Comcast is losing fewer cable TV customers than it has in the past eight years. That’s no small feat, considering signs of rampant cord cutting inundating the broadcast industry. Comcast added 89,000 customers for video service Xfinity in the fourth quarter, the most of any quarter since 2006, according to its earnings release. Video revenue […]
AudienceXpress, a TV planning and buying platform Comcast acquired last summer via its purchase of parent Visible World, is opening up new programmatic TV tools to several agencies, including Horizon and US International. These tools include a self-serve platform and direct APIs, AudienceXpress’ first major product launch since the Comcast acquisition. The beta will last through the […]
Comcast’s drumbeat of new video services is designed to support content parity across devices rather than to create a cord cutter’s alternative, per se. The cable giant recently rolled out to Xfinity Internet customers a $15-a-month streaming video service appropriately dubbed Stream. Comcast has also flirted with a Web video portal to rival YouTube and […]
BlackArrow, a 13-year-old provider of live and video-on-demand ad products to TV operators, was acquired Monday by Cross MediaWorks, the owner of a national media network called Cadent and the full-service Cross Agency. Although BlackArrow, which has 100 employees, will remain as an independent entity, it will partner with Cross MediaWorks’ other business divisions to […]
ABC, A+E Networks, Comcast and Canoe have initiated a pilot with broadcaster ad server FreeWheel to manage dynamic ad insertion in VOD and set-top box inventory alongside digital ads. Video-on-demand advertising has been relatively slow to take off, namely because of greater need for back-end integration in the underlying TV tech infrastructure. “The benefit for […]
Comcast’s plan to acquire Visible World, announced late Thursday, will deepen its addressable TV prowess, but the real target might be Visible World subsidiary AudienceXpress and its burgeoning buy-side dealings. Comcast’s inheritance of AudienceXpress, which provides provides digital workflow automation for the buying and selling of linear TV ads, could reduce the media giant’s reliance […]
Traditional cable nets are increasingly turning to video demand-side platforms to factor things like digital purchase habits into the TV-planning process. Cadent Network, a national media network that partners with more than 200 multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) and more than 80 cable networks at the local and national level, including Verizon FiOS, Comcast and […]
The $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal is officially kaput. If the merger had materialized, it would have created an unsurpassable media and cable conglomerate with massive audience reach. From day one, regulators were wary about one company controlling too much broadband access, resulting in Comcast terminating the deal Friday. “Today, we move on,” […]
Advanced audience targeting is taking a seat at this year’s TV upfronts. Sellers are lining their arsenals with new products promising cross-platform reach, partially out of necessity. Viewer attention is fragmenting and advertisers want assurance that if they commit an upfront buy, there will be multiple points of execution. It’s unclear the extent to which buyers […]
FreeWheel, a video ad server owned by Comcast and used by broadcasters like ABC and Discovery Communications, has teamed up with digital demand-side platform (DSP) TubeMogul to make premium digital video inventory accessible on a programmatic reserved basis. FreeWheel is arranging several data escrows with TubeMogul and providing access to agencies and marketers like Allstate, […]
