Larry Kless' Weblog: Tubemogul

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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Online Video Platform Summit 2010 Keynote: Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, "The New Video Landscape: Multi-platform Distribution, Monetization, and Fragmentation"

In his keynote address at the Online Video Platform Summit, Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Chairman of Brightcove discussed the broad themes involved in the complex and fragmented landscape for online video publishing and the strategies organizations need to have in place to achieve success with their video initiatives. Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen provided a great summary of Allaire's keynote in his post, Brightcove: “Everyone is an Online Video Publisher” on OnlineVideo.net, which highlights Allaire's view of the changing face of video and content monetization, as more and more publishers look to expand their video initiatives to all three screens.

Allaire pointed out the rapid growth of online video in 2010 grew to a staggering 30 billion monthly views, and is now more than 50% of Internet traffic in the U.S., and it's estimated that it will will grow to 90% by 2013. Some of the key drivers fueling that growth are ad supported online video, which continues to grow faster than any other area of online advertising, and also the brand marketing and retail applications which are really exploding.

eMarkerter predicts that online advertising spend will be $28.5 billion in 2011, and that almost $2 billion of that will be online video advertising. This is really exciting for the industry, says Allaire, because corporations and institutions are expanding and investing in video as a way to enhance their customer relationships and customer touchpoints.

According to Allaire:

“Everyone is an online video publisher. Retail, small businesses, foundations, non-profits, and of course media companies. The use cases for online video are now as many as the use cases for the web in general.”

He added that online video platforms have emerged as critical partners to publishers by creating solutions that help them navigate the complex and fragmented online video landscape.

“For businesses, it’s less about the technology—which should be invisible—but about the business value."

Allaire said increased bandwidth capacity and demand for higher quality video experiences have required publishers to render multiple versions of their content for multi-bitrate streaming. In addition, there is a tsunami of new connected devices consumers are using to access video which all use a variety of video runtimes creating a fragmented publishing environment. Allaire said that the recent release of Brightcove 5, the company's cloud-based online video platform, addresses many of the issues that publishers face in the fragmented landscape and helps expand their reach. The new features include: distribution and synchronization with YouTube, iPad reference app, Apple HTTP streaming for the mobile Web and apps, cross platform Smart Players, new advanced analytics for Adobe® Flash® and HTML5 video developed in partnership with Tubemogul, and wide-ranging productivity enhancements.

I spoke with Allaire at length about his background and the early years of online video in this post from 2009. I also caught up with him following this keynote to get a summary of his view on the fragmented video landscape in this post, Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove: Reaching Viewers in a Complex and Fragmented Video Landscape. I've reposted the video from our conversation below.

About Jeremy Allaire

Jeremy Allaire founded Brightcove in early 2004 with a vision for the transformation of television with the Internet. From his early days as CTO of Macromedia, where he was instrumental in evolving Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform for rich media applications on the web, Allaire envisioned that one day video would become as ubiquitous as text on the web. As CEO and Chairman of Brightcove, Allaire leads the company’s technology, marketing and business development strategy. Prior to founding Brightcove, Allaire worked as a technologist and entrepreneur-in-residence for Cambridge, MA-based venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he worked on companies and investments in broadband media, mobile content, e-commerce software and digital identity.

Before General Catalyst, Allaire was Chief Technology Officer of Macromedia, where he helped define and launch the Macromedia MX platform for Rich Internet Applications, helping to evolve Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform for rich media applications on the Internet. Allaire joined Macromedia with its merger with Allaire Corporation, where Jeremy was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. Founded in 1995, Allaire Corporation was a pioneer in using the web as an application platform, and its industry leading and award winning products power millions of websites, online services and business applications on the Internet.

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all types, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with
Streaming Media West in Los Angeles, the Online Video Platform Summit is designed for video publishers of all types and sizes, whether small businesses looking to publish content for the first time, independent entertainment content creators, large media organizations, or anywhere in between.

Related:

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

What Counts as a Video View? - Online Video Conversations: David Burch, Tubemogul - Part 2

So, what constitutes a video view? Is it considered a view just when the stream is called up and served to the viewer, even though only a portion of the video is viewed? Does the entire video need to be viewed to be counted? After several years of inconsistencies, the online video industry has not yet adopted a standard definition for a view. So to get some insight on this subject I spoke with David Burch, Director of Marketing at TubeMogul, Inc. According to Burch, while the industry standard is to count a view once someone clicks play and the streams starts, there still is a lot of misconception among media buyers on constitutes a view.

Burch says the technology is definitely there and Tubemogul has been putting out benchmark data on video completion rates for some time. Back in 2008, Tubemogul put together a study on What Counts as a View? which identified the differences in view counting among popular video sites. Most of the sites counted any interaction with the video player (full view, 1/2 view, refresh, embed, embedded autoplay) a view and as the report states, "The implications are relevant for video advertisers, content publishers, and those that might seek to artificially inflate the popularity of a given video."

Jim Louderback

Jim Louberback, CEO of Revision3 Internet Television, has been very outspoken on the need for standardization and has railed against the industry practice of counting an autoplay-start, as a video view and the growing prevalence of "stream fraud". He cited Tubemogul's updated study from September 2010, which reported that the problem of counting views was getting worse and nearly all video sites, except YouTube, counted anything including embedded autoplays as a view. According to YouTube, "A view occurs when a person watches your video. In order to preserve accuracy in view counts, we identify irregular playbacks such as spam and remove these from the view count."

Burch suggested that for publishers and advertisers it becomes a tradeoff. Another Tubemogul research report looked at drop off rates for pre-roll ads, which found that for many viewers, sitting through a pre-roll just isn't worth it. In fact, the overall number of viewers that clicked away from a video during 10-30 second pre-roll ads was close to 16%, and that number varied with top magazines and newspapers, where 24.85% of viewers click away; large broadcasters, only 10.9% of viewers click away during an ad, and video sharing sites saw 38.4% viewers click away and never actually watch the video content they originally came to see.

For advertisers, it becomes a bit of quandary when it comes traditional CPMs (Cost-Per-Impressions). If an "impression" or "view" is logged at the beginning of the pre-roll, for instance, and not after the ad has been viewed in full, then it's quite possible advertisers could end up paying for viewers that never saw their ad. For publishers, they risk losing a quarter of their audience based if they run pre-roll ads.

Burch concluded that:

"There is consensus around the industry about when to count a view, that's just a stream. But I think there's also consensus that that's obviously not enough. The technology is there to track it but benchmarking is just the beginning."

About Tubemogul
TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences. TubeMogul's advertising solution is powered by the company's unprecedented data platform that tracks billions of video streams every month from the Internet's top publishers. This unique technology enables TubeMogul to help advertisers find consumers who want to watch their videos - and watch them longer. Advertisers and marketers never again have to choose engagement and accountability over reach if they use TubeMogul's video advertising and analytics platform.

Follow: tubemogul (tubemogul) on Twitter

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove: Reaching Viewers in a Complex and Fragmented Video Landscape

I met with Jeremy Allaire, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove, at the Online Video Platform Summit to get a summary of his keynote address, where he shared his view of the increasingly complex and fragmented landscape for online video publishing, and the multi-platform distribution strategies organizations need to have in place to achieve success with their video initiatives. Allaire founded Brightcove in early 2004 with a vision for the transformation of television with the Internet. From his early days as CTO of Macromedia, where he was instrumental in evolving Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform for rich media applications on the web, Allaire envisioned that one day video would become as ubiquitous as text on the web. I spoke with him at length about his background and the early years of online video in this post from last year.

In his keynote, The New Video Landscape: Multi-platform Distribution, Monetization, and Fragmentation, Allaire described the rapid growth of online video in 2010 with monthly video growing to a staggering 30 billion views. He pointed out that online video is now more than 50% of Internet traffic in the U.S. and it's estimated that it will will grow to 90% by 2013. Some of the key drivers fueling that growth are ad supported online video, which continues to grow faster than any other area of online advertising, and also the brand marketing and retail applications which are really exploding. eMarkerter predicts that online advertising spend will be $28.5 billion next year, and that almost $2 billion of that will be online video advertising.

According to eMarketer's David Hallerman:

"The reason for the huge increase in video ad spending is that brand marketers will shift more of their ad budgets online. Since there is more professional video online than ever before, buyers have more inventory to choose from. Brand marketers realize how central the internet is to consumers’ lives than it was even two years ago. More important, they see how much of that video content is professional, so they trust it and as a FreeWheel study shows, consumers tend to watch video ads to the end when they are up against professional video content."

This is really exciting for the industry, says Allaire, because corporations and institutions are expanding and investing in video as a way to enhance their customer relationships and customer touchpoints. Data from Brightcove & TubeMogul's Online Video & Media Industry Quarterly Research Report for Q2 2010, found that online video is a priority for brand managers and that more than 60 percent plan to spend more their website video initiatives in the next 12 months.

But while consumer demand, growth trends, and broad industry adoption introduce exciting new opportunity, Allaire says the complex and fragmented device landscape is introducing new challenges for online video publishers. In particular, Apple's release of the iPad started the HTML5/H.264 video vs. Flash debate over the future of web content and application runtime formats, which Allaire wrote about earlier in the year in a guest post on TechCrunch.

Allaire says increased bandwidth capacity and demand for higher quality video experiences have required publishers to render multiple versions of their content for multi-bitrate streaming. In addition, there is a tsunami of new connected devices consumers are using to access video which all use a variety of video runtimes creating a fragmented publishing environment.

"We've moved from the world of people publishing video to the PC web with Flash, to needing to have video on tablets and smart phones – both web browsing and native apps, that people do across a lot of different platforms – and the emergence of connected TVs are yet another set of platforms that are going to create these challenges for publishers. And then, the explosion of social media sites as sources of traffic and valuable forms of customer engagement. So really, the world has changed a lot in the last 12 months and that's actually created a huge amount of challenges and a huge amount of opportunities."

Allaire says that the recent release of Brightcove 5, the company's cloud-based online video platform, addresses many of the issues that publishers face in the fragmented landscape and helps expand their reach. The new features include: distribution and synchronization with YouTube, iPad reference app, Apple HTTP streaming for the mobile Web and apps, cross platform Smart Players, new advanced analytics for Adobe® Flash® and HTML5 video developed in partnership with Tubemogul, and wide-ranging productivity enhancements.

In a follow up TechCrunch guest post last week, Allaire further expanded on the outlook for 2011 – which promises to be yet another transformational year in the online video landscape – with connected TVs set to go mainstream, OTT (over-the-top) video adoption, the ongoing battle over video delivery standards, and the rise of social recommendations with Facebook and Twitter growing much faster as sources for online video discovery and referral compared to traditional search engines. According to Tubemogul and Brightcove's Online Video & The Media Industry report for Q3 2010, Facebook is now the second largest traffic source for media sites surpassing Yahoo! The report states that not only are social media destination driving more traffic, but consumers who find video through the recommendation of peers in the social networks are more engaged with the video content then content they find through other sources.

In his keynote, Allaire said that, "Everyone is an online video publisher," and that online video platforms have emerged as critical partners to publishers by creating solutions that help them navigate the complex and fragmented online video landscape.

"I think the really big picture is that we're just at the beginning. Video ubiquity is just emerging and we see a world in the next several years where every professional website in the world is going to have professional video applications, so it's a very exciting time for our company and the industry."

Online Video Conversations: David Burch, Tubemogul - Part 1: Why Video? Marketing tips, Online Video Industry Trends

In this latest installment of Online Video Conversations, I caught up with David Burch, Director of Marketing at TubeMogul, Inc., to find out why video is important for all types of businesses – small, medium and large – and how video distribution, analytics and social media marketing helps build brand identity and viewer engagement. He also talks about trends and the current state of the online video industry. Burch is well-known within the industry and is frequently quoted as an expert in online video in leading media outlets like AdAge, NPR's Marketplace and Wired.

Burch leads media relations for the Emeryville, California-based online video ditsribution, analytics and advertising platform. He also is the author of all TubeMogul's data-driven research. Prior to joining TubeMogul, Burch was a Content Manager at Delivery Agent, and worked on digital strategy for many top media companies, including ABC and NBC. He received his BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley, which is where Tubemogul was born.

To start the conversation, I asked Burch one of those "what is the meaning of life?" questions by asking:

"Why video? What's so compelling about video that companies should get involved with it?"

According to Burch, there are a lot of good reasons, but the number one reason is that video is more engaging than any other media.

"Video is just a really powerful medium to convey branding messages. It's more effective than other formats, like banner ads or different mediums of advertisement. Why video? Why not video?"

Online video audiences continue to grow, with more and more people are watching more video across the board. According to Tubemogul research, people are more likely to click on a link if it's a video and on average audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watch a video 36.91% longer than viewers referred by Facebook and 49.98% longer than viewers referred by Digg. He says people love Tubemogul's feature that sends a Tweet when your video is uploaded.

In addition, Brightcove and Tubemogul's Online Video & Media Industry Quarterly Research Report, found that online video discovery is shifting from search to social media. Twitter and Facebook attract more engaged viewers than other sites and are growing faster than search engines, and while Google search is still king, social media marketing gaining ground fast.

Burch says that even though YouTube is the biggest online video entity – publishers, marketers and businesses of any size can benefit from distributing their videos to more than one site. Tubemogul provides a free video syndication service OneLoad, which is a single point for distributing videos to the top video and social networking sites. Tubemogul also provides InPlay, its free video analytics solution for publishers, online video platforms and video sharing sites. He says that publishers and marketers can learn a lot about their audience and their level of engagement from real-time analytics.

Burch says that if you're not using video, you should get started:

"A lot of small businesses get a lot of SEO benefit from video. Being in more places means – more people are watching. It's not like you're gaming anything, you're just becoming more popular."

In regards to the current state of the online video industry – and comparing the industry growth innings in a baseball game – Burch thinks we're in the forth or fifth inning.

"It's hard to remember, but YouTube's only been around for 5 years, so it is pretty young. I really think with the analytics space, we've got this technology that a lot of people are using – and I think the technology is getting there."

According to Burch the viewing experience is getting better and rebuffer rates (those annoying delays in the video loading) are going down. Fast load times are low rebuffer rates are crucial, as Tubemogul's research found that 81.19% of viewers choose to click away instead of waiting for a video to rebuffer.

"If you're willing to avoid that and want to pay to deliver professional quality video, there are solutions out there to do it. There's this while ecosystem of analytics built in, which is where we step in, advertising solutions which we recently launched, our PlayTime ad platform. It's a very developed ecosystem. HOw television will be viewed on the web and how mobile will fit in to that – there's a lot of open questions – but I feel that it's evolved quit a bit."

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my Online Video Conversation with David Burch coming soon.

About Tubemogul
TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences. TubeMogul's advertising solution is powered by the company's unprecedented data platform that tracks billions of video streams every month from the Internet's top publishers. This unique technology enables TubeMogul to help advertisers find consumers who want to watch their videos - and watch them longer. Advertisers and marketers never again have to choose engagement and accountability over reach if they use TubeMogul's video advertising and analytics platform.

Follow tubemogul (tubemogul) on Twitter

Related posts:

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Online Video Platform Summit: Measuring Success

For businesses, all roads lead to monetization, and there's no other tool more important than video analytics to capture how your video content is consumed on the web. While definitions vary on what is considered a "view" or an "impression" and no real standards currently exist, everyone recognizes the need for real-time data to measure and maximize the ROI of their online efforts. In this session from the Online Video Platform Summit, the CEOs of four leading analytics and video technology companies, Tubemogul, DigitalSmiths, Visible Measures and Accordent, discuss how video metrics help video publishers better understand audience behavior and the performance and reach of a viral video, social marketing campaign, online video ad, corporate training video or other content, and how it drives productivity and revenue.

Measuring Success

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 3:00 PM PST

Description: Without solid, performance-based metrics, there's no way to measure the success and ROI of your video content. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach. Panelists in this Online Video Platform Summit session will demonstrate video metrics in action and talk about what to measure, how to measure it, and how to turn those measurements into actionable business intelligence.

Moderator: Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo Publishing

Mike Newman, CEO, Accordent Technologies

Brian Shin, Founder & CEO, Visible Measures

Ben Weinberger, CEO, Digitalsmiths

Brett Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO, TubeMogul

In regards to the future of video analytics, Brian Shin noted a tremendous shift in the analytics space in general. He said,

"I think that the integration of analytics into everything that we do, the concept of web analytics will go away and I think you'll have just a unified analytic platform that's just tracking events."

Mike Newman noted that for his enterprise customers it's about business intelligence. There are always "bean counters" and finance managers that want to see objective data, metrics, tracking and discipline.

"Interestingly, the evolution we have seen is from starting with, "We want to create content" to "How are going to define success and how are we going to measure success?" and without those things in place we're not even going to start."

Ben Weinberger outlined the five things that you need to know about your target viewer to effectively monetize video. He maintained that you don't need to know who they are since that information is too specific and overwhelming. He expanded on these key points:

"What you do need to know is (1) what group they belong to, the basic demographic information (2) what is the viewing behavior of that group (3) when they are viewing, what is the appetite for consuming advertising (4) what platform are they on, since you're going to optimize the viewing experience for them (5) if you have all that information, what bucket are you putting them in, in the traditional ad sense. So that they're effectively being targeted with the right kind of ads."

Brett Wilson noted that,"the hardest part of online video is getting your video watched," and that approximately 50% of all the videos on YouTube have under 500 views and there's only .33% that have over 1 million views. He cited a Tubemogul research study that looked at how much a typical online video is watched, which found that most viewers click away from the video after the first minute.

"I think one thing we'd all agree on is that a metric we would all like to see become more standard is viewed minutes. So right along side a view you'd see how long they actually watched."

A few key take-aways from the panel were, that not all video campaigns are the same so figure out the specific ROI each of your campaigns, focus on reach rather than views and don't assume you've isolated the key metric. Key data can come from somewhere you weren't even trying to measure.

Related @ovpsummit Tweets:

OVP Summit analytics panel session, "Measuring Success" with @visiblemeasures @DsmithsBen @tubemogul @Accordent_Tech #ovps093:12 PM Nov 18th, 2009 from web

See my related post for detailed bios of each panelist - Online Video Platform Summit Analytics Panel - Measuring Success
Also, see these Red Carpet interviews with Brett Wilson, Brian Shin and Ben Weinberger

Monday, November 23, 2009

Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet Interview - Brett Wilson, TubeMogul

In this Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet Interview, Jose Castillo of thinkJose.com sits down with Brett Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO of TubeMogul. Brett leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul, a free online video distribution and analytics service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. TubeMogul's free beta service has been live since November of 2006, and in January 2008, TubeMogul announced the launch of its Premium Products, which include a host of new professional features.

TubeMogul was founded in 2006 by Brett and a handful of online video buffs who met while in graduate school and won the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition. TubeMogul's objective from the start has been to empower online video producers, advertisers and the online video industry by providing publishing tools and insightful, easy to interpret analytics.

Through its acquisition of Illumenix in October 2008, TubeMogul is also able to offer rich engagement and performance metrics to video sharing sites, content creators and advertisers. Earlier this year, TubeMogul launched TubeMogul 2.0 which offered video publishers for the first time, access to a single, standardized set of rich, census-based analytics measuring far beyond the metric of video “views,” including per-second audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, audience geography and much more.

Brett says TubeMogul has a few competitors on the syndication side that doesn't provide analytics and have a host of competitors on the analytics side but doesn't have the tools to help with campaigns. TubeMogul will soon be offering a feed-based solution that will launch later this year which will offer content owners greater hyper-syndication tools.

Brett was on two panels sessions at both Streaming Media West and the Online Video Platform Summit. The Streaming Media West session, Successful Content Syndication and Aggregation Strategies, was moderated by Jim Louderback, CEO, Revision3. Other panelists included Vanessa Pappas, Director, Audience and Strategic Partnerships, Next New Networks, Tom Gorke, VP, Digital Distribution, MTV Networks, Brandon White, Interactive Manager, FUNimation Entertainment who discussed the new ways content owners and site developers are aggregating content and distributing it on the web. They talked about the shift from super-syndication (shotgun approach to distribution) to hyper-syndication which is more of an audience play reaching out to social sites, blogs and other sites that will give you a niche audience for your content within a specific vertical.

Brett also spoke on the Measuring Success panel session at the Online Video Platform Summit which was moderated by Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo Publishing and included Mike Newman, CEO, Accordent Technologies, Brian Shin, Founder & CEO, Visible Measures and Ben Weinberger, CEO & Co-Founder, Digitalsmiths.

Look for videos of both of those sessions coming soon as well more Red Carpet interviews on Streaming Media TV.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Online Video Platform Summit Analytics Panel - Measuring Success

Without solid, performance-based metrics, there's no way to measure the success and ROI of your video content. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach. Panelists in this Online Video Platform Summit session will demonstrate video metrics in action and talk about what to measure, how to measure it, and how to turn those measurements into actionable business intelligence.

Measuring Success
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 3:00 PM PST

Moderator

Jan Ozer
Principal
Doceo Publishing

Jan Ozer is a digital video expert and frequent contributor to Information Today, Inc.’s magazines, including Streaming Media and EventDV. Jan is the owner of Doceo Publishing, and has written more than 10 books related to the video world and is considered an expert in the field of video and compression techniques. In 1995, Jan published his first book, Video Compression for Multimedia with Academic Press, followed by Publishing Digital Video in 1997 for the same publisher. Since then, Jan has taught video production seminars in the U.S. and abroad, both on a private consulting basis and for various academic institutions, most recently the University of Wisconsin. Jan continues to write for PC Magazine, EventDV, and Streaming Media, and has published an additional eight books for Peachpit Press and PC Magazine Guide to Digital Video, published by John Wiley. Ozer's most recent instructional title is Critical Skills for Streaming Producers, published with Streaming Media, and is a mixed media tutorial, delivered in PDF format on DVD. If you're looking for more current articles from Jan Ozer, check out Streaming Learning Center.com.

Speakers

Mike Newman
CEO
Accordent Technologies

As co-founder and CEO of Accordent Technologies, Mike Newman has led the company’s growth and development from a start-up software company to an enterprise internet communications solutions provider with thousands of tier-1 enterprise, education and government clients worldwide. Mike is a frequent speaker at industry trade shows and conferences and is widely respected in the streaming industry for his expertise in webcasting technologies and business models.

Brian Shin
Founder & CEO
Visible Measures

Brian Shin is the founder and CEO of Visible Measures. Brian has co-founded several successful Internet software companies, including web-based collaboration technology vendor Creative Aspects, which was acquired by Medsite Inc. (now WebMD); and The Cambridge Intelligence Agency, a Web-based e-mail response management solution provider that was acquired by marketing services company MSGi. Brian also co-founded technology strategy consulting firm Infraweb, Inc., where he served as President, and was an early member of the team at Allaire Corp. which went public in 1999 and was subsequently acquired by Macromedia.

Brian enjoys trying new foods with his wife, occassionally updates Twitter and his blog, holds an undergraduate degree from Tufts University, and earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management as part of the dual-degree Harvard-MIT Biomedical Enterprise Program.

Ben Weinberger
CEO & Co-Founder
Digitalsmiths

Ben Weinberger co-founded Digitalsmiths on a single premise—the internet would revolutionize the movie, television and entertainment industry, driving a new level of innovation that would forever change consumer behavior. This pioneering approach has helped the company transform an idea into a reality and a vision into a thriving and fast-growing business. The company’s flagship product, Digitalsmiths VideoSense, the industry’s leading studio-grade, video monetization solution, has propelled Digitalsmiths to the forefront of multi-screen metadata management, media analysis and digital content publishing technologies. Ben graduated with honors from Southern Illinois University, and serves on its board of directors for the Honors Program. He also serves as a member of the Digitalsmiths’ board of directors.

Brett Wilson
Co-Founder & CEO
TubeMogul

Brett Wilson leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first 3 years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable ecommerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired. He is also married and has two beautiful children. Brett received his M.B.A. from UC Berkeley.

Follow OVP Summit (ovpsummit) on Twitter
hashtag #ovps09

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

eMarketer Report Says Online Video Coming Into Focus, 188 Million US Viewers by 2013

In a new report analyzing the upward trajectory of online video consumption, eMarketer projects that there will be 144 million online video viewers in the US this year, growing to 188 million viewers in 2013. The report, Video Content: A Premium Opportunity, points out that audience levels and stream counts are rising, the demographic range of the viewing population is expanding and the content mix is evolving from short, snack-type clips to long-form content such as TV shows and feature films. As the medium matures so do the monetization models but for consumers it's unlikely that they would be willing to ever pay for the bulk of it. It's more likely that in the future Hulu and YouTube would move to a pay-per-view or download model for premium content.

Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the report said,

“Most video inventory is funded through ad support. This includes user-generated content, news clips, humor videos, TV shows and special events such as the Olympics. On the other side of the coin, feature films and mainstream sports content continue to be monetized through subscriptions and download fees.”

Mr. Verna noted that the bulk of the current video inventory is discoverable through social networks, blogs, microblogs, e-mail and other social platforms which TubeMogul confirmed earlier this year. That creates the perfect storm for a viral video hit and opens up opportunities for content distributors and marketers. Video quality is getting better too he added saying that,

“Gone are the days when the space was dominated by short user-generated clips aimed primarily at a collegiate crowd. Now, video offerings cater to all age groups and interests, from teenage sports buffs to news junkies to retirees who enjoy classic movies.”

Online video has come a long way from its early days and the rise of YouTube and other web portals, free and premium destinations fueled that growth. Knowledge Networks found that from 2006 to 2008, the percentages of US Internet users across every age group who accessed full-length TV shows grew by significant margins.

Gavin O'Malley from Mediapost added that,

"A number of trends will keep online video on an aggressive growth trajectory in the coming years. These include mobile distribution through smartphones and next-generation networks; HD streaming and other quality enhancements; better integration among PCs, digital cable boxes and TVs; and interactivity features that work better online than on TV."

For those following the online video industry it should come as no surprise that the growth is exploding, as it was just last month that Cisco announced the results of their Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast and Methodology, 2008-2013 which states that by 2013 video will be 90 percent of consumer IP traffic and 64 percent of mobile. More evidence came earlier in the year when The Nielsen Company reported that viewing of video on television, Internet and mobile devices - the Three Screens - continues to increase and has reached new heights. John Burbank of the Nielsen Company highlights the findings of their A2/M2 Three Screen Report in this video.

Chris Albrecht though suggested that as studios and cable operators make their moves to put their premium content behind subscription walls,

"It’s possible that could actually reduce consumption. Between Time Warner’s TV Everywhere, Comcast OnDemand Online, Netflix, and a supposed Disney subscription service, premium content could choke off its audience before it’s fully realized."

That's unlikely though to stop the continued growth since the millions of online viewers consume video for free through blogs, search engines, social networks and video destination sites.

Related:

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Veeple and TubeMogul Announce Distribution and Syndication Agreement

Iin another strategic partnership Veeple has announced an agreement with TubeMogul that will offer greater distribution and syndication choices for marketers, agencies and social media leaders using Veeple's Interactive Online Video (IOV) platform. The agreement allows Veeple customers the use of TubeMogul’s signature “Load and Track” service which gives users the capability to upload videos once and automatically deploy them with as many of the top video sharing sites as they want, within the users’ specified accounts. TubeMogul, in turn, will recommend Veeple as one of TubeMogul’s three primary online video platform providers. Veeple and TubeMogul expect to deliver the new capabilities by the end of July.

According to Brett Wilson, TubeMogul CEO and co-founder, “Veeple understands the needs of today’s marketer who is responsible for telling a compelling story while building a well-respected brand through the powerful tool of online video. TubeMogul is pleased to enhance Veeple’s service offering through the ability to help increase the distribution of the interactive videos that Veeple’s customers are creating.”

I asked Scott Broomfield, Veeple CEO and co-founder, about how the new partnership evolved and he said that TubeMogul found them first as their customers began to ask them about online video platforms. Veeple also saw the need for wider distribution and syndication is a key element, along with embed, url, RSS, and video SEO. Interactive works if the destination site allows embed, url or metadata tracking. This means for sites like Ning or Wordpress, but not for YouTube or Metacafe. Over time Veeple plans to add an 'onion skin' that will ride along with the InPlay API that will make everything interactive.

Broomfield added that, “Veeple is all about enhancing, engaging and measuring online video campaigns. Our customers expect not only simplicity in our service but also a platform that quickly evolves with their needs. As we evolve the Veeple service we knew that syndication was a top priority for our customers who are increasingly adding online video to their marketing mix.”

To see interactive video in action see Veeple's customer web sites

Follow Veeple and TubeMogul on Twitter

About Veeple
Veeple is the leader in simple, Interactive Online Video (IOV) solutions for marketers looking to deepen customer engagement through online video. With Veeple's cloud-computing solution people have easy access to use interactivity, full content management for multiple clients, branded player video delivery and full clickable analytics. Veeple has the solution for successful online video campaigns. Veeple is a private company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For additional information go to www.veeple.com/solutions.php

About TubeMogul
TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers
large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web's top video sharing sites. TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched. TubeMogul offers tracking far beyond the traditional metric of video "views." TubeMogul InPlay, which can be activated within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance -- all in real-time.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

TubeMogul 2.0 Democratizes Online Video Analytics, Sets New Standard for Viewing Metrics

Leading web video distribution and analytics company TubeMogul recently launched TubeMogul 2.0 which "democratizes video metrics" by providing free video tracking capabilities that were once exclusive only to large media companies and advertisers. TubeMogul's powerful InPlay technology, incorporated into their platform from their acquisition of video analytics firm Illumenix, was previously only available to sites hosting their own video, but is now integrated on 15 of the Web's top video sharing sites, including Brightcove, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, blip.tv, Break.com, Howcast, eBaum’s World, Graspr, GrindTV, Sclipo, Webcastr, Viddler, 5min, Streetfire.net and Sevenload -- with more to come soon. TubeMogul says they are in talks with YouTube, who along with Hulu are not among the sites included.

So for the first time ever, video publishers can gain access to a single, standardized set of rich, census-based analytics that can be seen and compared in a single dashboard, aggregating data from the Web's top video sites, unlocking rich, standardized data measuring far beyond the metric of video “views,” including per-second audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, audience geography and much more. TubeMogul hopes that this public, census-based data will democratize viewing behavior online far more than the simple metric of video “views,” which are counted on most sites as soon as a video stream starts.

These metrics will be free to most of its 85,000 users but commercial sites and ad agencies will have to pay. As TubeMogul indicates, "In a world where panel-based data can yield such wildly divergent numbers, it’s important to have an independent, census-based standard, which we hope to become."

Liz Gaines points out that a lack of standard measurement has led to conflicting reports and in light of the recent controversy surrounding the war of numbers between Nielsen and Hulu and the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence's Video Consumer Mapping Study report this past week which stated that online video usage is "vastly overstated" it's clear that TubeMogul has taken a huge step to lead the effort towards standardization.

I spoke with Mark Rotblat, VP of Sales and Marketing for TubeMogul back in March and he gave me the scoop on the upcoming release of TubeMogul 2.0. Mark said that TubeMogul 2.0 was always part of their plan and their acquisition on Illumenix helped them acheive their goal of providing a powerful analytics suite for their worldwide customer base. Mark also talked about TubeMogul Marketplace and said that more than anything TubeMogul is a promotion platform.

Tim Street shared his 3 reasons why he hates TubeMogul 2.0 and recorded a video with Brett Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of TubeMogul who describes the exciting news and what it means for independent producers. "In the industry, this level of data was previously only available to large advertisers and top video destinations, and usually only for their own site," comments Brett. "We now track this type of data globally and are giving it away."

Michael Greer, VP of Product Development at The Onion, which beta-tested the product says that TubeMogul 2.0, "has allowed us to understand our audience better, as well as to more precisely monitor our business needs." Additionally, Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3, who has been a strong advocate for honesty and transparency in online video metrics also beta-tested the product, echoed similar feedback, "Knowing which shows are the most engaging to viewers is helpful in selling advertising and devoting resources."

About TubeMogul

TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers
large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web's top video sharing sites. TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched. TubeMogul offers tracking far beyond the traditional metric of video "views." TubeMogul InPlay, which can be activated within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance -- all in real-time.

For more information about TubeMogul, contact:

David Burch
david@tubemogul.com
+1 510 653 0501

Upcoming on Klessblog, Interviews with Online Video Entrepreneurs

What I love about writing this blog is that I get to meet new people and learn all about their companies, the products and services they offer and their technology innovations that help shape the online video industry. The people I've met are online video executives and industry thought leaders who run well-funded and established companies or start-ups. Whether they are the CEO, SVP, VP or chief marketing officer, each are entrepreneurs who have their own unique vision to monetize online video.

If blogging was my full-time job I could probably publish content daily but since it's not I usually fall behind on getting the interviews published in a timely manner. As a result I have a number of blog posts in progress and I thought I'd take a moment to let you all know what's upcoming on this blog.

Adap.tv - VP of Marketing Dakota Sullivan talks about the upgraded OneSource 2.0 ad management platform
Channels.com - CEO Sean Doherty discusses his RSS video site which launched last September '08
Kodak - CMO Jeffrey Hazlett describes Kodak's support of web television through their sponsorship of the Streamy Awards
Ooyala - CEO Bismarck Lepe and CTO Sean Knapp talk about Ooyala's value proposition and VaaS (Video as a Service) and a demo by Alec Holub Technical Lead of Ooyala's interactive video
Sorenson Media - CEO Peter Csathy talks about his new job and his plans for the global leader in video encoding and compression applications
The Feedroom - Matt DeLoca, SVP of Sales discusses the rapid adoption they are seeing at the corporate level for online video advertising and communications and updates The Feedroom's web site and business focus
TubeMogul - Mark Rotblat, VP of Business Development talks about TubeMogul Inplay, online video analytics and distribution
WonderHowTo - a conversation with CEO Stephen Chao about his how-to video site

I'm also working on an analysis of the recent Streaming Media Online Video Roundtable that featured Brightcove, Kaltura, Ooyala and VMIX and a report on the Web Video Leadership Forum Breakfast I attended earlier this month in San Francisco. Look for these blog posts in the coming weeks.

Many thanks, and stay tuned.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

TubeMogul Looks to Grow and Standardize its Online Video Analytics with $3 Million in Series A Funding from Trinity Ventures

TubeMogul, online video's most popular distribution and analytics service, announced last week it has received $3 million in Series A funding from Trinity Ventures. "We invested in TubeMogul because we saw the potential of a viable business model, a solid product with a growing customer base at this early phase. However, it is my relationship with the executive team that that reminds me why I love what I do, helping passionate entrepreneurs fundamentally change an industry,” said General Partner from Trinity Ventures Ajay Chopra, who will join TubeMogul’s board. "TubeMogul has the team, vision and product to drive a fundamental change in the way online video is monetized.”

The funding will be used to fast-forward growth of TubeMogul's video distribution platform and accelerate standardization of its online video analytics. With over 75,000 users and hundreds of millions of streams tracked, TubeMogul solidifies its position at the nexus of online video.

Last week at the Future of Television conference Tim Street got an on camera interview with Brett Wilson, TubeMogul CEO and co-founder about the investment and some new features coming down the pike.

"We are thrilled to be partnering with a world-class venture firm like Trinity Ventures whose reputation as a value added partner is well known among entrepreneurs,.” Brett said, "To have Ajay on our board who was also a successful entrepreneur and passionate about winning this is space is invaluable."

With TubeMogul, users upload videos once and TubeMogul deploys them to as many of the top video sharing sites the producer chooses. TubeMogul's integrated analytics then provide a single source of metrics on where, when, and how often the videos are viewed. TubeMogul's free beta service has been live since November of 2006. In January 2008, TubeMogul announced the launch of its Premium Products, which include a host of new professional features.

Through its acquisition of Illumenix in October 2008, TubeMogul is also able to offer rich engagement and performance metrics through InPlay, its Flash-based analytics service. Integrating within minutes with any Flash video player, InPlay tracks audience statistics and user interaction in real time. TubeMogul also offers a marketplace to connect online video producers and advertisers and a promotion service for new viral campaigns, video ads or web series.

TubeMogul is on track to be cash-flow positive by the fourth quarter of 2009. "Since the company’s founding, TubeMogul has hit every single one of its revenue targets, and this one should be no different," said Dave Toth, co-founder of NetRatings and a TubeMogul board member and early investor. Other early investors include Knight's Bridge Capital Partners.

I recently visited the TubeMogul headquarters in Emeryville, California and met with Brett and the TubeMogul team. I had a great conversation with Mark Rotblat, VP of Business Development about online video distribution, analytics, TubeMogul’s InPlay technology and more. Look for that video later in the week.

Congratulations to Brett, John, Mark, David, Eugene and everyone at TubeMogul!

About Trinity Ventures
Founded in 1986, Trinity Ventures, a boutique firm, partners with passionate entrepreneurs to transform revolutionary ideas into reality. With over $1.5 billion under management, Trinity Ventures was founded on the principle of personal engagement and mutual respect with the entrepreneurs we fund. Trinity Ventures focuses on early stage technology ventures with a particular emphasis on digital media, Internet services, mobility, security and software markets.

About TubeMogul
TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web's top video sharing sites. TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched. TubeMogul offers tracking far beyond the traditional metric of video "views." TubeMogul InPlay, which can be activated within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance -- all in real-time.

For more information about TubeMogul, contact:
David Burch
david@tubemogul.com
+1 510 653 0501

Related:

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Tubemogul Releases Industry Report: Google and Social Networks Top Referrals Sites for Online Video

Today in an online video research report, online video analytics and distribution company Tubemogul asked, "How do people discover videos online?" Thanks to the analytics available from their recent acquisition of TubeMogul InPlay, which tracks rich video statistics, they were able to answer that question. The report was culled from a two-month sample of 35,528,837 inbound URLs from six top top video sites which they were not able to disclose. It's not surprising that Google is the top referral site followed by Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace and Digg as the top five. "Blogs and direct navigation to video sites, mostly. Also: social networks refer more views than video search engines."

Site	Share of Video Referrals
google	7.19%
yahoo	2.12%
facebook	1.93%
myspace	1.55%
digg	1.49%
stumbleupon	1.13%
msn/live	0.92%
blogspot	0.78%
aol	0.43%
reddit	0.29%
truveo	0.22%
flurl	0.21%
blinkx	0.19%
ask	0.19%
comcast	0.16%
twitter	0.15%
wordpress	0.15%
cnn	0.12%
wikipedia	0.11%
ovguide	0.06%

The report broke the data down the referral traffic into the following categories:

Search engines: 11.18%
Social networks: 3.66%
Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%
Video search engines: 0.63%
Email/IM: 0.05%
Everything else (almost all blogs, from the thousands we scanned): 80.88% of all referred traffic

Xavier Vespa of HyveUp.tv also wrote about the report on the HyveUp blog and offered this analysis of the report, "In other words, there isn't one definitive source that brings views. This actually makes a lot of sense: the myth of the skateboarding cat makes all the marketers drool, and they all want to replicate the same virality for their own company/client. Truth is that the real power of online video is the accessibility/affordability we have never seen before in the media space (a Youtube account is free, a blog is free, a FlipCam HD is $200). Popularity is not a given."

In related news, this past week white-label video management and publishing company thePlatform announced an “advantage” pricing program to lower total costs of running a broadband video business which gave customers of thePlatform's media management and publishing system a 10 percent or greater discount on services such as advertising, reporting and analytics, and online community creation from a select group of partners which included TubeMogul InPlay Analytics and Syndication.

Tubemogul Marketing Manager David Burch said this about the new partnership with thePlatform and Tubemogul, "What's really unprecedented about this is that it lets video producers compare rich viewership statistics from thePlatform's player on their own site site side-by-side with their syndicated stats from sites like YouTube. From our perspective, this deal expands our base of potential customers. We can now essentially turn on a rich analytics and syndication plugin within seconds for anyone using thePlatform, which is an expanding list."

For more on Tubemogul Inplay, here's an informational PDF, if interested.

This HyveUp.tv video features David Burch who provides an overview of Tubemogul analytics and distribution offerings.

Also, a big congratulations to Tubemogul for being named an AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 Winner. TubeMogul and the other OnMedia 100 winners including Mixpo were recognized at the OnMedia 100 Conference last week.

About TubeMogul
TubeMogul is the first online video analytics and distribution company serving publishers large and small who need independent information about video performance on the Internet and automated upload to the Web's top video sharing sites. TubeMogul's analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what's hot and what's not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends. For sites that host their own video, TubeMogul offers tracking far beyond the traditional metric of video "views." TubeMogul InPlay, which can be set up in any Flash video player within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance -- all in real-time.

Larry Kless' Weblog