VideoNuze Posts

I'm pleased to present the 168th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. Today we start by discussing Akamai's new Ad Integration Services, which enables cloud-based video ad insertion, in partnership with mDialog.

This approach has multiple benefits including improving the user experience which extends view times. Colin notes that recent data from Conviva, for example, shows that a 1% increase in buffering results in 8 minutes of lost viewing time, which in turn means a loss of 2 ad breaks. Conviva estimates in 2012 this adds up to $2.2 billion in lost ad revenue globally, and by 2017, it could be $20 billion. Clearly improving the viewer experience has a significant payoff.

We then transition to talking about improvements in video discovery. Colin shares takeaways from his interview this week with Jeremy Toeman, CEO of Dijit (Next Guide), which recently acquired Miso. And I share observations on the new web version of Fanhattan, which launched in beta yesterday.

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Video discovery app Fanhattan has launched its web site today in beta, offering the same convenient way to find a TV program or movie through one simple interface. Until now Fanhattan has only been available as an iOS app. Fanhattan's key value proposition is that it eliminates the complexity of searching across multiple services. This problem is only worsening for users as more video comes online and aggregators gain and lose rights over time.

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Israeli startup Wochit launched yesterday, seeking to mass-produce near real-time video news bites that will be distributed across the web to sites hungry for high-quality video and additional revenue.

Company CEO and co-founder Dror Ginzberg told me that Wochit's algorithms monitor hot topics that are trending online via social media. Then source video from content partners like Reuters and Getty Images is mined to quickly create short videos. The videos themselves can focus on general headline news, specific topics, geographic areas, etc. and include voice-over narration (see examples here).

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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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