VideoNuze Posts

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.

Watch the interview

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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One of the things I was listening hard for throughout the sessions at this past Tuesday's VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit was whether speakers and attendees believe a convergence is coming between TV advertising and online video advertising models. To date the two have been siloed with different user experiences, back-end technologies, measurement systems (or lack thereof), ad loads, etc. In fact, the most frequent touch point between the two may well be on the creative side, where many of today's pre-roll ads remain re-purposed TV spots.

Yet with premium video proliferating online and connected devices like the iPad, Xbox and Smart TVs driving more consumption of entertainment, the formerly bright line distinguishing a viewer's online video experience from their TV experience is becoming increasingly blurry. For viewers this causes confusion around what degree and type of advertising to expect when they watch. And for content providers it likely means monetization is not being fully optimized across platforms.

At the heart of the issue, I believe, is whether video advertising should continue to be impression-based, as it always has been with TV, or engagement-based, as online has become, primarily due to the rise of search as online's dominant category.

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Today's VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit was a huge success, with hundreds of attendees joining for an immersive day of learning and networking. There are tons of tweets at #VideoAdSummit as well as various posts around the web.

All of the sessions were video-recorded and I'll be posting them in the coming weeks, as they're edited and available. In addition, I'll be posting all of the speakers' presentations. I'm re-grouping on Wednesday and will be begin posting highlights on Thursday.

Over 500 industry executives will converge on the VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit tomorrow in NYC. Registration spans brand marketers, agencies, content publishers, technology providers and others in the ecosystem. There are 18 sessions scheduled with 40 different speakers, ensuring an immersive learning experience for all, in addition to plenty of time for networking.

There's still time to sign up, but if you're not able to join us, we'll be tweeting updates throughout the day at @VideoNuze and #VideoAdSummit. I'll be back online posting later this week.

The Summit is generously supported by Title sponsors Adobe/Auditude and YuMe, plus Adap.tv, The AOL On Network, Collective, Conviva, Eyeview, Innovid, LiveRail, Jivox, Mixpo, TubeMogul, VideoHub, and Videology.

I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 137th edition of the VideoNuze-TDG Report podcast.

First up this week, Colin and I discuss this week's news that the Department of Justice is investigating whether cable TV companies are acting to suppress online video. As I wrote on Wednesday, it's good for the government to be vigilant, but for now anyway I don't believe online video providers or consumers are being impacted (rather I suggested if the DOJ wants to address a REAL way consumers are being harmed it should look into the multi-billion dollar per year subsidy non sports fans are forced to pay for expensive sports networks).

Colin disagrees with me. As he's stated in the past, he believes the use of "private networks" to deliver video traffic to connected devices that doesn't count against data caps creates preferred broadband lanes and are inappropriate (Colin believes Comcast is doing this with its recent plan to deliver video services to the Xbox).

Wrapping up, Colin shares observations from Cisco Live a big analyst event he attended earlier this week and I do some shameless plugging for next Tuesday's VideoNuze Online Video Advertising Summit.

Click here to listen to the podcast (20 minutes, 36 seconds)

Click here for previous podcasts

The VideoNuze-TDG Report podcast is available in iTunes...subscribe today!