LAS VEGAS -- Twitter is focusing on a number of initiatives with marketers to link brands more closely to the real-time opportunities in the daily tweet stream of users, says Melissa Barnes, head of agency and brand advocacy at Twitter in an interview with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show. "The best brands [in real-time] are the ones thinking about it far in advance," [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Digital content data provider Rovi is preparing to reboot its recommendations offering in the next few weeks. 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 [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Mobile gaming is expanding into fitness, casual health, to-do apps and other areas of gaming that are ripe for brand integration, says Brian Wong, Founder and CEO of Kiip, a mobile gaming service, in an interview with Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show. "It's reflective of people living their lives. You are using your phone in moments of [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Kicking off its new year, digital video tech outfit Rovi announced it has been contracted by Mexico's América Móvil to provide its guidance, search, recommendations and metadata products to the broadcaster. 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 [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Marketing land is abuzz about "native advertising" - the hybridized presentation of marketing in the guise of publisher editorial. As different publishers and agencies approach the opportunity in different ways, the commonly accepted notions of what constitutes an ad and how you recognize it begin to break down. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wants to put them back together again. "Where [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Branded content is hot in marketing land. Now Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG's) is saving brands the trouble of creating their own content - by obtaining publishers' permission to re-publish theirs. SMG's new Content@Scale CMS, launched this week, ingests text articles and images from Ahalogy, Demand Media, Glam Media, Forbes, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Parade, Rodale Inc. and Time, Inc, all [...]

LAS VEGAS - Content@Scale, the new content marketing platform launched by Starcom Mediavest Group, will soon add video capability to its text article re-distribution offering. The service lets marketers licence "evergreen" articles from 15 US publishers to re-use as content in display ad units. Flite CEO Will Price, whose technology powers the service, says he aims to take it to the Spanish, [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Multiscreen consumers now outnumber single-screen consumers by three to one, with about 203 million multiscreen consumers in the United States, says Joe Apprendi, CEO of ad technology company Collective, during an interview with Beet.TV at CES. Collective is working with marketers and agencies to help them reach audiences in a targeted fashion across screens, he adds. "We want to [...]

LAS VEGAS --  Keep an eye on developments in wearable technology as that's a field ripe for marketing innovation, says  Michael Kassan, Chairman and CEO of MediaLink, a media consulting firm, in an interview with Beet.TV at CES. "CES allows important conversations between marketers and manufacturers, which can help in delivering the new technology. This year at CES there are some 10,000 marketers," [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Fueled by a focus on media, new products, and technology of the future, this year's Consumer Electronics Show is the largest ever, says Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, in an interview with Beet.TV. The flagship consumer electronics event comprises more than 2 million square feet of exhibit space with more than 3200 companies showing [...]

LAS VEGAS -- 4K televisions being touted at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) promise phenomenal-quality viewing in the years ahead. But traditional broadcast infrastructure may not be able to cope with the extra demands, and broadband pipes may not be fat enough either, says one exec. "The only way a wireline operator is going to be able to provide 4K is [...]

LAS VEGAS -- The New York Times' web redesign on Wednesday opened the site up to paid articles from sponsors - but a distinction will always be clear and the publisher wants only "sophisticated" examples of the format including video, the exec in charge tells Beet.TV. "We are going to give marketers a platform to publish their content on to the [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Pubmatic has long offered premium publishers the ability to sell their display and mobile ad inventory using real-time systems. Now it's about to offer video ad sales in the same way, too. Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, the Redwood City- and New York-based company president Kirk McDonald tells Beet.TV Pubmatic will launch the offering this week. "Up until [...]

LAS VEGAS - In advance of his keynote speech to the Consumer Electronics Show here, Cisco CEO John Chambers tells Beet.TV in this video interview that 2014 will be the "inflection point" of the Internet  - the emergence of what he calls the "Internet of everything." In this interview, he talks about the importance of Videoscape, the company's cloud-based video management [...]

Brightcove, a leading provide of video platform and cloud services, has made a significant move intp the digital video ad sector with a $49 million acquisition of Unicorn Media, the company announced today. Unicorn manages ad insertion into live and VOD digital video. Here is the take on the acquisition by Brightcove CEO David Mendels, who rights this blog post. We interviewed Mendels [...]

"Coding" is the new black, and there's no longer a shortage of service teaching kids, women and all comers the virtues of computer programming. One of the latest, EngineHere, aims to to get ahead of the pack by replicating the familiar school environment using online video. Recently-launched, EngineHere uses Tokbox's WebRTC video tools to support live video streaming learning from tutors [...]

Everyone has been talking about "second-screen" experiences. But what do those experiences really bring to advertisers' party? Greater consumer engagement, says a tech vendor. In the Netherlands, Civolution, whose technology knows which ads are playing on which TV channels and when, has been delivering that real-time data to Group M's data-driven ad unit Xaxis. "As soon as we identify an ad, we [...]

Advertisers imagine a world where they target ads by knowing just what viewers are watching. In digital, that world is coming in time. But, in analog, it's already here. Around a million US households are feeding their TV tuning data to media monitor Kantar Media, which uses it to help WPP stablemate Xaxis buy digital ads reaching very specific audience groups. "With [...]

The apparent shortage of premium video inventory against which brands can advertise is being driven in part by insufficient verification for who is really watching what, says one ad exec at the sharp end. Group M data unit Xaxis' audience strategy manager Evan Hanlon blames "shortage" partly on the "lack of our ability to verify the premium nature of so much [...]

After Tokbox closed its own-brand consumer video chat service in 2011, it began opening up its own technology to offer as a platform for rival services. Two years on, CEO Ian Small is thanking a Google-backed web video initiative for supporting his company. "A little over a year ago, Chrome introduced WebRTC," Small tells Beet.TV. "We've gone from virtual no endpoints [...]