VideoNuze Posts

Last week at Adap.tv's Worldwide Publisher Conference, Curt Hecht, The Weather Company's Global Chief Revenue Officer shared an eye-opening data point: 1/3 of the company's online ad revenue now comes from programmatic, though it only started selling ads this way around 18 months ago. And contrary to lingering concerns that programmatic reduces the value of inventory, Curt also said ads sold programmatically actually generate some of the company's best pricing, and that overall CPMs are up since programmatic was introduced.

Programmatic is one of the biggest trends in advertising today, allowing ads to be bought and sold via marketplaces using data and specific audience targeting criteria. Real-time bidding is also a feature of programmatic, though not always. Programmatic also reduces some of the back-end friction associated with the exchange of RFPs and IOs.

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Video stream optimizer Conviva reported today that its Intelligent Control Platform processed over 45 billion streams in 2013, a 4x increase in the last two years. The streams were viewed across more than 1.6 billion devices, including PCs, tablets, smartphones and connected TVs, in 180 countries and through more than 400 premium media video players.

Conviva's platform monitors and optimizes the delivery of premium online video by content and service providers. The company said that in 2013 it made over 4 million preemptive, automated corrective actions per day for individual users, devices and routes which improved video experiences. Conviva's software analyzes and measures what viewers are watching, at every second checking for quality issues such as buffering, long start times, video artifacts, and stuttering.

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This morning Verizon finally made official what has been rumored for months - its acquisition of Intel Media's assets, including its OnCue and its IP-based TV set-top box. With the deal (plus other recent acquisitions of upLynk and EdgeCast), Verizon is now well-positioned to launch an over-the-top pay-TV service outside of its FiOS footprint.

If and when it does so, then last week's net neutrality ruling takes on even higher importance, because incumbent cable operators/broadband ISPs would either have to allow Verizon's traffic through, unfettered, creating direct OTT competition for their core pay-TV services, or discriminate against Verizon, creating a perception of anti-competitiveness and no doubt, a PR firestorm.

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I'm excited to be hosting a one-on-one interview with Roku's CEO and founder Anthony Wood at NATPE in Miami next Monday, Jan. 28th. Anthony is one of the true visionaries in the online video / connected TV device world.

Among the topics on my list to discuss with him are Roku TV (launched with Hisense and TCL at CES last week), how Roku owners actually use the device since there are now over 1,200 channels to choose from, the status of Roku's work with pay-TV operators and whether transactional VOD will play a bigger part in Roku's future. I'm sure we'll also discuss larger industry trends like cord-cutting, the connected TV device landscape, Smart TVs, TV Everywhere and the role of mobile devices.

That's a long list, but what do YOU think I should ask him? Send me suggestions via email or leave a comment!

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NeuLion is powering live sports streaming on Xbox One, under a multi-year deal announced today. According to a Microsoft spokesman, the first linear channel available is the NFL Network, accessible to Xbox Live Gold subscribers as part of the NFL's app. Subscribers must also be authenticated as pay-TV subscribers.

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I'm pleased to present the 210th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

2014 is shaping up to be another very busy year for all things video. In this week's podcast, Colin and I share our top trends to look for in 2014 and why. And in the spirit of accountability, we also review our 2013 predictions from a year ago - what we got right and what we got wrong.

Listen in to learn more!

Click here to listen to the podcast (23 minutes, 26 seconds - sorry, for running long, lots of content this week.)

Click here for previous podcasts

Click here to add the podcast feed to your RSS reader.

The VideoNuze podcast is also available in iTunes...subscribe today!

Videology released the findings of a Forrester Consulting survey yesterday, which studied attitudes toward video advertising among 150 executives at brands, agencies and media companies. There are many interesting findings in the report and one that stands out is that nearly 70% of brands and agencies think it's likely or very likely that agencies will unify the planning of video and TV campaigns within the next 3 years (though note only 52% of media companies believe so).

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Earlier today the DC Court of Appeals threw out the FCC's Open Internet net neutrality rules. Net neutrality advocates are upset with the FCC for pursuing an illogical regulatory path from the start. They are deeply worried that now, unencumbered by net neutrality regulations, big broadband ISPs (which also happen to be the biggest pay-TV providers) will begin to discriminate against third-party online video services by shunting them to "slow lanes" and charging new delivery "tolls."

I completely understand these concerns, but I for one don't envision any of this happening, at least not in the foreseeable future. Some of you are no doubt thinking - Will's naive, he's an idiot, he's a shill, etc. so let me explain.

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