Posts for 'Technology'

Video personalization engine IRIS.TV has helped The Hollywood Reporter- Billboard Media Group more than double its video views from 80 million in October ’16 to 210 million in February ’17. Most of the viewership is on owned and operated properties. In a briefing, John Amato, President, Entertainment Group and Michael Palmer, GM, Video, told me that the key has been using IRIS.TV’s technology to drive longer session lengths with viewers watching two to four videos instead of just one.

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Online video platform Brightcove has announced Brightcove Live, a live streaming solution that includes server-side ad insertion, cloud DVR, content encryption, on-the-fly clipping and VOD asset creation. Brightcove Live can be deployed as a standalone service and also as part of Brightcove’s broader Video Cloud platform, which means it taps into all of Video Cloud’s technology tools and partnerships.

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Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS) has unveiled Verizon Media Xperience Studio, a new content intelligence system which allows content providers to further automate online video workflows and gain greater insights into the performance and profitability of individual video assets.

In a briefing, VDMS’s CMO Mary Kay Evans and product director Jason Friedlander explained that while analytics have always been a part of the VDMS offering, Xperience Studio is the first initiative that spans all aspects of its product suite, allowing much greater insights than ever before.

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TV data company Alphonso has debuted Alphonso Insights, which provides advertisers and agencies with real-time analysis of TV ads along with closed loop attribution. The benefit for buyers is to better understand the performance of their ads and how well they stand up to those of competitors. Over 2,500 end users from 200 different advertisers and agencies have been using Alphonso Insights during its beta period.

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I’m pleased to present the 364th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First, Colin and I are proud to announce our very first podcast sponsor, Akamai Technologies, which will show its Media Acceleration capabilities and range of cloud-based solutions at the NABShow in Las Vegas, in booth SL3324. Click here to schedule a meeting.

Colin was in London for the TV Connect show earlier this week and on today’s podcast, he shares his 3 top takeaways. Meanwhile earlier this week I was in NYC for the Advanced Advertising conference and I then share my 3 top takeaways.

As you’ll hear, data was on both of our lists. Interestingly though, our conversation reveals a very different approach to how users’ data is being treated. Colin elaborates on the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), which will enforce minimum collection standards on Internet companies in Europe, whereas just this week, the U.S. House voted to repeal the broadband privacy rules.

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Online video, music and sports experiences are poised to become even richer and more personalized as metadata provider Gracenote announced today a suite of new data products for each market. The data are meant to support entertainment providers’ and device makers’ voice and text search, user experiences and personalized recommendations.

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VidMob, whose platform provides clients access to thousands of video post-production professionals, is expanding its scope, announcing this morning that it is launching a self-service ad platform for Snapchat. This means that small-to-medium sized businesses will be able to buy, create and manage video ad campaigns through one interface. To date only larger brands and agencies have been able to buy Snap Ads.

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Synacor is a company that has flown a bit below the radar, but is playing a pivotal, behind-the-scenes role in enabling TV Everywhere and single sign-on across multiple devices, including Apple TV. Synacor’s CEO Himesh Bhise caught me up on the company’s activities and his thoughts on where the TV industry is heading. Following is an edited transcript.

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Extreme Reach has released a new e-Book, “Video Ad Streaming: A Simple Change that Will Set a New Industry Standard,” highlighting the inefficiencies of current cross-screen video ad fulfillment and urging a modern approach with ad creative centrally managed and accessible.  

The e-Book identifies the core problem of siloed TV and video workflows, which result in TV ads that are widely used online to be duplicated and re-formatted repeatedly. All of this causes major delays in getting the right ad to the right place at the right time.

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Brightcove has published a manifesto highlighting ad-supported online video’s challenging economics and proposing improved viewing experiences, ad optimization and reduced operational complexity as critical solutions. While observing that online video usage has clearly “crossed the chasm” to become a mainstream experience, the manifesto notes that “the extreme concentration of ad dollars among a few mega companies” (citing Morgan Stanley research that 85% of incremental spending goes to Google and Facebook) will ultimately mean fewer content options.

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Comcast Technology Solutions, a division of Comcast Cable which was formed last Fall, has announced an expansion of its the Video Platform solution to support multiple monetization models as well as complete video processing, management, multi-CDN distribution and playout. In addition, the Video Platform includes out-of-the-box templates for front-end user experience with partners Accedo and You.i TV, which can be fully customized.

The Video Platform builds on capabilities of thePlatform, which Comcast acquired back in 2006, along with multiple other technologies now under the Comcast Technology Solutions roof.

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Aiming for simplicity, popular online video platform provider JW Player has introduced JW Live, a cloud-based, live streaming service for content providers. JW Live is meant to be an out of the box service that is integrated with the JW player and platform, enabling content providers to easily power up live streams for their audiences.

JW Live is the latest effort to popularize live streaming, a category receiving a lot of attention these days, primarily because Facebook is aggressively pursuing it with Facebook Live. JW Live is another example of how technology providers are positioning themselves to assist content providers in powering their own businesses, as opposed to becoming solely reliant on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and others which offer large audiences, but risk undermining control over revenue generation and loyalty.

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The video industry could be about to get a whole lot smarter, as IBM announced it will marry its Watson cognitive computing capabilities to its cloud video technology. IBM has been heavily promoting Watson as a way for diverse industries to exploit highly unstructured data to better understand and run their businesses (if you missed the recent “60 Minutes” on how Watson is helping researchers treat cancer, I highly recommend).

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With online video increasingly becoming about long-form programming, viewers expect a flawless experience comparable to TV. But one of the complicating factors is that many content providers use application programming interfaces (APIs) from third-party vendors to enable multiple aspects of their experience whether online, mobile web or via apps. These could include APIs for analytics, ad serving, content management, video management, storage, CDN, etc.

While APIs enrich and enable the experience, when they fail or suffer degraded performance, the viewer is impacted and the content provider’s brand and business model suffer. Failures or reduced performance can happen for all kinds of reasons: new releases, insufficient testing, custom implementations, under capacity during peak load times, etc. Worse, given their lean staffs, content providers often don’t even know about failures, until viewers have surfaced them (many of us have no doubt been in this role, for example, tweeting about real-time problems).

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Popular online video platform JW Player now supports virtual reality and 360-degree video. With over 2 million publishers using its platform, the new capabilities could help further fuel VR and 360-degree video which have become key priorities for large companies including Google, YouTube, Samsung, Facebook and others.

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Operative has officially launched Operative Compete, a SaaS platform for publishers to centrally manage all of their programmatic partners. Operative Compete works for display and video inventory and across header bidding and waterfall set-ups. A beta version of Operative Compete has been in use by Outdoor Channel, Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Nasdaq and Meredith Corporation.

Programmatic is becoming a bigger part of the advertising landscape, with eMarketer forecasting that $25.2 billion, or 73% of all U.S. display and video advertising will be transacted programmatically in 2016, rising to $37.9 billion, or 82% of spending, in 2018. eMarketer cites two reasons for the surge in programmatic: buyers’ and sellers’ increased comfort using automation and technology to transact, and increasing demand for audience-driven buying.

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Multi-screen video app platform You.i TV has raised a $12 million Series B round, led by Time Warner Investments and including new investor Vistara Capital Partners and existing investor Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. Funds will be used for product development and channel partner development. You.i TV includes among its customers Sony Crackle, Turner Broadcasting, Rogers Communications and Corus Entertainment.

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