Why Pay-TV Providers Need To Access New Formats

Recent research says the rampant adoption of new viewing formats, including video on demand (VoD), and viewing on tablets and smartphones, by consumers will cause a much as $22 billion (30 percent) of the U.S. pay-TV advertising market to shift to new formats by 2016. 

Western Europe will see similar shifts, while the rest of world will lag in its transition of advertising dollars to new formats.

According to Sam Rosen, senior analyst/digital home at ABI Research, “A shift is already underway in the television advertising marketplace from linear ads inserted by a 24-hour schedule to advanced technologies that will increase the effectiveness of advertisers’ spending. New technologies are achieving scale within broadcasters’ advertising systems, notably audience measurement and tracking; targeted advertising; interactive advertising; VoD and multi-screen advertising; and other techniques, including companion devices.”

Many of the companies leading the charge in the advanced advertising ecosystem are yet to become household names; rather, they are specialists as new ad formats develop. They include Canoe Ventures (interactive ads), BlackArrow (VoD ads), This Technology (dynamic ad platform), INVIDI and Visible World (targeted or addressable ads).

Numerous technology components are required to deliver new ad formats.  The vendor ecosystem will rapidly expand to addresses these opportunities, including:

>> Such advertising-specific hardware and software systems as ad servers, ad splicers, ad decision systems, and traffic and billing systems;
>> Advertising-specific components of set-top box middleware like measurement and reporting tools, interactive stacks and interactive applications; and
>> Advertising-specific VoD software.

Taking advantage of this knowledge is Germany-based Access Co. Ltd., a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile, beyond-PC and digital TV markets, which says it will unveil a social-video monetization platform called ACCESSMyTV at next week’s CES in Las Vegas.

The company describes ACCESSMyTV as “an open, multi-screen social video platform for connected devices that Access says allows for the monetization of free and premium Web content, games and apps. The solution leverages the consumption of web video to create new revenue opportunities for content providers, consumer electronics (CE) device manufacturers and service providers.”

Here’s how it works: ACCESSMyTV creates consumer engagement and a viral marketing dynamic through the creation of personalized Web video channels that can be shared with friends and family via such social networks as Facebook and Twitter. This in turn enables ACCESSMyTV to support highly targeted advertising. The platform includes a multi-currency, multi-platform, PCI-compliant billing engine to allow secure purchases by from any provider with a single four-digit PIN; and premium content providers can create subscription, bundled or pay-per-view content offerings and branded destinations that can be accessed via the ACCESSMyTV UI or application.

The ACCESSMyTV platform will be offered as a white-label service that can be privately branded and deployed globally on any connected CE device.