VideoNuze Posts

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.

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Six months in the making, HuffPo Live has launched this morning, seeking to define a new online programming format at the intersection of live-streaming video, news coverage and community involvement. Unlike other news outlets that have primarily relied on re-purposing on-air broadcasts, or on creating online segments featuring their own reporters, HuffPo Live is looking to transform its huge base of active readers/commenters into participants in live-streamed, topical discussions. As a result, HuffPo Live is being positioned as not just a "video network," but more broadly as a "platform for engagement."

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 143rd edition of the VideoNuze-TDG Report podcast. In this week's podcast Colin and I discuss the prospects for Google Fiber, and specifically whether incumbent pay-TV operators and broadband ISPs should be "very, very afraid," as a report from industry analyst SNL Kagan asserted earlier this week.

Google's innovative spirit and willingness to spend heavily on Google Fiber is terrific, but as I said last week, I think its big challenge will be penetrating beyond a core early adopter audience. While uncapped gigabit broadband service is indeed compelling, more mainstream audiences will weigh its benefits against the costs of its missing features, being a guinea pig for an unproven service and increasing their monthly bills for TV and phone service, among other things.

In a sense, Google Fiber feels to me a little bit like Time Warner's Full Service Network pilot in Orlando in the mid-90's, with its high deployment costs, disruptive innovation, untested consumer premise equipment, lack of scalability and massive hype. That's not to say Google Fiber will end up like FSN as a complete flameout, but it's still not clear to me what the real impact of the project is going to be. I think incumbent operators need to be vigilant, but there's no real cause for fright, at least not yet anyway. Colin is a bit more bullish on Google Fiber, though I suspect that's because he's so enticed by the idea of a having a gigabit connection himself (being the early adopter that he is!).

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AOL is announcing this morning version 2.0 of its connected TV app, which will include a refreshed UI and advertising support for the first time. The app has been known as "AOL HD" but will now be known as "The AOL On" app. It is available on Samsung and Sony connected TVs and devices, plus Roku, and within a few weeks on TiVo Premiere DVRs. The move is another sign of how major content providers are getting more serious about migrating the online video experience from the desktop to the living room.

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The Wall Street Journal is further deepening its commitment to online video, and in the process, helping render moot the idea of a "print-only" journalist. A memo this week from deputy managing editor and executive editor, online Alan Murray, to all news staff, unveiled the WSJ's next video initiative, "WSJ WorldStream" (full text here). The memo carries the subject line "We're all video journalists now…" and ends with Murray urging colleagues to "embrace this new opportunity."

The memo is a clear signal that journalists solely hammering out text on a keyboard no longer cuts it. More important, it indicates how the WSJ is further redefining itself from its traditional roots. It wasn't that long ago that the WSJ was a newspaper. Then, with the advent of the Internet, it became a newspaper with digital distribution. Now, with a huge push into video, it doesn't quite feel accurate to even use the term "newspaper" any longer. Rather, something along the lines of "multimedia news organization" (ok, that's too clunky) seems like a better fit.

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If you catch up on your favorite TV programs by watching them online, then no doubt over the past year you've noticed, as I have, that ad volume has been growing. A new report from ad manager FreeWheel substantiates the trend: the number of video ads in long-form content (20+ minutes) has more than doubled, from just over 3 in Q1 '11 to almost 8 in Q2 '12. But in a very encouraging sign for both content providers and advertisers, an amazing 91% of these ads (including pre, mid and post-roll) are viewed to completion, the highest level FreeWheel has yet measured.

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No doubt you've already heard that Apple will not be including its native YouTube app in the next version of iOS that will officially launch this fall. Apple said its license for YouTube, which it held since 2007, when the iPhone launched, has expired. From my vantage point, this seems like a rare win for all stakeholders: YouTube, Apple, iOS users, YouTube's content partners, advertisers and even other video content providers.

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In the past 2 weeks, Netflix delivered tepid Q2 results and a cautious forecast, while Comcast reported strong broadband numbers and an improving video subscriber picture. That's a big reversal from a year ago, when Netflix was flying high and talk of cord-cutting hung over the entire pay-TV industry. So what might we learn from these 2 companies' experiences over the past year? Though I'm sure there are plenty of lessons, here are 4 that come to mind:

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