of data it receives about viewers and turning clicks into dollars.
This week, it unveiled a new technology that "uses proprietary algorithms, machine learning and collaborative filtering" to create a precise recommendation engine. The idea is to deliver videos to people that they'll like, which makes them stay longer and thus see more ads. Ooyala, started by three former Google employees, is on the brink of the next big thing in web video, writes Humphrey: "Serious monetization."
