clypd may have recently taken on $7.2 million in VC funding to build out its ambition to bring data-driven advertising to television - but an exec says things are moving faster than anticipated. "We have a total $10.5 million (in investment) - this is being used to build out the team, build out the platform," product head Jason Burke tells Beet.TV. "This [...]

This year, Dutch TV data provider Civolution has been helping social ad firm Optimal place Facebook ads on second screens, chronologically synchronized with TV ads. Next up, the firm wants to get a lot more detailed. "2013 was all bat establishing the goalset," Civolution senior product manager Stefan Maris tells Beet.TV. "2014 will be all about, 'How can we increase the [...]

The Tribune company has acquired Gracenote for $170 million.   The company provides audio recognition software for  a number of consumer devices.  Recently the company has been working with television media planners in delivering targeted video ads.  Last month, we interviewed Gracenote president Steven White about the company and its new efforts  in the ad world. We have republished that interview [...]

Many people are out to re-invent education as a "flipped classroom", in which learning and interaction is carried out remotely and digitally. Tokbox CEO Ian Small agrees video is just the medium to support the idea. "WebRTC on its own solves the one-to-one, peer-to-peer (video) case reasonably well," he tells Beet.TV. "But what it doesn't really help you with is four, five, [...]

Today, the TV tuning habits of a million American households is helping Kantar Media advertising partners target digital ads. Tomorrow, the applications could be far more widespread. "One of the things on our roadmap, as we're very integrated in television, is to broaden the perspective," Kantar chief commercial officer Bud Breheney tells Beet.TV. "You have people that are using their television 6+ [...]

Putting users in control can put publishers at an advantage, it seems. Google's TrueView video ad format may let users skip YouTube pre-roll ads - but that doesn't mean reduced engagement, says a company exec. "One of the most interesting findings that we've gotten from TrueView, both on YouTube and also off of YouTube and on the publishers that we have [...]

Storyful, the Dublin-based start-up that verifies and manages UGC news video for many major news organizations, has been sold to News Corp for $25 million, the company announced today.  Earlier this year we spoke with Storyful Executive Editor David Clinch about the business and it's growing operations.  We are republishing that video today.  

Advertising software shop Mediaocean launched a new platform earlier this month geared towards its partners. Called the Connect Partner Platform, Connect lets third parties integrate with Mediaocean's services. It targets ad servers, data providers, supply companies and technology providers, letting them leverage Mediaocean's software that handles $130 billion in global ad billing each year. The new platform comes on the heels [...]

Advertisers should think of basic 15- and 30-second digital video ads as the "blank canvas" for interactive creative ad engagements, according to an executive from video ad tech vendor Videology. "There's a second layer of optimization around the interaction with the audience," product GM Rich Astley tells Beet.TV. He says Videology's own technology offers basic interactivity for video ads, but it also [...]

The number of pay-TV homes accessing TV Everywhere has doubled in the first nine months of 2013, says Jeremy Helfand, VP of Monetization at Adobe, during an interview with Beet.TV. Adobe launched its TV Everywhere platform, Adobe Primetime, earlier this year and now counts more than a dozen major media companies using the platform. The amount of authenticated content grew this [...]

Lately, ad tech vendors have been rushing like bulls out of a gate to bring out new automated ad delivery tools. But this proliferation may not always be the case, according to a top Google exec. "There could easily be some contraction in this marketplace, or acquisition," Google media platforms sales head Jay VanDerzee tells Beet.TV. "The next chapter we're very focused on is, how [...]

Today, super-automated and -targeted ad buying dubbed "programmatic" is mostly  brought to bear on straightforward display ads in standard formats. So, with engaging new devices demanding new-wave interactive ad formats, will programmatic reach this new area? "Technology will catch up to the creative," Real Media Group president Nicolle Pangis tells Beet.TV. "We've seen it in display, mobile, video - now they can [...]

Mindshare wants to deal in real-time ads - but it hates the price spikes that can be associated with the mechanism. The group's north America MD James Powell tells Beet.TV he needs "inflation-immune pricing"... "Strong publishers aren't necessarily dumping all their good content in to a programmatic sphere at the moment. And, even if they are, as a buyer, I don't necessarily [...]

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif – EngineHere, an online education platform for learning code, has gone live. Positioned between low cost (or free) MOOCs and immersive, high-priced developer bootcamps, the San Francisco start-up is offering introductory and intermediate level programming and web development courses with an emphasis on live mentorship. Founder Benjamin Plesser says that, while the interest in learning to code is accelerating, [...]

The growing sophistication of both TV and online data is making cross-platform media mix modeling more reliable, says Mark McKee, Senior VP Global Marketing and Strategy at Videology in an interview with Beet.TV. "The first party and third party purchase behavior is effective in reaching and delivering both brand and sales metrics," he says in a conversation about different types of data [...]

Programmatic buying isn't big enough to have a huge impact yet on the TV upfront, says Gibbs Haljun, Managing Director of Media Investment at GroupM, during an interview with Beet.TV. "It's not happening yet because there isn't huge scale. Look at Duck Dynasty. That has a very small viewership online....there is less of an incentive to shift money. My goal is [...]

"The year of mobile." It's become a pretty hackneyed digital media forecast. But, in 2013, for digital video, it came true, says Brightcove media and broadcast CTO Albert Lai. "In 2013, we saw a lot of our customers say that the majority or near-majority of their customer base were coming from mobile apps versus desktop," Lai tells Beet.TV. "That is a [...]

Automated advertising is about to be executed at some serious scale, after WPP this month announced it would merge its 24/7 Media unit's collection of publisher-side technologies in to data stablemate Xaxis. "It puts us in some rare air - we are the largest programmatic and media platform," Xaxis north America MD Brian Gleason tells Beet.TV. WPP merged the units to cater to an ad market [...]

As part of its digital expansion this year, Conde Nast has launched its magazine channels via Roku, says Fred Santarpia, Chief Digital Officer for Conde Nast, in an interview with Beet.TV. The channels for GQ, Glamour, Vogue, Wired, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair and Style.com went live last month on the over-the-top service with more than 600 episodes between them, he [...]

The newly released report by FreeWheel on digital video consumption and advertising represents something of a watershed moment for TV Everywhere, explains Ashley J. Swartz in this analysis for Beet.TV.  The report also points to the growth of advertising across digital properties. Here is our video interview with FreeWheel's Brian Dutt who gives his take on the report. Swartz is CEO of [...]