Recently on Videonuze
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VideoNuze Podcast #180 - Does Live Streaming TV Make Sense?
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Turns Out Most "Mobile Video" Experiences Actually Happen at Home
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Multiscreen Live Linear - Consumer Values and Perceptions
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Live Streaming Gets Another Boost As Brightcove Rolls Out New Live Module
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Early Bird Discount Ends This Friday for June 4th Video Ad Summit in NYC
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Study: Click-Through Rate for In-Stream Video Ads is Four Times Higher Than for Rich Media and Mobile
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ABC Introduces Live Streaming as TV Everywhere's Grip on Broadcast TV Tightens
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Video Apps, Devices, and Fragmentation: How to Navigate the Maze
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VideoNuze Podcast #179 - YouTube's Subscription Channels: Big Deal or Not?
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Inside Retransmission Consent - Aereo's Biggest Threat to Broadcasters
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Analysis for 'Deals & Financings'
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Innovid Raises $11 Million Series C Round To Expand to New Devices
Innovid has raised an $11 million series C round from existing investors Sequioa Capital, Genesis Partners and T-Ventures, along with new investor Vintage Investment Partners. With the new round, the company has raised $27.6 million to date. Innovid CEO and co-founder Zvika Netter told me the company experienced a very strong Q3 and Q4 in 2012, contributing to 450% year-over-year growth. The new financing will help the company expand its ad platform beyond online, mobile and tablet to also reach connected TVs, game consoles, VOD and broadcast.
Innovid's technology platform allows advertisers to integrate interactive elements into their pre-roll video ads, increasingly the likelihood of engagement and improving ROI. As Innovid's iRoll gallery shows, these can include social sharing, links to mini-sites, special offers/commerce, supplementary content, etc. Interactivity is added to the ads easily through the iRoll Studio. Innovid also offers ad serving and advanced analytics that track exactly how users engage with the interactive elements.Categories: Advertising, Deals & Financings
Topics: Innovid
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Taboola Raises $15 Million Series D Round
Taboola has raised another $15 million, led by Pitango VC, bringing its total to date to $40 million. The Series D financing comes just 9 months after raising its last round of $10 million. Taboola will use the new funds for continued international expansion and product development. CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me the company has 70 employees currently and plans to double in size by the end of 2013.
Taboola's roots are in providing recommendations for content providers to better promote their own video within their sites and also for third-party video to gain wider, targeted distribution. Over the past year Taboola has also leveraged its underlying EngageRank recommendations technology to quietly begin distributing article recommendations as well (I noticed these last month on WSJ.com).Categories: Deals & Financings, Technology
Topics: Pitango VC, Taboola
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Altitude Digital Lands $5 Million to Build Out Visualtising, A Video SSP
Anyone working in or around the video ad tech space knows how incredibly crowded and well-funded it is. So, when a couple of weeks ago I noticed that a company I was only mildly familiar with, Altitude Digital, announced it had raised $5 million, I was intrigued. While not a blockbuster-sized round, financings of this size signal that the investors, after having done their customary due diligence, see some "white space" still available to operate in. To learn more, I recently spoke to Devin Yeager, Altitude's COO, and Joe Salvador, VP of Video Operations.
Denver-based Altitude started up about 4 years ago as a display ad rep firm, but 2 years ago began building its own technology. More recently, Altitude has expanded into video, creating a new division called Visualtising. As a whole, the company is now processing about 12 billion display and video ad impressions per month. Altitude currently has 20 employees and is looking to double in size this year. It was also #54 ranked on Inc. 5000 list last year. Expanding Visualtising is the main purpose of the new financing.Categories: Advertising, Deals & Financings
Topics: Altitude Digital, Visualtising
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5 Year-End Video Stories You May Have Missed
Welcome to 2013! If you were mostly checked out over the past 1-2 weeks (or were only paying attention to the fiscal cliff roller coaster), you didn't miss a whole lot in the video world. However, there were 5 items that caught my attention which I briefly describe below:
Categories: Advertising, Aggregators, Cable Networks, Cable TV Operators, Deals & Financings, Devices, Research, TV Everywhere
Topics: Amazon, Disney, ESPN, Intel, Netflix, TV Everywhere, YouTube
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Carl Icahn's Understanding of Netflix Seems a Mile Wide and an Inch Deep
It may be a fool's errand to question the thinking of an investor who's worth $14 billion, but after listening to Bloomberg's interview with Carl Icahn yesterday (embedded below) concerning his newly disclosed 10% stake in Netflix, it's hard not to conclude his understanding of the company is a mile wide and an inch deep. Unless he has some big vision for the company up his sleeve that he's not disclosing, Icahn seems more interested in a short-term bet on driving Netflix into a larger company's arms, than in positively influencing Netflix's murky strategic direction.
Categories: Aggregators, Deals & Financings
Topics: Carl Icahn, Netflix
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RAMP Raises $15 Million for Enterprise, International Expansion
RAMP, which helps media companies optimize video discovery, has raised a $15 million Series C round, led by StarVest Partners, plus new investors Hearst Interactive Media and EDBI and including existing investors. With the financing, RAMP has raised $40 million to date. Funds are intended to pursue the enterprise market and also for international expansion.
Categories: Deals & Financings
Topics: RAMP
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Visible Measures Raises $21.5 Million; Video Ad Network Helps Power 300% Growth
Visible Measures, which provides video analytics and operates the Viewable Media video ad network, has raised another $21.5 million, led by DAG Ventures and including existing investors. The funds will be used to drive adoption of the company's products.
Visible Measures' CEO Brian Shin said that the company will achieve 300% revenue growth in 2012, for the second year in a row. That strong growth is aided by the April, 2011 launch of Viewable Media, the company's video ad network that is based on its core analytics platform. Viewable Media differentiates itself as performance-based and positions video ads as content that users can choose from on publishers' web pages. The company said that over one hundred brands and agencies have adopted Viewable Media since launch.Categories: Advertising, Deals & Financings
Topics: Viewable Media, Visible Measures
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Taboola Raises $10 Million Series C Round, Doubles Monthly Users
Video recommendations provider Taboola has announced a $10 million Series C financing this morning led by Marker LLC. With the new round, total capital raised to date is $24 million. Proceeds will be used for international expansion and product development.
Taboola's EngageRank now delivers 500 million recommendations per day to 130 million monthly users for publishers such as WSJ, NY Times, CNN, The Hollywood Reporter, USA Today and others. Monthly users have doubled since last November, when Taboola had 64 million users in the U.S. User growth likely reflects increased penetration with U.S. publishers, and also international growth in countries such as Germany (where Taboola recently announced a deal with OMS, a consortium of 30 newspapers), England, Israel, Brazil, France and Poland.Categories: Deals & Financings, Video Search
Topics: Taboola
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Avail-TVN's CEO Discusses $100 Million Financing, ODG Deal [VIDEO]
This week, Avail-TVN made a big splash at the Cable Show, announcing a $100 million financing from The Carlyle Group and the acquisition of the UK-based On Demand Group. As CEO Ramu Potarazu tells me in this interview, Avail-TVN isn't a household name, but it has become one of the most important players in distributing digital video globally. Ramu describes how complex the landscape has become for both content providers and service providers on the other and what roles Avail-TV has in the digital video value chain. He also touches on the disruption that is coming to the digital video advertising space due to dynamic insertion. Watch the video (8 minutes, 35 seconds).
Categories: Deals & Financings
Topics: Avail-TVN
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Elemental Raises $13 Million for International and Product Expansion
Elemental Technologies, which has developed an innovative GPU-based video processing technology, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, to fund international and product expansion. Total financing raised to date is $29.6 million. Elemental's CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman told me yesterday that the company racked up "8-digits" in revenues last year, up from "7-digits" in the two prior years, and has been close to being cash flow positive for the last couple of quarters.
Categories: Deals & Financings, Encoding
Topics: Elemental Technologies
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Mediamorph Raises $8 Million to Track and Measure All Digital Assets
Mediamorph, a cloud-based service which tracks and measures all digital assets across all digital platforms, has
raised an additional $8 million, from Smedvig Capital and Motorola Mobility. Co-founder and Chairman Shahid Khan told me that the funding will be used primarily to expand into Europe and to strengthen its range of service offerings. Total funding raised to date is $11 million.
Mediamorph addresses a key pain point for content providers: as digital distribution platforms multiply, there is massive complexity in cohesively tracking and measuring viewership by platform and then determining the compensation due per contractual terms. Shahid said the company now has relationships with 350 different distributors from which it receives usage data on behalf of content provider clients such as Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, HBO, Starz and others. Mediamorph accepts either structured or unstructured data, crunches it, and then provides a cloud-based, customizable dashboard so that clients can see exactly how their assets are performing either as a whole, or with specific outlets like iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, etc.Categories: Deals & Financings, Technology
Topics: MediaMorph
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Conviva Raises $15 Million from Time Warner Investments
Video stream optimization and analytics provider Conviva has raised a $15 million Series D round, led by Time Warner Investments. With the financing, Conviva has raised $59 million to date. The new funding is earmarked for international expansion and headcount growth.
Conviva's client-side software takes the "pulse" of video streams, and depending on problems detected, will preemptively modify the stream's bit rate and its source, switching CDNs on the fly. The result is a much-improved user experience. Content providers are able to use the Conviva dashboard to analyze delivery, playback and of their video, along with viewer engagement. Conviva optimizes streams for Time Warner divisions HBO and Turner Broadcasting, among other customers including ESPN, Netflix, Fox, NBCU and others. In total, Conviva is optimizing over 1 billion streams per month.Categories: Deals & Financings, Technology
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Verizon Won't Easily Snag Netflix
Verizon is getting its full turn in the rumor mill. Last week, word had it that Verizon is looking to launch an OTT subscription service. Next, Verizon was teaming up with Redbox. And the latest rumor yesterday is that Verizon is
planning a bid to acquire Netflix, which sent Netflix's beleaguered stock up by 6%, and more today. As always, you can never be sure what to believe. But let's assume for a moment that Verizon is sniffing around Netflix. While the combination makes a certain amount of sense, Verizon's big challenge will be that if Netflix is truly in play, unlike others, I would expect pretty healthy bidding competition.
Categories: Aggregators, Deals & Financings
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24/7 Real Media Acquires Panache As Video Ad Consolidation Continues
24/7 Real Media, part of global advertising powerhouse WPP, has acquired video ad technology firm Panache, the latest deal in a wave of consolidation sweeping through the online video advertising technology industry.
Steve Robinson, Panache's CEO and co-founder, told me this morning that the companies have been working together on mutual customers for a while. Panache brings its work flow, analytics and innovative Ad Catalog, which includes 25 video ad formats, which will be integrated into 24/7's Open AdStream. The first version of the new joint solution will be brought to market in Q1 '12.
Categories: Advertising, Deals & Financings
Topics: 24/7 Real Media, Panache
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Netflix Raises $200 Million From TCV, Board Member's Investment Firm
Talk about keeping it all in the family: Netflix's newly issued $200 million convertible debt (part of a $400 million financing announced yesterday) was bought by Technology Crossover Ventures, an investment firm that wasco-founded by Netflix board of directors member Jay Hoag, and where Netflix's former CFO Barry McCarthy is now a venture partner. There's nothing untoward about the move and TCV is a long-time Netflix investor. In fact, given the pair's intimate understanding of Netflix's operations, the move could actually be interpreted as a real vote of confidence in the company's future. Or, on the other hand, it could be seen as a sort of hard-luck loan as the company struggles to regain its footing in the wake of massive recent missteps and aggressive expansion plans.
Categories: Aggregators, Deals & Financings
Topics: Netflix, Technology Crossover Ventures
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Jivox Raises $8.2 Million to Fuel Interactive Video Ads
Interactive video ad technology provider Jivox has raised an $8.2 million second round, led by Fortisure Ventures, with participation from existing investors. Diaz Nesamoney, Jivox's CEO and founder told me yesterday that the funds will be used to expand sales and marketing and further develop its technology platform.
Jivox sees its differentiators as simplifying the process of creating interactive video ad across multiple devices for both in-banner (i.e. rich media) and
in-stream (i.e. pre-roll, mid-roll, etc.) formats. Jivox also distinguishes itself with "BrandGage," its proprietary analytics platform that adds tags to all engagement opportunities in the ad and then maps them into a funnel to deliver higher ROIs. Diaz explained that click-through rates on Jivox ads can range from 2%-8%. He added that brands are demanding more social media integration in their ads, and the ability to serve and track user behavior across platforms and units has become very appealing.
Jivox has raised almost $19 million to date. Campaigns using Jivox currently running include Showtime (for "Gold Rush"), Franklin Templeton and others.Categories: Advertising, Deals & Financings
Topics: Jivox
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Adobe Expands Into Online Video Advertising Through Auditude Acquisition
Adobe is expanding into the surging online video advertising space, announcing that it has acquired video ad manager Auditude, whose Connect platform is used by customers such as Comcast, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Dailymotion and others. Adobe views Auditude as providing the monetization piece of an integrated Adobe solution that already includes video creation, publishing and optimization across all IP-enabled devices. Auditude had raised approximately $40 million to date.
The overall solution is targeted to premium video publishers and distributors where Adobe already has a strong footprint through its Flash Media products and Digital Marketing Suite (i.e. Omniture). The deal seems like a pretty smart move since at a minimum Auditude will benefit from exposure to Adobe's large customer base. Adobe's positioning of the deal as streamlining work flows from creation through monetization/measurement will also resonate with publishers who are swamped trying to keep up with myriad new devices, platforms and social media opportunities.
Categories: Advertising, Deals & Financings
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Irdeto Acquires Piracy Detection Firm BayTSP
Software security provider Irdeto is acquiring media anti-piracy firm BayTSP, the companies are announcing this morning. BayTSP's monitoring and business intelligence technology will broaden Irdeto's range of security solutions for studios, pay-TV providers and media companies, including its ActiveCloak renewal security system. BayTSP counts Comcast, Sony and Toshiba among its clients. Martin Sendyk, Irdeto's SVP, Product and Stuart Rosove, BayTSP's CEO briefed me on the details late last week.
Categories: Deals & Financings, DRM, P2P, Technology
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No Surprise, No Deal for Hulu. Here's What Changed.
Last evening, Hulu's owners announced in a short statement that the company will not be sold after all. The news came as no surprise to me. VideoNuze readers will recall that back on June 22, when the first rumors of Hulu potentially being up for sale surfaced, I posted, "Here's Why Any Deal for Hulu is Unlikely."
In that post I explained how Hulu's primary asset - next-day distribution rights to ABC/Fox/NBC programs - would be at the heart of its valuation. The
big challenge with selling Hulu was that its owners would have to pass these rights (albeit likely reformulated) to an unaffiliated and uncontrollable 3rd-party, at the same time as online video delivery has injected massive uncertainty into their businesses. This issue, rather than lower-than-expected bids as some have tritely suggested, is why Hulu's owners ultimately decided to pull Hulu off the block.
Though this was always the central issue in any Hulu deal, I believe 3 things happened in the past 4 months that crystallized the importance for Hulu's owners of maintaining full control of their distribution rights:
Categories: Aggregators, Deals & Financings
Topics: Comcast, Disney, Hulu, News Corp.
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Over $236 Million Raised in Q3 '11 By Private Online/Mobile Video Companies
Private online and mobile video companies raised at least $236.5 million in Q3 '11, the largest amount since Q2 '10 when $247 million was raised. It's also a huge rebound from Q2 '11's $84 million which was the lowest in the past 2 years. I've compiled the total from numerous sources I track and as always, it is possible that I missed some news during the quarter. If so, please let me know and I'll update the list.
As detailed below, the $236.5 million was raised by 20 companies, with 2 additional financings undisclosed (ClipSync and Ooyala). Of the $236.5 million, 62%, or $147 million, flowed to just 5 companies, Tango ($42M), Tremor Video ($37M), Thought Equity Motion ($25M), Vidyo ($22.5M) and Zenverge ($20.5M). All of these were later stage rounds in companies that had previously raised substantial sums.
As I always like to add in these roundups, too much shouldn't be read into one quarter's data as financings close when they do - a few days one way or the other and quarters can look very different.
Still, the number and breadth of the financings across the online and mobile video value chain - from chips to monetization - is solid evidence that investors remain bullish on video's potential. This should continue as video usage increases, devices proliferate and advertisers accelerate their spending.
In addition to the financings, there was also significant M&A activity and public financings in Q3, which are noted below.
Categories: Deals & Financings
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