With a strong demand for online video, many are looking for more ways to monetize the mobile consumption. One London-based company, Videoplaza, focused on selling ad management platforms for video, has secured a Series B Wednesday. The $12 million was led by Qualcomm Ventures and Innovacom. The company previously received funding from Creandum and Northzone, which also participated in funding the company. This brings VideoPlaza's total funding to $18 million.
Qualcomm already has a deep investment in the chipsets for video, so this investment in online video seems to nurture that focus for the company.
Videoplaza plans to apply the new funds towards expansion as well as research and development. While the TV industry is estimated as a $162 billion industry, and online consumption is a mere fraction of that, many are seeing the tides turn in the direction of online video. As more people cut the cable, many more opportunities to host and advertise online video are popping up.
Videoplaza has grown its international client base and delivered five times more ads in the last year across 17 markets, just as it opened new branches in Berlin, Madrid and Singapore.
The company’s platform utilizes Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, iOS devices, Android, Sony Playstation, Samsung Smart TVs, and closed IPTV environments. By 2013 the company expects more than half of its traffic to come from mobile phone and tablet devices – up substantially from the Q4 of 2011 where 8% of the company’s traffic was generated from non-PC devices.
“We believe in picking sides and are 100% committed to the sell side, empowering broadcasters and publishers to effectively monetize their video inventory across any device or service," said Sorosh Tavakoli, CEO of Videoplaza, in a statement. "This investment allows us to further strengthen our commitment as we increase our R&D efforts and footprint to make sure our clients can build a sustainable business in a fast changing and ever more fragmented world.”
Videoplaza does point out, though, that there are many challenges in it market due to device fragmentation the difficulty in developing monetization policies across multiple platforms.
“With the number of connected devices booming, the New IP-delivered TV is clearly one of the most disruptive markets right now”, Bruno Dizengremel, Partner, Innovacom said in a Videoplaza blog post.
VideoPlaza exists in the same online video advertising space as LiveRail, BlackArrow and DoubleClick.
By 2020, Videoplaza estimates that there will be nearly 10 billion connected mobile devices and media owners making revenue on online video content.
Even months back in July, reports were coming in that a full 71% of American Internet users use video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo, representing an increase of five percentage points over last year, when 66% of users visited such sites.
Interestingly, despite limited broadband reach, 68% of rural Internet users visit these sites, compared to 71% of suburban users and 72% of urban users. The report’s author, Kathleen Moore, notes that the difference between the usage rates of rural, suburban, and urban users is not statistically significant, and it demonstrates that since 2009, rural residents have caught up with urban and suburban residence in online video viewing habits.
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
LiveRail is a unique online video distribution and ad-platform that will revolutionize the way people think about video advertising. Founded in January 2007, LiveRail aims to be the global leader in this exciting new medium.
LiveRail’s takes a ground-breaking approach to video advertising online.
With LiveRail, ads are optional, and advertisers only pay when someone actually chooses to watch their advert.
Whenever someone watches a publisher’s video, LiveRail serve up a series of highly targeted, relevant ad-previews underneath their main content. If at any point a viewer sees an ad the interests them, they can click it, watch the video and return to their main content when finished. This means advertisers only pay when somebody actually chooses to watch their ad, giving more measurable, more effective and more controllable results.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
We've seen the future, and the future is now for on-demand video programming with dynamic, personalized advertising. In the world of viewer-controlled video, where the consumer controls the play, pause, fast-forward and rewind buttons, BlackArrow provides the answer for a dynamic video ad-management that supports broadband, video-on-demand (VOD) and DVR playout.
One with the ability to reach the right audience with a laser-focused message — across any on-demand platform. And rapid-fire reporting to provide powerful "apples-to-apples" analytics across playout environments, helping you evaluate and optimize brand campaigns in entirely new ways.
BlackArrow is your partner on the path to multiplatform monetization. With the new world order of on-demand video comes a corresponding set of new advertising and revenue opportunities.
Our purpose-built system is agile enough to incorporate evolving everything. Which means we make every effort to future-proof our clients by providing them with an open framework that easily integrates new and next-generation ad types, ad models, media players – and everything in between. Underscore that with an inherent scalability to extend ad-management beyond broadband and VOD into the realm of DVRs, mobile devices and personal media players.
The multiplatform experts. We spend our days focused on solving the new ad-management challenges that keep you up at night. Our approach comes from a combined perspective — we've culled an experienced team of executives from across the advertising, network, cable infrastructure and broadband digital media industries to ensure we've laid our foundation properly.
We're proud of our heritage. BlackArrow has a foundation of innovation and thought leadership born out of the DiMA Group and its ID!A Project — a consortium of leading programmers, agencies, advertisers and operators chartered with identifying new on-demand video ad opportunities.
But, we're not the only ones that think this is a great idea — our investors do, too. We are proud to be backed by a blue-chip roster of strategic backers and leading venture capital firms, including Cisco, Comcast Interactive Capital, Intel Corporation, Mayfield Fund and Polaris Venture Partners.
