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Flash became popular in the early 2000s for good reason - it added interactivity and polished design to the Web.  Over the last few years, Flash has been operational and has been very important when using websites like YouTube and Hulu, among other sites.

However, with the emergence of HTML5, especially since the beginning of 2016, the Flash ad has seemingly become useless and has lost trend over the past few years. There are predictions that showing Google will finally close this ad type by the end of this year, 2016. I also predict that the majority of advertisers will need to shift their video ad supply to be delivered in HTML5 format, while currently, about 30% of the ads worldwide are in the HTML5 player (according to Selectmedia’a server stats from Aug/2016).

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While digital consumers used to search the internet for content, several years ago Facebook began pushing content to us. And as our attention spans got shorter and shorter, we no longer wanted to read past the first paragraph of an article. But our eyes are still drawn to sound and motion, so we want to consume all of our content and news in video form.  

The news cycle is no exception. In digital publishing, the most successful companies are those that have the foresight to stay ahead of the technological curve. Even as publishers face huge monetization challenges, they have discovered something new: native video.

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When MTV stopped ruling the music world maybe 20 years ago, the joke was that people had been tuning in not to watch the song of the day, but to watch their song of the day. So, as MTV tried  to appeal to the widest possible audience, hard-core music fans tuned out.

These days, MTV is focusing again on music after a long sojourn in reality programming. But when people want to watch music videos these days, they tend to go to one of two places, YouTube and Vevo, which YouTube owns along with major music labels. There they can find, if they know what to look for, a bewildering and fantastic array of videos about all kinds of music.

That's a key phrase: "if they know what to look for." YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine and search is what drives discovery there. But how do you find music you'll love, particularly music that's situationally relevant, if you don't know what to look for? More importantly, what if you'd like to go somewhere else to watch music videos? Music discovery shouldn’t be something that is left to one or two destinations.

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Apple made an important announcement at its recent Worldwide Developers Conference that marks a significant step toward simplifying online video delivery thereby reducing the cost of content preparation. By announcing support for fragmented MP4 (fMP4) within HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Apple is bringing the industry closer to the realization of a single format for OTT medial delivery. This could save the OTT industry millions in revenue lost from processing their content across the plethora of formats that exist today.

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In today’s on-demand culture, the days of passive television viewing are over. People prefer to choose the exact content they want to watch when they want to watch it. It’s no longer about who controls the TV remote – it’s now about controlling our individualized viewing experience and schedule.

It’s no surprise, then, that more than half of all U.S. homes own a Connected TV (CTV), a set that plays traditional TV programming yet is also connected to the Internet through a stand-alone streaming device. These devices, such as Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, etc., enable access to over-the-top (OTT) services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, to name but a few, as well as ad serving and digital measurement.

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Content quality is widely viewed as one of the most important variables for driving performance in advertising. Many brands and agencies divide their efforts between premium media advertising and cost effective media advertising. Buying premium content and video is often utilized to build brand awareness and generate exposure, while cost effective media advertising focuses on conversion points and total reach. Bridging the two practices through software for value and decisioning gives advertisers unreached efficiencies. This will be extremely important as the move to cross screen advertising begins to scale.

But what is the formula for automating the process to determine what is to be considered premium content?

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At this month’s F8 conference, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave a big boost to the burgeoning business of live-streaming online video when he said it was a “top priority” for the company. The company has assigned 150 engineers to live-streaming, changed its News Feed algorithms to give live video higher visibility, and is paying several notable publishers (including the New York Times, BuzzFeed and Vox) to create original programming for the format.

That’s a serious commitment by the planet’s biggest social-media company. More interesting, perhaps, is what’s not yet attached to the Facebook offerings: figuring out how to pay for everything. The answers will help determine whether live streaming video becomes only a gimmick used by well-funded brand experimenters or narcissistic hobbyists. Done right, it could supercharge a bracing new platform with its own stars, best practices and yes, monetization schemes.

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Outstream video ad units - video ads that appear within content as readers scroll through - have taken the market by storm since their release in 2013. An increasing number of vendors provide this technology for publishers, to insert video ads into non-video carrying pages.
 
It’s no secret that video represents one of the highest yielding advertising opportunities for publishers, but also one of the most resource intensive to create. Publishers have invested significantly to develop the content required to provide video at scale. The Wall Street Journal, for example, employed a 40-person video team tasked with creating 40 videos per day, while CNN is pushing video views over page views as a measure of success.

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