VideoNuze Posts

Elemental Technologies, which has developed an innovative GPU-based video processing technology, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, to fund international and product expansion. Total financing raised to date is $29.6 million. Elemental's CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman told me yesterday that the company racked up "8-digits" in revenues last year, up from "7-digits" in the two prior years, and has been close to being cash flow positive for the last couple of quarters.

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Following its success helping leading marketers distribute video and other rich media messages to mobile devices, Mogreet is now looking to do the same for individuals, with its recently launched moShare service. moShare distinguishes itself from other social platforms in that the video or rich media being shared is sent via a text message to the recipient's mobile device, with content formatted specifically for viewing or playback on it. 

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Eric Elia, Brightcove's VP, TV Solutions came by the VideoNuze booth at the recent NABShow and explained what he sees as the "third phase of TV transformation." Eric believes companies like Amazon, Netflix, Apple and others are helping make it "OK to put a dollar euro sign in front of content." Brightcove has seen a huge surge of interest from aggregators and content providers in providing paid services.

Eric also shares insight about how cable TV networks are beginning to embrace content distribution via apps, a big change from just a year ago. Eric cites the catalyst for this as the launch of apps from Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which have signaled to networks that it's acceptable to distribute this way, as long as the billing relationship, via authentication, remains intact.

At the NABShow, Brightcove announced its "paywall solution framework" and support for Google's Widevine DRM.  Sample applications for connected TVs. See video below (13 minutes, 35 seconds)

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 131st edition of the VideoNuze Report podcast, for May 4, 2012. This week Colin and I discuss how fundamental battle lines have been drawn between the traditional TV ecosystem vs. the numerous digital outlets that are launching online-only original programs. To be more specific, the former group seems intent on erecting ever-higher paywalls to access its programs, which is in turn opening up a gigantic opportunity for free, ad-supported programs to be provided by the latter group. How this battle unfolds will have far-reaching and profound implications for everyone involved.

For the traditional TV ecosystem, there appear to be two core drivers at work; first, the desire by broadcast TV networks to morph themselves into cable TV networks, and second, the role that TV Everywhere is taking on as a foundation of paywall economics.

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At the recent NABShow, I interviewed Vamshi Sriperumbudur, VP of Marketing for Dyyno, which powers video services throughout the world for content aggregators, pay-TV operators and virtual MSOs looking to distribute OTT content to multiple devices.

As Vamshi explains, the  company has recently released a TV Everywhere solution that has deployed 25 different customers apps, streaming over 500 different channels from around the world and 10K pieces of VOD content (Vamshi demos an iPad app it built for IPWorldTV, a virtual MSO with 150 different ethnic channels). See video below (9 minutes, 2 seconds).

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VideoNuze is proud to be partnering with Tubefilter and Four Screen Media to present another complimentary Multi-Screen Mix-Up, on Wed, May 16th at Copia, 307 East 53rd Street in NYC. At our last Mix-Up, we had hundreds of attendees turn out for a great night of networking with video industry colleagues.

We have two special attractions planned for this Mix-Up: first, our featured speaker will be Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, who will informally discuss how he helped create the company, building its slate of original programs and diverse distribution methods, while maximizing revenue.

Second, we will be doing a drawing for 5 winners to receive free tickets to the VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit on Tues, June 19th (each a $595 value)!

Hope you can join us for this fun evening during Internet Week!

Sign-up for the Multi-Screen Mix-Up now!

Ben Weinberger, CEO and co-founder of Digitalsmiths and I caught up at the recent NABShow, with Ben explaining how pay-TV operators are using Digitalsmiths' technology to extend content discovery to mobile apps, second screen tablets and connected devices. Ben said operators began to recognize about a year ago, as TV Everywhere started kicking in, that they need to connect consumers to content in far more effective ways than just through traditional programming grids.

Digitalsmiths recently announced a partnership with Audible Magic for automated content recognition-based recommendations and also its "Social Discovery" feature which analyzes social activity to make recommendations. See video below (7 minutes, 23 seconds).

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It's been a little over four years since I started discussing a concept I called the "Syndicated Video Economy." My thesis was that for content creators to succeed, they needed to distribute their videos to relevant third-parties in addition to their own sites. Only by leveraging syndication would they gain enough scale to achieve an ROI. Flash forward to today, and value of syndication is strong and growing.

One of the companies which is capitalizing on the syndication trend is Grab Media, which in 2011 saw its unique viewers jump from about 7.3 million to about 24 million, the second-fastest growth of an video property according to comScore. Grab works with hundreds of content providers of all sizes and has built a catalog of 800K-900K short videos (usually 3-5 minutes), which it makes available to 140,000 different publisher sites. All of this aggregates to almost 300M video views per month.

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