When Matt Prohaska joined The New York Times as programmatic advertising director in May, it was clear The Gray Lady intended to open up her ad inventory to newfangled programmatic ad bidding technology. Now that process has started in earnest. "In the last few months, we've directly engaged our sales force and integrated programmatic in to everything we do as an organization," [...]

As programmatic advertising has grown in usage in the video ad industry, the natural next step was to add more transparency on the supply side. That's why video advertising company SpotXchange launched a platform earlier this week that's designed to provide more insight into online real-time buying for publishers, says Mike Shehan, CEO of SpotXchange in an interview with Beet.TV. The buy side has [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Dual exposure on a second screen app and on TV can drive big lifts in brand awareness and likeability, says Greg Consiglio, President and Chief Operating Officer for second screen service Viggle in an interview with Beet.TV from IBC at the 2nd Screen Summit. Citing a study Viggle conducted with Nielsen earlier this year, he says brands have seen improvements from 11% [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Online video technology supplier Rovi's top priority is helping clients pump out video in the next-generation video compression standard. 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 [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Akamai may be best known for helping speed up the flow of internet packets of all kinds using its distributed network technologies. But the Cambridge, MA-based outfit is also zeroing in on the booming online video industry. In this video interview with Beet.TV at the IBC show, EMEA product director Stuart Cleary says Akamai's network is well deployed in [...]

COLOGNE -- Automated, programmatic ad-buying technologies are disrupting the display advertising market. And, increasingly, they will do the same for video ads, says one exec. "From an advertiser point of view, the idea of audience targeting is something they're extremley keen to do across video as much as they are across other places," Caspar Schlickum, EMEA MD of GroupM's data division [...]

COLOGNE -- The US PRISM data snooping controversy has hampered efforts to argue against European ad-targeting rules that are already too onerous, says GroupM Interaction COO John Montgomery.   GroupM is the media agency  holding unit of WPP. "The US is trying to support self-regulation - we're trying to avoid any form of legislation by regulating ourselves," he says in this video [...]

COLOGNE -- Don't call it "Rise Of The Machines", but AOL's new ad chief reckons real-time ad bidding algorithms will soon do much of the grunt work currently done by Mad Men and women. In this video interview with Beet.TV at the DMEXCO industry conflab, AOL Networks' Bob Lord says: "Traders on the floor (of Wall Street) never thought their jobs would [...]

COLOGNE - While the automation of  buying and selling of video inventory in Europe has become well established, the introduction of real-time bidding is still some months away, says Jana Eisenstein, Director of Publishers Services at Videology, the U.S. video adtech firm. In this interview with Ashley Swartz, the London-based executive gives provides an overview on progress and roadblocks in programmatic [...]

AMSTERDAM -- The upcoming successor to the popular H.264 video standard could save video content owners money on encoding by reducing file sizes by up to 50 percent. But, so far, adoption of High-Efficiency Video Compression (HEVC) has been slow. "The key challenge around HEVC today is to put all of the pieces together," says Rovi product management director Sam Orton-Jay. "Whilst [...]

COLOGNE -- The emergence of real-time, programmatic online ad buying is usually seen as a race toward cheaper ad pricing and, therefore, appealing more to lower-tier publishers. But, speaking to Beet.TV at DMEXCO, the CEO of AOL's ad server business, AdTech, says he is hoping to appeal to bigger publisher brands, some of which are still keener on selling their own [...]

COLOGNE -  DMEXCO, a two-day conference here, is the world's biggest adtech industry gathering, with a thousand exhibitors and 24,000 attendees.  Virtually all the major  ad agencies, trading desks and technology providers are here, reports Ashley Swartz, founder of the New York-based consultancy Furious Minds and a regular contributor to Beet.TV Swartz outlines a number of the themes at the show [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Technology company Civolution is using its tools for second-screen applications to enable multi-screen synched advertising, says Alex Terpstra, CEO of Civolution, in an interview with Beet.TV from IBC at the 2nd Screen Summit. The Netherlands-based company's watermarking and fingerprinting tools can also be used to identify ads in real time at the moment they play on TV and then [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Given the growth in second-screen applications, expect broadcasters to build in tools and technology to deliver real-time graphics, text and information with their shows in the coming months. That's the prediction of Anthony Rose, Co-Founder and CTO at Zeebox, a companion TV app, in an interview with Beet.TV from IBC at the 2nd Screen Summit. "In the next year you will [...]

COLOGNE -- Earlier this year, AOL launched Marketplace, a supply-side ad platform allied to its Adtech ad-serving business that helps premium publishers sell their non-reserved ad spots. Then, the launch happened only in the US and UK. But now AOL is green-lighting Marketplace across Europe. "This is about giving publishers the controls and the choices to extend revenue opportunities beyond what the [...]

AMSTERDAM -- At this year's video industry conferences, we are hearing a lot from technology vendors claiming to have cracked the second-screen advertising opportunity. The latest is a pairing, Cisco and Innovid, who used IBC to show off two proofs of concept. In the first, the pair would use metadata describing a linear TV ad to invoke a relevant interactive ad equivalent [...]

COLOGNE -- Everyone in media nowadays is eager for more data to inform their business. Now AOL is hoping to bring more data to every part of the video value chain, launching a new tool called Insights. "There's such a big gap right now," AOL Networks international SVP René Rechtman tells Beet.TV in this video interview. "Everybody's going in to video (without) [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Norwegian web browser maker Opera is having a busy International Broadcasting Convention show. It announced IPTV firms Amino and AirTies will adopt Opera's software on their devices, giving Opera greater traction for its ambitions to break in to interactive TV. And the firm also announced it is basing the latest version of its browser software development kit on Google's [...]

AMSTERDAM -- Content owners who want to get their content on new smart TV platforms frequently need technology vendor help. One such TV app maker, 24i Media of the Netherlands, is expanding globally on this quest. "We probably will start an office this year in the United States in order to be closer to our clients," CEO Martijn Van Horssen says in this [...]

Video ad marketplace SpotXchange launched a new platform for programmatic buying, and said that one of its initial customers, NDN, has already seen a boost in revenue yield from using the platform. With the platform, publishers can tap into ad networks, demand side platforms, agency trading desks and even direct sales, says Sean Buckley, VP Platform at SpotXchange in an interview with [...]