VideoNuze Posts

One of the highlights of the recent VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit was the session with Alisa Bowen, Head of Product for Dow Jones (and formerly GM of the Wall Street Digital Network). Alisa is now responsible for all of the company's digital consumer products and had previously overseen WSJ Live, the company's burgeoning video initiative. WSJ is defying the conventional wisdom that newspapers are in inevitable decline by showing how video can help re-invent the brand and leverage existing assets.

WSJ Live has gained huge momentum since its launch last fall, and now includes 14 different original programs, totaling 100 hours per month, which generate 10.4 million streams per month and are distributed across 20 different platforms (Roku, Apple TV, Smart TVs, etc.). As Alisa explains, all of this has allowed WSJ to reach its audience in different environments, with an experience that is more aligned with users' expectations when they're using a particular device. I continue to think of WSJ Live as an outstanding template for other print publishers to follow.

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 138th edition of the VideoNuze-TDG Report podcast.

Today we discuss two new products that Google introduced this week, the Nexus 7 tablet and the Nexus Q media streamer. Viewing both through the lens of online/mobile video, I think both products are duds, and are generally inferior to other competitive products already available, especially those from Apple. A particular source of concern for Colin and me is the lack of differentiated content. For instance, the Nexus 7 offers no unlimited viewing plan like Amazon Prime for the Kindle Fire, the device it is most similar to.

Colin is less skeptical, and has even ordered a Nexus 7, though more for professional reasons than anything else. However, he's completely underwhelmed by the Nexus Q, thinking the entire whole home audio product category isn't really addressing a strong consumer need. Further, maybe Google has a master plan it's not sharing, but to both of us, the company's silence on how Google TV fits with the two Nexus devices suggests a real lack of coherency in Google's approach to digital media. Listen in to hear all of the details.

Click here to listen to the podcast (18 minutes, 45 seconds)

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Collective has released its Video Metrics Report 2012, delivering 6 profiles of online video viewers who are female and heavy buyers of certain types of consumer packaged goods. The 6 profiles are for buyers of diet foods, organic products, beauty products, household products, baby care products and carbonated beverages. For each profile, Collective shares index figures for age, income, occupation, product preferences and TV consumption. Collective also offers marketers specific tips for how to reach these 6 profile groups with online video advertising.

Collective generated the profiles by analyzing hundreds of millions of video impressions along with its Audience Cloud profile database and Personifi purchaser data. The insights are valuable for brands that are seeking to reach certain types of potential buyers using online video advertising, in conjunction with TV ads.

HealthiNation, which produces and syndicates health and lifestyle video across multiple platforms, is getting a big boost to its library via an exclusive distribution deal with PumpOne, which has the largest collection of fitness and workout videos and images. PumpOne offers content such as step-by-step workout plans and hour-long exercise classes yoga, bootcamp and other areas.

HealthiNation separately announced that Seth Solomons has joined its board of directors. Solomons is currently Global CEO of CRM365, a CRM agency that's part of Publicis' VivaKi unit, and is also the former global CMO of Digitas.

It's no secret that billions of videos and photos are created and uploaded to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, flickr, Facebook and others every day. The proliferation of digital capture devices and online hosting sites has triggered an explosion of digital creativity. What's been missing however, is an economy around these digital content assets - a simple way for content creators to list and license their videos and photos, with a corresponding mechanism for buyers to discover and buy those they desire. This massive opportunity is what Paya (pronounced "pay-ya"), being introduced today by T3Media, is addressing.

As Craigslist and eBay did mainly for physical goods and services, Paya is trying to put the necessary structure around digital assets to create a thriving marketplace. A couple of weeks ago, T3Media's CEO and Founder Kevin Schaff and VP of Marketing Dan Weiner walked me through how Paya works. I think it's one of the most impressive, well thought out ideas I've seen in a while.

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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.

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Interviewed by the NY Times' Amy Chozick at last week's VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit, News Corp.'s Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller summed up his view of the future of TV by saying that "TV is an app." Jon believes that watching programs will become "screen agnostic" with consumers expecting consistency in experience and choices.

That said, Jon doesn't anticipate a proliferation of successful TV apps at the scale of what we've seen in the tablet/smartphone world; rather he envisions a hierarchy of just a few aggregators (e.g. Hulu, Netflix, HBO, etc.) leading the way. He also doesn't envision an a la carte future any time soon. Although consumers say they value lots of choices, Jon points to examples where this actually leads to consumer fatigue.

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While the quantity and quality of mobile apps keeps expanding, there's one corner of the ecosystem that has lagged: high-quality video apps. Once you get beyond apps like HBO Go, Netflix, WatchESPN, Hulu Plus, Xfinity and a handful of others, the choice and quality drops off pretty quickly. That's because great video apps are expensive to build and to maintain, especially since the number of mobile device platforms keeps multiplying.

This is the problem that Beachfront Media, which has built the video aggregator MeFeedia, is trying to solve with a new mobile video app development platform it announced called Beachfront Builder, which launches in private beta next Thursday. With Beachfront Builder, content providers are able to quickly build video apps for iOS, Android and Kindle Fire, with others coming soon.

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