VideoNuze Posts

In an interview at NATPE, Chase Norlin, CEO of AlphaBird, shared details of how the company helps content providers acquire and monetize audiences. Chase explains that whereas most ad tech companies are focused on the buy side of the advertising equation, AlphaBird is solely focused on the publisher side. Through a series of 5 acquisitions, AlphaBird has built a suite of solutions that span video, search and display (it's most recent acquisition, of Australia's Volt Media, was announced last week).

Chase details the company's thesis that the web is moving from text to rich media to video. However, the biggest challenge that video providers have today is in building their audiences, and then monetizing them. This reflects Chase's belief that video is still in the early days, and he anticipates lots of consolidation down the road. Advertisers will continue to be drawn to online video as it provides an unprecedented level of targeting and ROI.

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Betsy Morgan, currently president of TheBlaze (Glenn Beck's media company) and former CEO of The Huffington Post and SVP of CBS Interactive, has a highly informed perspective of today's video landscape. And in a recent interview I did with Betsy at NATPE, she doesn't mince words, observing, among other things, that "all of the burdens of legacy media really suck" and that "advertising will be disrupted first" and that "cable still has enormous value."

In her role at TheBlaze, Betsy is on the front lines of defining a new kind of cross-media, personality-driven media company. TheBlaze has a free, ad-supported online property, a subscription service called TheBlaze TV that has 300K members (who pay $9.95/mo) and a distribution deal with Dish Network which it hopes to emulate with others. Betsy explains how in the new video landscape, there's no longer a one-size fits all model; rather what's needed is a flexible approach that serves consumers however and whenever they want to access content.

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YouTube may be trying to shed its image as a home for user-generated videos, but it turns out there's actually real hidden value in those videos, as a syndicated TV program called "RightThisMinute" is proving. Already airing in 47 markets around the U.S., RightThisMinute mines the web for undiscovered video gems, tracks down their creators and tells the stories behind them, all from its newsroom in Phoenix.

The program is the brainchild of Phil Alvidrez of MagicDust Television, who I interviewed at the recent NATPE conference. Phil explained how his background in local news gave him the insight to tap into the "newsroom of the world" which is what the Internet has become. RightThisMinute is co-produced with Cox Media Group, Raycom Media and E.W. Scripps and at NATPE the program selected MGM as its syndication partner.

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In a bid to re-architect and improve upon how online video ads are inserted, this morning Akamai is announcing Ad Integration Services. With Ad Integration Services, online video ads are dynamically inserted in the cloud and delivered using Akamai's Sola Sphere delivery network, eliminating the typical client-side process of the video player calling for the ads.

As Kurt Michel, director of product marketing for media solutions, explained to me last week, the traditional process often diminishes the user experience. That's because the content itself and the ad are competing for last-mile bandwidth as the video player transitions from the former to the latter.  This contention can lead to delays, which in turn leads to viewer abandonment (if you've ever waited for an ad to play you know about this).

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Taboola has raised another $15 million, led by Pitango VC, bringing its total to date to $40 million. The Series D financing comes just 9 months after raising its last round of $10 million. Taboola will use the new funds for continued international expansion and product development. CEO and founder Adam Singolda told me the company has 70 employees currently and plans to double in size by the end of 2013.

Taboola's roots are in providing recommendations for content providers to better promote their own video within their sites and also for third-party video to gain wider, targeted distribution. Over the past year Taboola has also leveraged its underlying EngageRank recommendations technology to quietly begin distributing article recommendations as well (I noticed these last month on WSJ.com).

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At NATPE, I sat down with Drew Buckley, COO and Head of Digital for Electus, which has become one of the most successful studios producing programming for both TV and online. In the interview, Drew explains the company's strategy, and how it thinks about different screens or "glowing rectangles."

Among the specific topics Drew discusses:

- How Electus works to get talent to connect with their audiences, through various social media, and which ones Drew has found perform the best.

- How Electus is using its 3 YouTube channels to create and promote its own brands and personalities.

- Why the episode length for its "K-Town" unscripted series on Loud has nearly doubled from 11 minutes to 21 1/2 minutes in its first 2 seasons, proving longer-form does work online.

- What Electus does with brands to help extend their DNA through its original programming, beyond simple product placements.

And more.

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I'm pleased to present the 167th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. Today Colin and I assess the prospects for Intel Media's forthcoming over-the-top / pay-TV alternative service, which Erik Huggers described at this week's D: Dive Into Media conference.

Colin and I have very different perspectives on this. I believe that the ground rules of how major TV programmers negotiate their distribution deals (i.e. bundling disparate channels together) essentially eliminates the opportunity for pay-TV operators (or aspiring operators like Intel) to actually innovate with subscription packages. Further, by not addressing consumers' main problem with pay-TV, which is its high cost, Intel is going to have a hard time even getting 98% of consumers' attention in the first place.

Conversely, Colin believes that Erik wouldn't have been on stage at D unless he already had confidence he could get the kind of programming flexibility required to deliver on what he described. With that flexibility, Colin has faith that Intel can offer finer-grained packages, in turn delivering higher value to prospective consumers. However, absent more details, he's reluctant to be too optimistic.

Listen in to learn more!

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I attended the D: Dive Into Media conference earlier this week for the first time. It is mainly a series of one-on-one interviews with senior executives from a variety of media and technology companies, plus networking. Overall it was a great conference, and it's hard to beat a couple of days in beautiful Dana Point, CA, especially when coming off a blizzard in Boston.

My main interest was the video-related sessions, and from those I had 6 takeaways which I share below (along with selected session video clips), in no particular order:

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