VideoNuze Posts

Startup Vinyl Trading Desk, founded by longtime Altitude Digital COO Devin Yeager, has raised an initial round of $750K from FastPay. Devin told me in a briefing that Vinyl’s platform unifies and simplifies ad buying across video, search and social for clients starting with budgets as little as $1,500. The new funds will be used mainly for product development and building sales and marketing staff.

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I’m pleased to present the 372nd edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we discuss 4 stories that caught our attention in recent days. First, Viacom’s plan to anchor an entertainment-only skinny bundle without sports or news networks. Colin and I are intrigued, but for a variety of reasons are skeptical Viacom is the right company to lead this.

Next we turn to Facebook, which has made no secret of its interest in pursuing longer-form video. This week brought news of its initial partnerships and potential business models.

We then discuss Amazon Channels expansion into the UK and Germany this week, building on the US model for Prime users to easily subscribe to various SVOD services. Both of us have been very bullish on Channels for a while and see lots of potential for it in other geographies.

Finally we dig into Snapchat Shows, the fast-growing social network’s plan to enlist multiple media companies to make vertical videos. Variety did a really good roundup of all the activity earlier this week, which suggests substantial progress.

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Samba TV and SpotX have announced a partnership to improve video ad targeting to viewers on the web and in apps and connected TVs. Under the deal, Samba TV’s TV viewership data will become available in SpotX’s ad server, so that custom TV audience segments can be built using combined TV and digital data.

SpotX will become Samba TV’s primary connected TV ad server enabling advertisers to buy connected TV ads either programmatically or direct.

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Content discovery platform Taboola is taking a page from social networks, introducing a new format called “Taboola Feed,” which is a continuous scrolling feed of content that appears at the end of publisher’s article pages. Publishers can customize the feeds using “cards” that can contain either their own or third-party content (see video demo below).

Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola, told me that moving to the feed approach is an acknowledgement that social networks have optimized how the mobile user experience should work, and that the publishers’ current approach to loading their pages with multiple widgets is broken. With a feed that follows the end of an article, publisher create a familiar environment that in turn improves the likelihood that users will stay engaged.

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Viewers’ interest in being able to download videos, as well as stream them, is strong, though awareness of a downloading feature in streaming services remains modest, according to new research from software provider Penthera. In a poll of U.S consumers 18-44 years-old, Penthera found that one third or more of subscribers to major SVOD services like Netflix weren’t aware downloading was available (Netflix officially launched downloading for select titles last November after consistently saying it didn’t believe it was a valuable feature). Dan Taitz, Penthera’s COO told me in a briefing that the relatively low awareness reflects downloading still being in an “early adopter phase.”

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Online video advertising is still relatively new, so understanding its exact impact on critical brand metrics is not yet entirely clear. To better understand the correlations between frequency and impact, YuMe recently conducted a study using Kantar Milward Brown’s MarketNorms data and select video ad campaigns that ran in Q1 2017.  

Not so surprisingly, at a high level, YuMe found that as viewers experienced more video ad exposures, all brand metrics improved. These metrics include aided awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent.

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Brightcove has announced the beta availability of a new transcoding approach it calls Context Aware Encoding, which aims to save customers money through reduced storage and delivery bandwidth, while still optimizing visual quality.

Context Aware Encoding optimizes a video’s parameters including resolution and frame rate, plus codec parameters including bitrate, codec profile and level in order to create a set of specific adaptive bitrates. All of this is done by analyzing the video using machine learning to optimize it for devices and bandwidth.

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Today is the LAST day to save $100 on registration to the 7th annual VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit on Wednesday, June 14th in NYC. Reminder that as a bonus, all early bird registrants will be entered to win a 55-inch TCL 4K Roku TV.

This year’s Ad Summit features a rich and diverse program including keynote discussions with Troy Young, Global President of Hearst Digital Media and Brian Lesser, CEO of GroupM North America. There are over 40 other industry executives from Bloomberg Media, Bonnier, Disney ABC Television, Hill Holliday, Hulu, IAB, Initiative, Mic, NBCU, Publicis Media, Roku, Trusted Media Brands, Turner Broadcasting, The Washington Post, Universal McCann, Pfizer, Reuters, USA Today Network, VEVO, Viacom and others still to come.

In addition to our premier program, the Ad Summit offers unparalleled networking throughout the day. If you or your company are focused on online video and all of the areas it touches these days, the Ad Summit is a must-attend event.

Many thanks to our 15 sponsors, including exclusive Title Partner FreeWheel; Premier Partners Comcast Technology Solutions, Extreme Reach, Verizon Digital Media Services, VertaMedia and Videology; Headline Partners Beachfront Media, Cedato, SintecMedia, Smart AdServer and Vemba, and Branding Partners Brightcove, JW Player, Roku and SpotX.

Don’t miss out - learn more and register now!