Welcome to Mediafly Feature Alerts. In this post, we will cover new features to the entire Mediafly Platform made available over the second quarter of 2012. If you are an existing customer and have any questions, or want to learn more about how Mediafly’s Solutions can help your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Improvements to the Device Applications
iPad and iPhone
We have made a lot of minor improvements to the applications as we round out security and usability over the past quarter.
- We improved the choices for the user for second-screen and AirPlay.
- When playing over slow connections, we show better information to help the user self-diagnose issues.
- When multiple users are bound to a device, we allow the user to “lock” (de-authenticate) when they are done using the device.
- The app support rotating overlay watermarks, in addition to colorful textual watermarks at fixed positions on videos or documents.
- Apps can now nag users to upgrade if they aren’t on a minimally supported version.
- The app checks for jailbroken devices and attempt to shut off access.
Android
The Mediafly Platform’s DRM (Digital Rights Management) system offers customers the ability to enforce policies on media. Specifically, if a manager revokes the ability to access a specific piece of media to a specific user, that user’s apps remove all known copies of that media. While Android would remove media from the user’s hierarchy, it would not actually remove that media from the SD card or other storage. This loophole has been fixed, and the Android platform apps now offers a consistent level of DRM as our other device apps.
Another significant challenge in enforcing DRM on Android surrounds PDF documents. Unlike iOS, Android does not give apps the ability to control PDF rendering. On the contrary, PDF viewers are external applications and generally support no encryption. This makes keeping PDFs secure on Android a challenge. We solved this challenge by building a PDF renderer that can handle encrypted PDFs passed down from our API…
… but note that this capability is currently in beta, and is available only on tablets. We plan to improve its usability and introduce it to phones in the coming quarters.
The final major improvement that our Android users will see is in background images. The apps that we build for our customers include rich branding and graphics. Our Android apps can now add branding and shine with these images.
Roku
We built the capability to show media in the new Roku grid layout. This layout presents a wonderful way to display two layers of hierarchy on one screen.
Web Player
We created the Horizontal Carousel Mode, which enables customers to show a simple list of items as a horizontal carousel.
Improvements to the Platform
Publisher
While we are designing and building our new publishing platform, code-named Airship, we continue to improve the Publisher platform for our customers.
Lots of bug fixes and stability improvements hit Publisher the past several months. We hope our users have noticed!
In the past, when a user changes only metadata, the apps would think the entire item has changed. The default behavior has changed: when a user changes only metadata, the apps are smart enough to realize only metadata has changed and do not re-download the media.
Users can now upload PowerPoint files (PPT and PPTX) directly into Publisher…
… though they will probably want to change the presentation size to 8.5″ x 11″, vs. the PowerPoint default of 7.5″ x 10″.
We’ve introduced a beta feature as well: users can also “bulk edit” certain fields for a series of items, all at once. Simply select a number of items and click on “Edit”. The Bulk Editor window will appear.
When you choose “Save & Publisher”, your changes will be published.
Reporting
We have added folders as a column in most reports. This is particularly useful for customers that have the same item appear in multiple locations.
We have created a few new reports. The most notable is “What folders have the most views?”. This report consolidates item views by folder to provide a view into the most popular folders at a glance.
We refreshed the user interface to match the new Mediafly styling. Expect to see this styling rolled out across all of our web properties over the coming quarters.
Improved Security
We have released even more security improvements for our customers.
- A lengthy, coordinated effort that spanned several months and nearly every system brings us 2-way mutually authenticated SSL. This feature greatly enhances our application security by helping our servers better trust that our apps are who they say they are.
- Customers can now set complex password and PIN requirements, including combinations of letters, numbers, length, and history constraints.
- While we have supported and will continue to support RTMPE, Adobe’s encrypted version of RTMP, customers using the Mediafly Flash Player can upgrade their security to pRTMP (protected RTMP). pRTMP is a vast improvement over RTMPE: pRMTP encrypts the content itself, whereas RTMPE encrypts only the communication channel and leaves the content unencrypted.
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