“So when we first came in we took this decision that said set-top data must move at the speed of digital,” says Walt Horstman, TiVo’s SVP, GM, Advanced Media & Advertising. That meant “in a matter of seconds.”
The underlying motivation, Horstman explains in this interview at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: “We’re in the golden age of TV, but we’re also in the golden age of TV data.”
Now advertisers and media companies “truly can understand how TV advertising changes consumer behavior,” he says in response to a question from Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.
This means “No longer using proxies, no longer using correlation metrics, but truly in a deterministic fashion understand how we can change consumer behavior through TV advertising, and that’s what’s really exciting,” says Horstman.
What’s gratifying to see on the buy-side is that the siloes between TV planners/buyers and digital planners/buyers “are really coming down. We are now using TV data with digital planners, analytics folks at agencies or brands.”
He says the “real momentum” is reflected in the realization that everyone needs to comprehend how TV and any kind of digital campaign work together.
“It’s all about integrating the effectiveness, the targeting, the measurement and understanding the impact of TV on digital campaigns and vice versa,” Horstman says.
In addition to bulking up on viewing data, TiVo has been advancing the cause of deeper audience engagement with its Personalized Content Discovery Platform, which groups viewers’ favorite shows, genres, interests—even actors and directors—into personalized carousels.
“We’ve given the consumer everything they ever wanted, which is all the content available on demand on any device. That has created a challenge for the consumer because it’s harder to find things.”
Content recommendation drives longer engagement, “which of course increases more advertising units, more monetization,” Horstman says.
Among the insights derived from the Personalized Content Discovery Platform is that from Monday through Friday of a typical week, “consumers are much more focused on watching what they’ve currently been watching, catching up with whatever their favorite shows are.”
Conversely, on weekends people are “much more interested in exploration of a broader set of offerings, and that’s where we can expand catalog consumption either for a content provider or for a service provider.”
An overarching goal is to keep people in the ad-supported TV environment.
“As we know, the biggest advertiser on television is television. And so we’re starting to bridge that story between personalized recommendations with also marketing content and merchandising in the same offering,” Horstman says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Meanwhile, during this year’s TV Upfront season, “There’s going to be a much bigger focus on delivery across all platforms,” Steuer adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
He likens the networks’ embracing audience-buying, platform-based tools to a continuation of the evolution of better TV targeting from the likes of Simulmedia and unwired networks and “picking up where the TRA platform left off,” a reference to the technology purchased by TiVo before its acquisition by Rovi.
A big challenge to the buy-side, according to Steuer, is stitching together the various network offerings.
“In a world where the lines between linear TV and other digitally oriented methods for delivering television programming, whether that’s streaming services or video downloads or on demand from the cable operators, all of that is making it extremely complex to measure audience delivery across multiple providers,” Steuer says.
Gone are the days of a single TV currency based on Nielsen panel data, which are too small to measure more granular audiences.
“The more severe problem is finding those granular audiences across a variety of different platforms and delivery mechanisms,” Steuer adds.
On-boarding clients’ first-party data has led to many opportunities, but there are limitations to such datasets because they don’t provide a view of the entire marketplace.
“It gives you who your current customers are. That first party data is a great suppression mechanism if what you’re trying to do is go fined people who aren’t already your customers.”
On the plus side, first-party data can easily connect exposure with outcome “because you already know on a person level exactly who the people are.”
This Upfront will be Steuer’s second representing the buy-side, so he offers his thoughts with “a grain of salt required here.” He’s optimistic because given linear ratings erosion, networks aren’t to maintain the status quo while offering patchwork solutions “around the edges” to make up for ratings shortfalls.
“I think it’s going to be a different dialogue than we’ve had in previous years and one that has much more of a data informed story throughout, because the old way of saying ‘we’re really strong in 18-34’ doesn’t ring the clients’ cash registers anymore,” says Steuer.
This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>These are some of the network’s recent activities as outlined by Mel Berning during an interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
“TV has taken a little bit of an undeserved hit in the last couple of years because digital has always used the model that basically focuses on last click attribution” to claim that digital ads drive sales, says the President of Revenue at A&E.
The network and others are working with Data Plus Math Corp., a company founded in 2016 by John Hoctor, formerly of Rovi and IntegralReach, and Matthew Emans, formerly of IntegralReach, to develop a multi-touch attribution model “that we think is a real step forward.”
A+E and some 10-12 networks have talked about the attribution model with individual marketers and the Association of National Advertisers. They also hope to gain the endorsement of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement.
“What this leads to is the ability for us all to get behind attribution modeling and talking about the higher value, the higher return that TV really contributes an advertiser’s marketing campaign,” Berning says.
With regard to VOD addressability, he identifies the goals of the network’s testing with Comcast as eliminating waste for advertisers and improving the viewing experience for consumers via reduced ad load.
In addition, “We’ve been in discussions with a couple of other companies who are looking to actually get into the market also of doing national addressability,” meaning ad inventory beyond the two minutes of local time that cable providers now offer to advertisers for household targeting.
Like other TV networks, A+E continues to refine its audience optimization efforts in order to “go back to advertisers with a pretty pure mix of the targets that they want to reach,” Berning says.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>This is how Fariba Zamaniyan surveys the TV landscape while attending the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers. A former Nielsen executive who is now SVP, Sales & Client Service for TiVo, Zamaniyan explains how many of the thousands of brand marketing people in attendance have changed their thinking.
“What might have been more of an obstacle in the past with lots of these folks in the background is much more of a reality today than it was 10 years ago,” Zamaniyan says. “The challenge is change. Whether it be infrastructural or just a mindset change.”
The influx of digital media is forcing a rethinking of how media plans are brought to market and executed against, according to Zamaniyan.
“Now the technology and the availability of consuming content outside of traditional linear TV is forcing the marketplace to rethink,” Zamaniyan says.
A longtime set-top box data provider, TiVo recently upped its game in its acquisition by Rovi, best known as the company that has provided onscreen TV guide listings and metadata that power the media-search function on many platforms, along with advertising analytics and cloud services.
TiVo’s viewership data merged with Rovi’s analytics tools will enable better targeting of media spend for marketers and improved advertising inventory yield for media sellers.
“We feel very strongly that the measurement business and building efficiencies into media planning, the ability to measure them and execute against those plans is really critical to the growth of the industry,” says Zamaniyan.
We interviewed her at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Working the front end and back end of television audience targeting and measurement is TiVo’s legacy research analytics, which provides insights into networks and programs. “But there’s this whole middle layer where the ad sellers actually have to operationalize the promise of audience targeting. They have to look at the inventory level, what ad inventory, what avails are going to deliver this audience target,” Joan FitzGerald, VP, Product Management & Business Development at TiVo, says in an interview with Beet.TV.
That middle is Rovi’s sweet spot. TiVo’s viewership data merged with Rovi’s analytics tools will enable better targeting of media spend for marketers and improved advertising inventory yield for media sellers. Rovi is best known as the company that has provided the onscreen TV guide listings and metadata that power the media-search function on many platforms, along with advertising analytics and cloud services.
After the TiVo acquisition, the resulting entity kept the TiVo brand name. TiVo generates reports containing indices showing how programs rank for certain target audiences. “If you were a broadcaster and have a certain program and you’re achieving a 120 index for Ford F150 buyers, that means your show is likely to have 20 percent more Ford F150 buyers in the audience,” explains FitzGerald, who spent six years at ratings provider Arbitron and an equal tenure at metrics company comScore.
But when it comes to sellers actually deploying their inventory, “You’re not going to deliver the highest target every time,” FitzGerald says. “You’re going to have a mix of targets for the advertisers, because the reality is you’re guaranteeing based on GRP’s.”
As the industry moves toward guarantees based on reach, TiVo will help media sellers optimize their inventory based on what is known about those audiences in the past.
FitzGerald acknowledges that Nielsen is still “a super important part of the equation” and its data is used by TiVo for currency measurement purposes. “Age and gender targeting is not going away. But bringing these alternatives in there to provide more visibility into the system is one of the major road map items,” says FitzGerald.
This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.
]]>Horizon Media national TV SVP David Campanelli tells Beet.TV the company is using ad tech vendor Rovi’s Ad Optimizer tool together with ad spots on A+E Networks: “We’re going to take portions of our upfront spend on the books now, run that through the tool to optimizer against a higher index to reach our target customer for that particular advertiser.”
Campanelli likes the tool because “it’s built by people thinking from a TV standpoint, not from a digital standpoint and trying to translate that to TV”.
But Campanelli sees “programmatic TV” as meaning automation, data targeting and real-time optizisation of a schedule and dynamic ad insertion. But, on the latter, he says: “TV doesn’t work that way. We can’t have full programmatic until we have the ability to dynamically insert ads. That is a way off from a technology standpoint.”
Campanelli was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
]]>“We think of the analogy as almost like (the search engine) Alta Vista back in the day to Google, when you had to think about ‘How do I craft my search query?’ and then you made the query,” says video tech vendor Rovi‘s products VP Daren Gill. “Google gave you that ability to just type your query and go.
We think voice should be the same way. I shouldn’t have to think about what it is I need to say. (Viewers should) just say say what it is they’re thinking – what we have to get to is where you just speak naturally and freely.”
Xbox has allowed users to search for TV and movies with voice for a few years, while some Samsung TVs now offer the same. Rovi inherits voice search capabilities fromacquiring Veveo this February.
Gill spoke with Beet.TV at The Cable Show 2014. Disclaimer: This video was produced as part of sponsorship with Rovi.
]]>The deal will see internet TV box makers Entone and Evolution Digital take on Rovi’s connected guies in their intermediary connected TV boxes, which enable TVs with connected features.
“You’ve got a legacy infrastructure out there – consumers are dealing with devices that may not be sophisticated to deliver the user experience that’s expected,” says Rovi’s VP of vertical marketing Sharon Letz. “With these new connected guides, we’re able to deliver a much more engaging advertising experience for the user.”
She spoke with Beet.TV at The Cable Show 2014. Disclaimer: This video was produced as part of sponsorship with Rovi.
]]>“Conversational search really will be one of the tools that will transform the TV experience where the user has the ability to converse with their navigation solutions to provide a more rich experience,” former Arris SVP John Burke, who joined Rovi in March, tells Beet.TV.
Xbox has allowed users to search for TV and movies with voice for a few years, while some Samsung TVs now offer the same. Rovi inherits voice search capabilities from acquiring Veveo this February.
He spoke with Beet.TV at The Cable Show 2014. Disclaimer: This video was produced as part of sponsorship with Rovi.
]]>The deal sees Rovi’s DTA Guide, an electronic program guide software, get added to DTAs, the Digital Terminal Adaptors, the add-on devices some cable companies are giving their subscribers to upgrade their old cable service.
“They’re looking at alternate ways of promoting and using the data such as including it in packages focused for high-speed data customers where they only want a small amount of video,” Rovi product manager Mitch Drummond tells Beet.TV.
He spoke with Beet.TV at The Cable Show 2014. Disclaimer: This video was produced as part of sponsorship with Rovi.
]]>“The entertainment industry has been slow to embrace big data and analytics,” says Rovi’s analytics product and technology VP Matthew Emans. He says Rovi’s product can take data from set-top boxes, panel measurements and any source, making it “the first platform that can use this data at scale”.
So what can big data do for TV advertisers? “We can look at smaller target segments – people who might be interested in buying a truck, buying a particular type of healthy product,” Emans adds. And broadcasters are being targeted, too: “We help programmers design better schedules, we can help analyze viewership for cable operators and how they design their line-ups.”
He spoke with Beet.TV at The Cable Show 2014. Disclaimer: This video was produced as part of sponsorship with Rovi.
]]>“We strongly believe in the cloud, it can change the industry,” Rovi’s product development VP Thierry Lehartel tells Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show.
At the show, Rovi announced Remote Access Services, an upgrade to its existing Cloud Services which lets pay-TV operators give viewers channel-changing, DVR-setting remote control functionality from their mobile devices.
“It’s about maintaining the touchpoint throughout everyone’s daily experience,” Lehartel adds.
“Progressively migrating your users to a new world that delights them and migrating your infrastructure to something that is super-efficient… those two things are the ingredients of success for operators.”
]]>At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, Rovi trailed two new products aiming to help advertisers out. Ad Optimizer and Promotion Optimizer take in multiple data feeds to help advertisers figure out how to plan their spending.
“Today, there are massive amounts of data sets available,” Rovi product management director Akhil Parekh tells Beet.TV. “We not only know what consumers are watching on TV, we also now know what they’re doing off TV.
“Our platform can ingest all kinds of data (and) combine that with proprietary algorithms that identify what ads you want to run, when, on your inventory.
“Big data analytics will really change the world of advertising.”
]]>“With the picture being four times the resolution, you’d think that would take up four times the bandwidth and make it very difficult for the broadcasters to send it to you,” Rovi’s product management director Hans Baumgartner tells Beet.TV.
“But, using a new encoding standard called HEVC, we’re able to compress that picture in to about the same size as a current HDTV broadcast.”
Rovi’s DivX standard began offering HEVC-compressed production and playback in 2013. During CES, Rovi announced Sharp would use this capability in its next line of Aquos TVs and Blu-ray players.
]]>The Rovi Recommendations Service uses metadata describing the content viewers are watching to make suggestions for similar next content to consume.
“Our recommendations product will be relaunched this quarter,” company product management VP Priya Rajagopalan tells Beet.TV. “The 2.0 version combines analytic techniques with our deep editorial expertise and multilingual capabilities.”
Studies show consumers are more likely to consume content when it is appropriately recommended. Rovi offers such a service to digital video operators, along with data, program guide and other products. Details of the upgrade are not yet known.
Also on Rovi’s roadmap this year – global expansion. “We’re in 55 countries today – we’re going to 70 by the end of 2014,” Rajagopalan says at the Consumer Electronics Show.
]]>The year ahead heralds further development, says Rovi’s corporate strategy EVP Julian Lighton.
“You’ll see us expand in to Europe and further parts of Asia,” Lighton tells Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show.
“Around personalization, you’re going to see a few interesting features and functions … around the ability to tag and discover and recommend new experiences that are across different types of digital entertainment.”
Lighton says Rovi will also unveil new packages to help customers with promotion and demographic analysis of their usage.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV at the IBC show, Rovi product sales and marketing SVP Bob Shallow christens “search and recommendation 2.0 – effectively going to prediction as opposed to related-content”.
“The way search and recommendation 1.0 worked is, if you like one piece of content, you’re likely to like a piece of content that has the same actors, is done by the same director etc,” Shallow says.
“Recommendation 2.0 adds a degree of prediction. Predicting what a person would like based not only on the attributes of the pro or film but also viewer behavior – patterns of interest, thematic ties etc.”
For more on Rovi’s take, watch the video interview in full.
]]>Succeeding the popular H.264 standard, High-Efficiency Video Compression (H.265) promises up to 50 percent smaller video sizes for cheaper online transmission. Rovi has been amongst the few to commit early support for the standard, in the latest version of its DivX suite.
“HEVC is where we’re focused,” senior sales director Malachi Bierstein tells Beet.TV in this video interview at the IBC show, “to make it as easy as possible to make this transition for the whole supply chain.”
Many in the industry hope HEVC’s greater video file compression can help deliver 4k videos in future.
But Bierstein says: “With HEVC, you don’t have to be in 4k to get the benefit. You’ll start to see deployments of HEVC at the standard 1080p resolution because of cost savings on the file size reduction.”
]]>“The key challenge around HEVC today is to put all of the pieces together,” says Rovi product management director Sam Orton-Jay.
“Whilst ‘end-to-end’ is one of the most over-used terms… the only way to start delivering HEVC’s cost benefits to consumers today is to work across the supply chain.”
At the IBC show, Rovi unveiled more details of how it has become one of the first big players to commit to the standard, offering support through the latest version of its DivX suite.
“Div X certification allows us to work with IC vendors and device manufacturers to certify HEVC playback in those devices… which means we can guarantee a consistent playback experience,” Orton-Jay adds.
He also said Rovi technology can save up to 30 percent on some such encoding tasks.
]]>But video tech firm Rovi has given the new standard one shot in the arm by unveiling the latest version of its DivX video software, with HEVC support.
HEVC promises to compress content owners’ video by up to 50 percent more than H.264 for VOD, and about a third more for live streams – promising both SD and HD video in smaller packages today, and reducing file sizes of hefty 4k videos tomorrow.
But we’re not there yet, acknowledges Rovi’s senior manager for product marketing Solange Jacobs Randolph: “HEVC across the video industry is very much in its infancy. We’re facing the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma…
“Content providers like the big Hollywood studios are hesitant to adopt HEVC immediately … because there aren’t any devices available for consumers to enjoy it on. Consumer electronics manufacturers are not yet jumping on the HEVC bandwagon to incorporate that technology in their devices because the content’s not there.
“In six months, though, I believe that we’ll start seeing early devices come to market from leading players in consumer electronics – and, later on in 2014, I think we’ll start seeing the first entertainment services that are based on HEVC.”
If stakeholder uncertainty over licensing costs, as well as the chicken-and-egg problem, can be overcome, HEVC’s power to retain video quality in smaller files could save money on transmission. Broadcasters need higher-quality content and mobile operators need to decrease network congestion, Randolph said.
For now, Rovi’s support for HEVC in DivX 10 is one early way the industry can get an early start with the standard.
Disclosure: This video is part of a sponsored series produced by Beet.TV for Rovi.
]]>To jump-start adoption of the so-called “High-Effiency Video Compression” (HEVC) – or H.265 – codec, video tech firm Rovi is pushing out software in to the hands of consumers, regardless of the industry’s rate of take-up. The tenth version of its Div X video software suite includes HEVC creation and playback support.
“Consumers creating content in HEVC will really propel the standard,” says Rovi senior manager for product marketing Solange Jacobs Randolph in this video interview. “Once device manufacturers see all of this content, they will know that it’s time to start supporting HEVC in their devices natively.”
This is a fascinating strategy in addressing a supply-and-demand problem, or, as Randolph calls it, a “chicken-and-egg dilemma” – why should studios take advantage of HEVC’s smaller video sizes when no consumers can play them, and why should consumers care when there is no HEVC video content anyway?
One answer appears to be getting consumers to produce their own HEVC content, ahead even of Hollywood.
Can amateur or prosumer video makers drive the big outfits to adopt the standard that promises to save content owners and distributors money on delivery costs? Certainly, their content may show a quality gap compared with big-budget fare. But, in today’s landscape, when everyone is a content creator, the material produced by Div X-toting consumers may yet help create a showcase library of content in the format.
And the Div X chain may have the scale to popularise HEVC. “More than one billion Div X deices have shipped to market form the world’s leading consumer electronics manufacturers, and we plan to do it again,” Randolph says.
“We are introducing the Div X HEVC certification programme – and are already starting to work with the ICs, the OEMs who are coming to us because they have an interest in supporting HEVC.”
Rovi is presenting its latest developments in HEVC today in Amsterdam at the opening of of the IBC show.
Disclosure: This video and post was created as a part of sponsorship arrangement with Rovi.
]]>Already, there are HEVC services available. At NAB Rovi showcased an encoder based on the MainConcept SDK for HEVC; the digital entertainment technology company built the foundation for the content production and delivered the software tools for the end-user experience and the certification for devices, Kramer says.
– Katy Charles
]]>Francis explains that, “To us, content isn’t linear. Content is almost like software. It needs constant refreshing.” To this end, the company works not only with metadata and recommendation engines but also with a worldwide editorial staff made up of specialists in areas from film and television to music, books, video games and more in order to make connections not only between genres, themes and moods but associations between artists, directors and more to help consumers find exactly what they’re looking for.
He says, “It’s about being able to hit the target on the head when the mood strikes for a specific piece of content. That is what we are engineered to design our content to do.” The mix of filters, a recommendations engine and associations across TV and film make for a “really engaging experience that allows [consumers] to always be at the pulse of trying to find the content that fits the mood or theme that [they’re] looking for.”
]]>Entertainment Unbound aims to evolve the TV Everywhere initiative by working with the content as soon as it leaves the Hollywood studio. Via encoding for specific devices, adding metadata, generating personalized recommendations and user guides and presenting targeted advertising, Rovi seeks to present the user with a more optimized and relevant TV watching experience.
Rovi announced the initiative earlier this year at CES.
– Katy Charles
]]>