SAN FRANCISCO -- These are heady days when an advertiser starts making TV shows to sell ads - but they are headier still when they plan to sell those ads programmatically. In February, Group M announced it will co-produce a sport documentary series, My Side Of The Sky, with Hulu. "There's not enough good content out there to align brands with," Paul [...]

The newly relaunched Time.com is highly video centric, with increased production of original content, a prominent player and a cross-title "recirculation" strategy which is driving consumption of  videos across all the company's titles, with customized thumbnails of videos displayed on all article pages, explains Craig Ettinger, General Manger of Time.com in this interview with Beet.TV He explains how video discovery engine [...]

SAN FRANCISCO  -- Having established a technology for buying and selling video advertising programmatically, and having entered the medium of linear television, Adap.tv will evolve to become  a cross-media platform, encompassing mobile and display in the  next year,  says Toby Gabriner, President of Adap.tv in this on-stage interview with moderator Ashley J. Swartz.   The goal of  becoming cross platform [...]

LONDON -- Time was, investors wouldn't look a content startup in the face. Lately, we have seen some financial energy go back in to ambitious, content-related companies. But that doesn't change the challenging outlook, says one leading investor. "Content as original programming remains a very hard category to invest in," says Saul Klein of Index Ventures, the European VC firm whose [...]

Paul Kontonis, a veteran of the emerging medium of branded video, who helped define the category as an executive at Digitas, recently joined the  LA-based Collective Digital Studio (CDS), one of the big MCN's (multichannel networks),   to design and sell marketing programs to brands around the network's key YouTube channel stars. We spoke with him about how CDS  creates "authentic" [...]

Taboola, the content discovery technology platform, which powers the  consumption of videos and articles via the distribution of  billions of thumbnail images across the Web and mobile apps, sees discovery as the "fourth" digital advertising medium, added to search, social and display, says CEO and Founder Adam Singolda, in this video interview with Beet.TV Historically a solution to drive discovery and [...]

LONDON -- Advertisers are being urged to quit viewing spending allocation as an "either-or" between TV and online video, and instead buy both together for campaigns. "We're entering in to an economy where there are friends with benefits - video and TV working together," says video advertising technology platform vendor Videology's head of global TV strategies Rhys McLachlan. "Video remains the pre-eminent [...]

LONDON -- From Google's Loon to Facbeook's drones, the internet that Silicon Valley's giants will create in Africa will be quite different to the one back home. With many first-time consumers adopting mobile devices before desktop, Africa may be a vision of the west's media future. "The rate at which the mobile phone has grown in Nigeria is from 1999, which [...]

LONDON -- Quartz, Atlantic Media's online-only journalism offshoot, may be pitched at providing premium-grade analysis, but don't expect the site to start charging any time soon. "Social mechanisms (are) the primary way that traffic is derived for most content sites today," Quartz publisher and Atlantic Media SVP Jay Lauf tells Beet.TV. "Anything you do in terms of  a paywall or reg [...]

LONDON -- With added TV and video features, the recent launches of the next-generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles has seen Microsoft and Sony move further increments closer toward their dreams of being living room entertainment super hubs. But that's a "flawed strategy", says one analyst. "The Xbox One strategy is ... based on a 1995 understanding of the world, the [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- As TV reaches into the programmatic landscape, it will face challenges in areas like inventory, but opportunities in delivery and decisioning, says David Algranti, Senior VP TV Product Integration at measurement firm Rentrak during an interview with Beet.TV. Rentrak works with a number of networks and agencies that are licensing its data to inform programmatic buying for TV. [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Programmatic buying has great potential to bridge technology between TV and digital buying systems, says David Miller, VP Product Management at INVISION, a multi-platform ad sales provider during an interview with Beet.TV. "When you compare the ease of buying TV to digital we hear a lot that TV is easier, but TV has a big head start and [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- The spread of programmatic buying in media is changing how agencies buy and sell media, but also how they approach metrics, says Gregg Colvin, North American Chief Operating Officer for Universal McCann during an interview with Beet.TV. "This is a mindset change. Planners and buyers are thinking towards a more nuanced approach to KPIs and using programmatic to become [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- So much greater are video ad prices compared with standard display, there is a more pressing need to inject programmatic platforms with price control mechanisms, if video advertisers are to adopt the mechanisms, says one programmatic expert. "There's such a limited quantity of video … there hasn't been the need to have this open auction going on," says [...]

Yahoo is in conversations to acquire the big video news syndicator NDN, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.   The acquisition would resemble in some respects, the 2010 acquisition by AOL of 5Min.   Earlier this year at the Beet.TV executive retreat, we  interviewed  NDN COO Eric Orme on stage about the company and its recent developments [...]

LONDON -- The Washington Post already invested in its Post TV online video brand last year. Now it plans to increase editorial video volume and to make more video available to native ad brands. "We'll be telling more stories using more video content than ever before," chief revenue officer Kevin Gentzel tells Beet.TV. "We'll lead more stories with video, surface more [...]

SAN FRANCISCO - With first party data on some 150 million consumers, Time Inc. is using that data to serve advertising programmatically, explains Patrick Landi, Executive Director of Programmatic Sales at Time Inc., this interview with Beet.TV Also in the interview, he speaks about the emergence of private marketplaces, linking programmatic sales between Time Inc and brands. Recently, Time Inc. announce that [...]

LONDON - The Huffington is registering 44 percent of it's traffic from outside the United States via it 11 international editions, which adds up to over 92 million unique visitors, says Jimmy Maymann, CEO of the Huffington Post, in this video interview with Beet.TV.  The company plans expand this year with a new global edition in India, he says. India has [...]

LONDON -- The Guardian's publisher will post annual digital revenue up by a quarter to over £70 million ($116 million) for the year ending March, CEO Andrew Miller tells Beet.TV. Although many in the industry report worsening ad rates, the Guardian Media Group CEO says: "We're seeing a hardening of our CPMs." The group will report the results this summer. The publisher [...]

LONDON -- The BBC's proposal to close its linear youth TV channel BBC Three in the UK but to go on publishing its shows online under the same brand will have little impact for a service already heavily consumed online, says the corporation's future media director. "The BBC is the first broadcaster to go online-only with one of its channels," Ralph [...]