End-to-end platforms are back in style (unless you’re Google, of course, with antitrust regulators breathing down your neck).
On Wednesday, video monetization platforms Connatix and JW Player announced plans to merge into a new entity called JWP Connatix. That’s just a placeholder name, though; there’s a rebrand in the works.
The merger was first rumored in July. But the two companies have been kicking each other’s tires for more than a year, JW Player Co-Founder and CEO Dave Otten told AdExchanger.
Otten, who declined to share a deal price, will become CEO of JWP Connatix, while Connatix CEO David Kashak transitions into the chairman role.
The rationale behind the merger is to capitalize on a trio of trends: the inexorable shift from linear to streaming, the publisher imperative to monetize and advertisers demanding transparency and higher-quality inventory.
“We believe we can bring a platform business to video,” Otten said, “which is something that, candidly, the market needs.”
The end-to-end upsell opportunity
Connatix and JW Player have complementary technologies, Otten said.
JW Player, which is embedded on thousands of websites, has tech for ingesting, rendering and monetizing video content, and Connatix has a video ad server, supply-side platform and contextual ad platform.
The workflow/ad tech combo makes sense, he said, because it allows advertisers, online publishers, broadcasters and streamers to manage ad delivery from the same place they manage their monetization, including live video and on demand.
JWP Connatix can upsell Connatix customers on workflow tech and JW Player customers on more robust video advertising.
Vizio is a good example.
JW Player powers the ad delivery for WatchFree+, Vizio’s streaming service. It’s primarily an infrastructure relationship. But the new company has an opportunity to extend that partnership with the promise of more demand and better monetization through Connatix.
Investing in AI and insights
Together, JW Player and Connatix reach more than 1 billion unique users every month and deliver roughly 30 billion video plays. That translates to around 150,000 years of content streamed every year, Otten said.
All of that consumption generates a lot of information about how people are engaging with video content and the ads within.
Because of its media player, for example, JW Player can see the metadata associated with video content, whether and how the content is being consumed, the number of minutes watched and other contextual signals.
Connatix, meanwhile, can see which ad was delivered at what CPM, where it ran and whether someone actually watched it.
The plan is to invest in AI to use this data for personalization, determining the appropriate ad load and maximizing yield for publishers, Otten said.
“I think this is the most underrated part of this transaction, and it’s something we’ll spend a good chunk of investment on,” he said. “It’ll probably be the most important part we need for our success in the future.”
Buying into commerce
JWP Connatix also has its eye on offering video monetization opportunities beyond advertising.
Early last year, JW Player bought a subscription enablement and identity management company called InPlayer that helps video publishers implement paywalls and handle payments.
But commerce is “what’s really the third leg of the stool here, and it’s another big investment area for us,” Otten said, pointing to the growth of live shopping in markets outside of the US.
The best way for publishers to make money, though, is to take a hybrid approach to monetization.
“What we really want to do here,” he said, “is to help publishers figure out the right mix for them, whatever it is, so they can make the most revenue possible.”
Up next
In addition to the rebrand coming next year, JWP Connatix will spend the next six months executing on its integration plan, including merging the two product and engineering teams as a prelude to merging the products themselves.
The sales, marketing and services teams are already working together and reaching out to publishers to talk up the new combined offering.
There will be a few redundancies, though. Otten declined to share numbers, but he did say a small number of people with overlapping skill sets will be let go from across the company. JWP Connatix’s total headcount will end up somewhere between 350 and 400 people.
According to Otten, both companies are profitable.
LLR Partners, the private equity firm that led JW Player’s Series E round in 2021, and Court Square Capital Partners, which took a controlling stake in Connatix at around the same time, both backed the merger and support the deal, Otten said.
But, hey, let’s not end on a mundane detail.
Here’s a fun fact: JW Player was YouTube’s original video player before the Google acquisition.
And here’s one more: The “JW” in “JW Player” stands for Jeroen Wijering, the Dutch software engineer – and later a co-founder of JW Player the company – who developed the first version of JW Player’s video player technology back in 2005.
