VideoNuze Posts

At CES this week, Sony announced an ambitious over-the-top pay-TV service that will launch sometime in 2014, making it the latest company to try competing with entrenched pay-TV operators. While Sony brings more assets to the table than did Intel (whose OnCue service never even got to market), the odds of Sony succeeding still seem extremely low to me.

To be fair, Sony's installed base of 25 million PlayStations, its early success with the PS4 and a broader base of connected TVs and Blu-ray players (which Sony says all total to 70 million in the U.S.) give the company a presence in homes that Intel didn't have. Sony also has both studio and TV production operations, plus a sizable back catalog, none of which Intel has. Importantly, Sony also has a well-recognized consumer brand (even if it's not exactly synonymous with innovation as, say, Apple's and Google's are), something Intel also didn't have.

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Akamai and NBC Sports announced this morning that Akamai will be powering video streaming, site performance and security services for the 2014 Winter Olympics on NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports Live Extra app. The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia will run from February 6-23.

NBC Sports plans to stream over 1,000 hours of Olympics content, double what it did 4 years ago from Vancouver. Streaming will include all 15 sports across 98 different events, plus lots of exclusive content such as interviews, athlete profiles and backstories that have become standard Olympics fare.

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Aereo announced late yesterday that it has raised  $34 million in Series C financing. Adding to the $20.5 million in its Series A and $38 million in its Series B, Aereo has now raised a total of $92.5 million. The new funding will support Aereo's ongoing regional rollouts, plus new hiring and technology. Of note, the new financing includes Gordon Crawford, a well-known media investor, whose involvement certainly gives Aereo further credibility.

Aereo is currently live in 10 markets, and said yesterday it plans to be live in 15 by the end of Q1. That's a downward revision from its expansion plan announced a year ago, which was to be in 22 cities by the end of 2013. Last September Aereo announced technical issues delayed its Chicago launch and hasn't updated when that area will go live.

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Mobile video is one of the hottest trends around. But the reality is that mobile video, is in fact, not very mobile. As I wrote last May, research firm Leichtman Research Group found that of people who watched video on their phone, 63% usually do so at home; for tablets, it's a whopping 89%.  One of the big contributing factors to this is the availability of WiFi at home, which allows viewers to avoid using expensive wireless data plans when using their mobile device for video.

That's why a new plan announced yesterday by AT&T, dubbed "Sponsored Data," could have very interesting implications for moving mobile video outside the home, and potentially unleashing totally new mobile video use cases. With Sponsored Data, the content provider pays AT&T for the cost of the data consumed, rather than it counting against the user's monthly data cap. Sponsored Data would have the highest impact on video because it is by far the most data-intensive media format.

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Interactive video advertising provider Innovid and Cisco are building on their previously announced partnership, announcing an initiative to have ads dynamically delivered to second screens using voice-based metadata from TV programs. Innovid's CTO and co-founder Tal Chalozin showed me a demo last week of Cisco's cloud-based technology analyzing words spoken in TV programming to generate keywords and context. The information was then passed to Innovid which delivered a relevant, interactive ad to the viewer's second screen within a few seconds.

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In yet another sign of how online video and TV advertising are continuing to blur, this morning ActiveVideo and BrightLine have announced a partnership to enable set-top boxes and connected TV devices to deliver interactive video ads from the cloud without any additional technical or creative work. Using ActiveVideo's new "CloudTV AdCast," advertisers and agencies can seamlessly deliver HTML5 ads to set-top boxes and connected TV devices, vastly expanding the reach of their ads and increasing their ROI.

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Brightcove announced this morning that it is acquiring Unicorn Media for approximately $49 million, a savvy move to expand into cloud-based video ad insertion, which is particularly beneficial for mobile devices.

Unicorn has differentiated itself by enabling content providers to dynamically insert ads in the cloud, rather than in the video player. By "stitching" ads in the cloud, Unicorn obviates some of the major issues in video ad insertion today, including delays and buffering caused by the video player switching between content and ad playback. These diminish the user experience, in turn causing abandonment which hurts overall consumption and monetization.

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Judging by the pre-show buzz, the main focus at this year's CES (which kicks off next Tuesday) will be on Ultra High-Definition TV, or "4K" TV. If this seems familiar, it's because UHDTVs were the main focus of last year's CES as well. Clearly TV manufacturers have settled on UHDTV as the next "big thing" to motivate consumers to upgrade. However, in 2013, UHDTV's high prices, impractically large screen sizes and lack of 4K content led to extremely limited adoption in the U.S. So the question is: will UHDTVs find better success in the U.S. in 2014?

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