The roots of OpenAP, an unusual collaboration among longtime competitors, can be traced to information conversations about a growing desire on the buy side, according to Noah Levin, SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, Fox Networks.
“What ended up happening was Fox, Turner and Viacom would bump into each other in the lobbies of agencies and the agencies were talking to us all about the same thing,” Levine says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show. “Hey, I actually want to move beyond age and gender. I want to be able to target high-income households. I want to be able to target my first party data.”
Buyers’ desire was borne out of frustration at having to deploy advanced audience targeting piecemeal.
“It made it very, very difficult to be able to allow that agency and that buyer to understand the results in a consistent manner,” Levine says.
“While demand for audience targeting has grown significantly, adoption has been limited by the fact that audience buying is not as transparent, as consistent and as easy as traditional guarantees,” the founding OpenAP members said in a joint statement on March 15. “It doesn’t need to be that complicated. That changes today.”
The first phase of OpenAP enables buyers to consistently onboard precision audience segments across its participating members for easy activation and receive third-party campaign reporting. So far, Accenture, comScore and Nielsen are providing support to the consortium.
“One of our favorite things to talk about at Fox as an example is self-actualizing truck intenders. You could take the self-actualizing segment and take truck intenders and do a fusion of the two,” Levine says by way of example.
Phase two of OpenAP is still in the defining stage, according to Levine, but it will involve additional datasets and panels for targeting purposes and it “will also include a focus on digital.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>While “it’s early days” in such use of AI, “it’s an exciting solution to bring to market,” says Scott Braley, GM, Advertising Platforms, Ooyala, which recently announced a partnership with Microsoft’s machine learning platform.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 NAB Show, Braley outlines the potential benefits of machine learning for helping advertisers steer clear of unsafe environments. He also suggests a “do over” in which the best practices of linear and digital television would be brought to bear on engaging viewers in the quickly expanding OTT space.
There is some labeling and metadata associated with individual pieces of content, but the process usually doesn’t go far enough, according to Braley. “Certainly when you get into user-generated content, it’s very difficult to get all of that labeled properly,” he says.
AI can be deployed to score, label and categorize content “at scale and with more efficiency.” This would pave the way for more content available programmatically “without having to deal with armies of people just reviewing content manually.”
As more consumers opt for alternatives to pay subscription TV models, younger audiences in particular are flocking to OTT viewing. Common traits among this cohort are media gratification and choice.
“We think from targeting standpoint, the OTT environment is a great hybrid opportunity to do over in a sense,” says Braley.
Combining the best practices of the digital and television worlds would mean not deploying the hyper targetability and addressability of digital and eschewing “index-based measurement models like Nielsen for TV.”
Braley sees this approach involving targeting on a household level using as much census-level data as possible and “decisioning dynamically but maybe not with the one-to-one, user-base that we’re doing in digital today.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>“Monetization is certainly front and center,” Jeremy Helfand, VP, M&E Industry Solutions, Adobe, and VP, Adobe Primetime, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.
He likens the shift in focus from audience fragmentation to broadcasters exercising a new muscle. “They need to think more like retailers, understanding who their audiences are,” says Helfand.
This involves having a business model that supports advertising not only of a digital nature but “converged advertising across both linear and digital,” he adds.
With the recent addition of video demand-side platform TubeMogul to its various cloud offerings, Adobe is looking to connect the buy and sell sides for “a common definition of audience to increase the value of advertising,” regardless of what screen it’s delivered to.
More recently, Adobe and video monetization technology and services provider Ooyala formed a partnership that will enable Ooyala to “leverage the playback and ad insertion capabilities of Adobe Primetime to help enhance their suite of products,” Helfand explains.
“Pairing our IVP solutions with Adobe gives even more insight into analytics and measurement, building common data sets across every function of video all with a single goal. To grow your business,” Ooyala Co-founder and SVP of Products and Solutions, Belsasar Lepe, said in a statement announcing the partnership.
Adobe’s latest report on digital video shows that “TV everywhere” has doubled in size over the last two years. “What’s really interesting is as we watch consumption of that content, TV is coming back into the living room,” Hefland says.
The highest concentration of daytime consumption is happening on mobile devices, but from 4-9 p.m. connected TV devices are dominant, according to the Adobe report.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>This is easier said than done in a world marked by the proliferation of skinny programming bundles and rampant cannibalization. The capital demands of investing in infrastructure and platforms can be a dizzying maze for established broadcasters to navigate while trying to cling to their audiences and generate new ones.
Seeking to be the tour guide for this trip is Accenture, which just weighed in with its annual road map called Bringing TV To Life, which provides strategies for both traditional video content distributors such as TV networks and programmers, as well as content aggregators such as pay TV operators.
“The interesting thing about a broadcaster is that they are a B to B business generally but at the same time they have B to C capabilities,” Sef Tuma, who is MD & Global Lead at Accenture Digital Video and the author of Bringing TV To Life, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual NAB Show.
“In their old world it was very broadcast capabilities. The fact is they don’t have any of the CRM, one-to-one or any sort of relationship-based capabilities in their operating model,” Tuma says.
The delicate balancing act is one of retaining and growing the value of each of household while investing in generating engagement and, most important, reach. “Because reach is really what their competitors care about, whether that’s Google or Facebook. They care reach that’s unbounded by infrastructure,” he adds.
Tuma cites as one example BBC, an Accenture client that “took power of all of their digital capabilities and put a personalization platform under it to be able to start creating new ways of having conversations with the audience.”
Broadcasters need to understand their audiences not solely for the traditional purposes of advertising, but to inform decisions about content investment and “be able to find their most valuable audience.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>Advertisers that use DoubleClick Bid Manager can now bid on both online and local linear TV inventory, the latter representing the top 50 DMA’s reaching some 106 million households, Ferreira explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 NAB Show.
Local TV stations use WideOrbit to book and invoice offers, make ad decisioning and manage creative, among other activity. “Since we’re the DFP, we do not require the stations to give us any inventory. We’re just a software layer,” says Ferreira.
So if a DoubleClick user has an interest in local TV spots they can submit an offer to a station and “your offer shows up in the same software that they would seen an offer from the Ford dealership that just called them,” he adds.
“Historically, TV and digital advertising have been bought and measured through different systems and currencies,” Google says in announcing the integration. “By adding traditional TV buying into DoubleClick Bid Manager, we are taking the first step towards allowing advertisers and agencies to manage their video campaigns across digital and linear TV, in a more efficient and effective way.”
While local TV has been attractive to marketers for many reasons, it’s had its currency drawbacks, according to Ferreira, and was complex to buy on a national basis.
“It was ripe for somebody to just come in and stitch it together and make it as easy to buy as buying a video on YouTube,” he says.
Ferreira is amused by the turn of events in a path that has seen a lot of ad tech innovation fueled by the expected “demise” of TV. “So it’s kind of ironic after 10 years of demise we have these companies now integrated with TV instead of waiting to replace it,” he says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The series is sponsored by Ooyala. For more coverage of NAB, please visit this page.
]]>As an official Media Solutions Partner for Facebook Live, Silicon Valley-based Ooyala has a ground-level view of the explosion of choices available to consumers to satisfy their needs for all things video. It comes amid the continued discussion about the need for video standards and, in the absence thereof, the ability to prove viewer engagement.
“There’s always a balance between standardization and people who want to have custom formats,” Jonathan Wilner, VP, Products and Strategy at Ooyala, tells Beet.TV during an interview at the 2016 NAB Show of the National Association of Broadcasters. “If we’re going to get more TV money in, that’s very used to trading against currency, then I think we need increasing amount of standardization to be in on the buy.”
This is particularly so when competing against the likes of Facebook and Google, with their huge audiences and data-gathering capabilities. Ooyala’s solutions for video providers include one of the world’s largest premium video platforms plus a leading ad serving and programmatic platform.
With Facebook Live, more choices also mean more confusion.
“What we’re seeing, interestingly, is inquiries from people that are running authenticated TV everywhere services that want to put clips onto Facebook,” Wilner says. “Their affiliate deals say they can’t run those clips on their authenticated services and they can’t offer them without authentication but they can put them on Facebook. That’s a sign of confusion in the market.”
In addition to its Facebook Live endeavor, Ooyala this month debuted an all-new HTML5 video player built for fast, consistent performance across desktop and mobile devices, plus Ooyala Flex, a media logistics solution modernizing video production workflows for broadcasters, studios, publishers, and brands.
]]>“A lot of the broadcasters used to have websites as a marketing arm to their core TV business,” according to Lakana‘s president Phillip Hyun. “Now that digital has really become a real viable business, a lot of the marketers are seeing their digital strategies having to be run as real businesses.”
St Paul, Minnesota-based Lakana was formed in April when Nexstar Broadcasting Group merged three of its units – Internet Broadcasting Systems, EndPlay and Inergize Digital – to create a multiplatform company supporting broadcaster efforts.
Hyun says Lakana powers the websites and digital initiatives of around 250 local US TV channels and has a combined audience of 100 to 130 million people. When those channels want to publish thousands of videos each day and breaking news streams, cost can become prohibitive, he says.
We interviewed Hyun at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The Chicago-based consultancy was amongst the firms to have developed dash.js, a Javascript library that helps web publishers embed video players for the emerging MPEG-DASH standard.
That might not sound particularly exciting, but consider that, just a few short years ago, web-based video delivery relied on plugins like RealVideo or Flash. Now MPEG-DASH and HLS are amongst the video codecs that deliver video over standard HTTP web connections, no special tools required.
“We’ve been building applications for many different clients around the world and we’re finding people are really interested in standardization,” Digital Primates founding partner Jeff Tapper tells Beet.TV in this video interview. The company has recently been presenting on how to build HTML5-based web video players.
We interviewed Tapper at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“We’ve started seeing growth not only in traffic on the network but growth in individual bitrates,” Akamai product management and operations VP Michael Fay tells Beet.TV executive producer Andy Plesser in this video interview.
“2014, we saw about 2.3Mbits (per second) average bitrate being streamed, but we’re seeing a lot more audiences for a lot more devices growing to four and five Mbit streams, on the journey to a 4K experience, which might be a 12Mbit stream.”
Akamai traditionally places its network optimization technology on infrastructure nodes that handle traffic before it gets to consumers. Now it also hopes network device makers will place the tech on devices consumers use in the home, easing network congestion and making 4K transmission more likely.
Last month, the firm acquired online video quality optimization firm Octoshapes in another bid to transmit high-quality video.
We interviewed Fay at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Adobe product management senior director Bill Roberts says the recently-announced “Project Candy” allows users to capture a color set using their smartphone camera for use in desktop video editing.
“Quite often, you want to capture the mood of a moment,” Roberts says. “If you’re at the beach at sunset, and you’ve got this glorious orange sky… that would be a great way to warm up a video interview.
With new Project Candy, I’m able to capture the colour and light, select the elements of the light that I want to exchange and save it. That look is immediately available to me when I jump in to Premier, After Effects of Premier Clip. The cloud should be something that’s seamless that makes your life better.
Additionally, Adobe Premier Pro CC introduces a new transition, Morph Cut, which lets editors blend moves between jump cuts, effectively eliminating the disparity between separate scenes.
We interviewed Roberts at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>TouchCast is a tablet video editing application that lets producers add interactive elements like photos, text, articles and web pages inside playing videos.
Revealing new features, TouchCast product manager Charley Miller tells Beet.TV it now supports “running external cameras in to the iPad so they can shoot on a really nice camera and get the depth-of-field that they are used to, making beautiful video but use TouchCast as a video mixer”.
One of those cameras, however, can be an iPhone. Miller shows how iOS devices can be used not just to produce but to input video in for inclusion in TouchCasts. Wall Street Journal is already beginning to use the functionalities.
We interviewed Miller at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The outfit has added live capability to its MainStage platform, following a partnership with Nowtilus.
Company sales and marketing SVP Malachi Bierstein says the idea is to reduce complexity in a fragmented world for broadcasters: “It is pretty complex but it doesn’t have to be.
“(Customers) want to be across the breadth of popular connected devices, they want to be able to offer business models like SVOD, EST, TVOD, live linear, ad-supported.”
Clients of London-, LA- and Tokyo-based Saffron include ITV and Sky, KDDI and NBCUniversal.
We interviewed Bierstein at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The corporation’s support for MPEG-DASH, an emerging media streaming standard that supports adaptive bitrate streaming over standard HTTP web servers, could move the industry toward the format, says Unified Streaming CEO Dirk Griffioen.
“The BBC in England wants to support DVB-DASH – that’s one of the DASH profiles – the same for ITV.
“The BBC is asking device builders, TV builders and others, to take the streams BBC provides and adjust their devices to that. Twelve months from now, you will see devices .. supporting DVD-DASH. That’s a step forward.”
MPEG-DASH could allow the BBC, which once used Microsoft’s WMA standard and had moved to Flash compatibility to efficiently deliver across platforms. It has been testing deployment for radio online, although the switch has affected reception for some listeners.
Amsterdam-based Unified Streaming wraps the solutions available from Apple (HTTP Live Streaming), Adobe (HTTP Dynamic Streaming), Microsoft (Smooth Streaming) and MPEG-DASH in to a single platform. Its customers include HBO Go, the BBC and Globo. Last year, Dailymotion picked the company to handle all its live streaming.
We interviewed Griffioen at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“DASH is getting more and more attention out in the real world,” Wowza streaming industry evangelist and VP Chris Knowlton tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re seeing more customers asking us about it as a potential replacement for other formats on the market.”
Knowlton says content owners are seeing DASH capabilities like multi-format encryption capability and 4K video support. “Only a few folks have actually deployed it so far. We have a lot of folks testing it for production,” he adds.
Colorado-based Wowza offers a video server called Streaming Engine for live and on-demand playback. At NAB Show, it unveiled cloud-based video streaming software, meaning broadcasters only need to use its remotely-hosted suite, and said features that previously came with a premium add-on fee are now part of Wowza Streaming Engine’s $65 monthly flat fee.
We interviewed Knowlton at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>The MPEG-DASH standard, which can use adaptive-bitrate streaming to scale quality regardless of connection speed over standard HTTP servers, is gaining supporters. But Apple’s HLS format remains influential, says digital video infrastructure security vendor Verimatrix‘s marketing SVP Steve Christian.
“It’s likely we’re going to be running implementations of HTTP Live Streaming in parallel with DASH for some while to come,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That’s a consequence of different standards and proprietary implementations across the world of devices. That’s going to take a couple of years to sort out.
“In a couple of years time, the industry is likely to fully support the DASH standard … rather than deal with many, many code bases.” Here is how the two standards shape up against one another.
San Diego-based Verimatrix makes technology that supports content protection and “revenue security” for video owners, including watermarking so Christian likes what he sees in DASH – “the ability to reach many different kinds of devices and support multiple kinds of common encryption systems”.
We interviewed Griffioen at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“It’s the right format for industry partners to come together to create a platform that’s scalable and flexible … but have some common denominators that allow equipment manufacturers, as well as CE vendors, to build products around a standard that can scale,” according to DTS digital content and media solutions business development SVP Geir Skaaden.
‘Last year was very big for DASH, with some of the biggest names in terms of streaming and internet media adopting DASH as their platform. We’ll see more exciting feature =s 4K video, higher resolutions, HDR, immersive audio are all components that will proliferate for streaming and digital delivery on the dash platform.”
Calabasas, California-based DTS Inc owns the DTS multi-channel audio technologies used in consumer and theater installations. In May, DTS announced its new DTS:X audio platform, enhancing audio for audio/video receivers, cinemas and headphones. The company’s annual net income nearly doubled in 2014.
We interviewed Balchandani at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“We have been involved in DASH from the very beginning,” says Iraj Sodagar, a principal chief architect at Microsoft:
Microsoft unveiled Azure Media Player at NAB Show, featuring automatic device detection and player framework selection for streaming fallback.
Sodagar is also president and chairman of the 78-member DASH industry forum.
We interviewed Sodagar at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“We will see a lot of deployments now with Silverlight dropping out of Chrome. The signs are really good,” according to Austria-based Bitmovin‘s CEO Stefan Lederer, whose company makes software to transcode and play online video.
Although Google may have thought it was doing users a favor by elbowing the ageing video format, many broadcasters still use Silverlight, and have instead advised their subscribers to ditch Chrome in favor of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari.
The alternative MPEG-DASH uses adaptive-bitrate technology on standard HTTP servers to bring better-quality video, audio and encryption to digital media.
“DASH is in our DNA,” says Lederer. “We have an HTML5-based MPEG-DASH player, we have a DASH-based cloud transcoding system. We deploy 80% of our content in DASH.”
Bitmovin recently unveiled a cloud-baed transcoding suite for the DASH and HLS video formats.
We interviewed Lederer at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Adobe Primetime director Lalit Balchandani says Adobe Primetime will be used to power playback, ad insertion and digital rights management: “It is coming out on Roku first and other platforms later.”
In what appears to be a bid to gather a mainstream TV-like following, the new player will open playing scheduled video. Viewers can watch along or pick their own video.
Crackle will use Adobe Audience Manager to segment viewers and target ads, Balchandani says.
We interviewed Balchandani at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Amongst the biggest changes – not just being acquired, but also being owned by a corporate, following Australian telco Telstra’s earlier acquisition of Ooyala last summer.
“This, for us, has been a big change – coming from a VC-backed situation forces you to be careful about how you spend money,” says Videoplaza CEO Sorosh Tavakoli, now SVP of ad tech for Ooyala.
Tavakoli started Stockholm-based Videoplaza in 2007 but is now moving to New York. He says trepidation about the journey his company has taken quickly dissipated.
“It’s pretty scary for someone like me who used to be the founder and CEO of the business – there are so many things that can go wrong,” he says.
“It’s been so much better than I anticipated. Culture fit; we felt like one company straight away. We felt, ‘we’d hire these guys’. We are adding about 10 people in the coming six months.”
We interviewed Tavakoli at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>“For the last 10 years, we’ve been focused on helping people distribute assets across the internet; now we’re all about managing those assets,” Haivision global commercial sales and internet media services EVP Chance Mason tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
At NAB Show, Haivision showed off its backhaul, transcoding, broadcasting monitoring, publishing and management tools, including the recently-launched Calypso, allowing clients to locate video in on-premises cloud storage.
“I’ve been in this industry for 12+ years … telling people there was going to be cord cutters. Now it’s actually a reality,” Mason adds.
We interviewed Mason at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Now it says it has improved the offering, after feedback received from customers. Cisco service provider video marketing director David Yates says improvements are threefold – “multi-vendor” integration, more virtualized function and better security.
“We’ve seen IP taking over all aspects of video processing expect for the production data centre,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Still older technologies are being used.
“Operators are finding it harder to use the old, hardware-specific ways of video processing. Now they can move all of their infrastructure to IP.”
We interviewed Yates at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Azure Media Services is getting a new video player and transcoding that will take place in the cloud.
“(Azure Media Player) does automatic device detection and chooses the right player framework and streaming fallback … to Flash or Silverlight … to ensure that the content is reached across all the devices consumers carry,” Azure Media Services director Sudheer Sirivara tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“(Live Encoding Preview) enables a citizen journalist, for example, to broadcast a single camera feed from a phone in to the cloud … we do the transcoding in the cloud … and deliver using Azure Media Player.”
Azure Media Services is the brand Microsoft uses for its services covering live online broadcast, on-demand distribution, enterprise video and digital marketing video.
We interviewed Sirivara at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
]]>Support for live ad insertion, digital rights management and the HEVC standard was added recently, and European internet TV standard HbbTV just just moved up to version 2.0 on DASH. Iraj Sodagar, president and chairman of the 78-member DASH industry forum, says more is to come.
“Next year, we’re going to have UHD and HDR, higher resolutions, higher frame rate… and DRM is going to be improved … and more audio codecs, like MPEG-H audio or 3D audio codecs.”
Why should companies switch to MPEG-DASH? “They can reach more devices, more customers, at lower cost,” Sodagar says. “Instead of having different solutions from different companies … now different devices can work with different services. It enables companies to deploy video services over the top in a larger scale.”
Sodagar is the Principal Multimedia Architect at Microsoft.
We interviewed Sodagar at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
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