VideoNuze Posts

IRIS.TV is officially launching its SmartStreaming product to help content providers drive more video views per viewer. SmartStreaming plugs into online video platforms so they can offer their content customers thumbs up/down and skip buttons in their video players, giving viewers more control over their video experiences. As they engage with these buttons, SmartStreaming learns their preferences and presents subsequent recommended videos.

The first OVPs that have integrated SmartStreaming are Brightcove, Kaltura and Unicorn Media. Field Garthwaite, CEO told me in a briefing that SmartStreaming is also compatible with thePlatform and JW Player from LongTail Video.

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MSN News is the latest high-profile news/information site to partner with Newsy for high-quality, short-form, customized video news clips. In a deal announced today, Newsy's editors will work collaboratively in real time with counterparts at MSN News to create and deliver up to 20 videos/day across categories including world, U.S. politics, science & technology, crime & justice and pop culture. Many videos are already live here and here. They will be distributed across all MSN News platforms.

For Newsy, the MSN News deal is the latest in a string of partnership wins with big news/information sites. In March, Newsy landed a deal with Mashable to create customized videos, which followed other partnerships with AOL/Huffington Post and National Journal. In total, with the MSN News deal, Newsy is creating 200+ custom videos per week for partners, which is part of the 2,000+ videos it creates each month for its own web site, mobile apps and syndication partners such as 5Min, DBG, blinkx, Grab Networks, ClipSyndicate and others. Newsy videos generate over a billion views per year. Newsy uses multiple partner models including revenue sharing and straightforward fees.

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This is last call to register for tomorrow's complimentary webinar, "Social Media and Second-Screen TV Experiences." The webinar will feature Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, who will share social insights from his firm's recent survey of 1,000 broadband users/TV viewers. TDG will also provide registrants with a complimentary copy of its accompanying report, a $1,500 value. Then Kevin Wyatt, director of business development for Rovi, will explain how the company's entertainment-related social media can be incorporated into TV apps. There will be plenty of time for Q&A.

Register now!

Periodically someone asks me how I think of the relative level of social networking use vs. video consumption. Of course they have both have been huge trends over the past 5 years, and they are very complimentary to each other. But, at least when it comes to mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) social dominates video in terms of time spent according to Nielsen's Q1 Cross-Platform Report, released late last week.

Looking at app-only usage on smartphones, social networking notched 9 hours, 6 minutes per person per month, nearly 8x as much as the 1 hour, 15 minutes of video viewed per person per month. For iPads, the range is tighter, with app-only social networking racking up 3 hours, 41 minutes per person per month, just over twice as much as the 1 hour, 48 minutes of video viewed per person per month. This makes sense to me because the iPad is more of a "personal TV" and therefore prone to longer-form viewing.

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I'm pleased to present the 184th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. This week we discuss the cloud's impact on video delivery. First, I share thoughts on Comcast's X2 platform, unveiled this week, in which the cloud plays a central role.

Colin notes that with Comcast's approach, there is still a fair amount of client-side processing happening, so it's not fully capitalizing on the cloud just yet. Colin draws a distinction between Comcast's approach and that of ActiveVideo Networks (which I recently wrote about), whose CloudTV moves all the processing to the cloud, allowing services to run on older set-top boxes and newer CE devices.

It's still early days in the cloud's deployment with different models at work, but there's no question it's going to become a bigger part of the video delivery landscape.

Listen in to learn more!

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At the June 4th Online Video Ad Summit, audience targeting was a recurring theme. We had a dedicated session on the topic, led by Richard Glosser of Hilltop Digital, with panelists from Altitude Digital, Nielsen, Xaxis and Videology. Topics ranged included the role of Nielsen's Online Campaign Ratings, targeting across platforms, how programmatic fits in, the value of different types of data sets and more. (Duration is 39 minutes.)

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Next Wednesday, June 19th, I'll be hosting a complimentary webinar focused on the impact of social media and second-screens on TV experiences. By now, anyone involved in the TV industry is well aware that the content itself is one part of the overall viewing experience;  for a growing group of viewers the social aspect that surrounds it has become equally important. Still, social is a relatively new phenomenon for TV and much is not yet understood.

In this webinar, Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, will share social insights from his firm's recent survey of 1,000 broadband users/TV viewers. TDG will also provide registrants with a complimentary copy of its accompanying report, a $1,500 value. Then, Kevin Wyatt, director of business development for Rovi, will explain how the company's entertainment-related social media can be incorporated into TV apps. There will be plenty of time for Q&A.

Register now!

At its Video Publisher Forum in NYC, LiveRail announced new features for its publisher-side video monetization tools. LiveRail has integrated Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) into its LiveRail Publisher Suite, so that publishers can obtain Nielsen metrics on current campaigns each night. There is also an "OCR Planner" which lets publishers gauge the value of their inventory in Nielsen audience terms. This helps publishers better target ad campaigns to their inventory.

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