Pluto TV is the anti-Netflix. It’s free and ad-supported. Users scroll through channels and watch whatever show is already playing, replicating the channel surfing that’s a hallmark of old-fashioned TV watching. Viacom spent $340 million in cash to acquire Pluto TV in January, validating the concept and its audience. The deal felt like “Cinderella getting […]
Disney closed its $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox on Wednesday, more than a year after it signed a definitive agreement to acquire the entertainment company, which at the time was going to cost $52.4 billion. Disney’s initial agreement in December 2017 turned out to be less definitive than the term implies. Comcast stepped […]
FreeWheel, the Comcast-owned video ad tech company, hosted its first television upfront on Wednesday and is mounting a campaign to expand its buy-side business. The marketer outreach centers on new attribution features and the launch of FreeWheel Media, which formalizes its buy-side accounts and ad-serving business into a cohesive offering, CRO Brian Wallach told AdExchanger. […]
Traditional broadcasters might soon bridge linear and digital ad buying. But first, baby steps. Before anyone reaches that holy grail, it helps if the ad inventory is trafficked through the same system. So in the spirit of unification, the video ad server FreeWheel said Wednesday that it will handle decisioning for NBCUniversal’s digital and linear […]
The Walt Disney Company has found its happily ever after with Google, not Comcast-owned FreeWheel. After months of speculation, Google said in a blog post that Disney would implement its ad platform across its brands, including Disney, ABC, ESPN, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. The relationship will span all of Disney’s video and display inventory. […]
FreeWheel released the next generation of its ad exchange on Tuesday. The Comcast-owned ad server built off its legacy ad exchange, enhanced by technology from its acquisition of StickyAds in 2016, for its updated ad product suite, DRIVE. The new exchange is designed to let marketers more easily buy over-the-top (OTT), set-top box video on […]
See you later, siloed views. Data science and technology company 4C is hoping its integrations with Freewheel, Telaria and SpotX, unveiled Tuesday, will streamline the buying of over-the-top (OTT) and linear inventory. These partnerships make more OTT and linear inventory accessible within 4C’s platform, Scope, a dashboard that lets ad buyers plan, purchase and measure […]
FreeWheel and Operative said Monday that they have partnered on an initiative called “Premium at Scale,” which lets advertisers buy digital and addressable TV inventory in one place. NBCU is the first media brand to sign on. Traditionally, ad sales on linear TV and digital have been very separate processes with very different measurements. Since […]
Viacom on Monday formed a multi-year agreement with Comcast’s advanced ads business, FreeWheel, to expand its use of the tech platform. Previously, Viacom used FreeWheel to power digital ad decisioning, but now, it will also use FreeWheel’s operating system to manage yield and grow revenue across live TV, set-top box and video-on-demand inventory. In addition, […]
Amazon wants to own a greater chunk of the video supply chain. Its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, released a suite of video tools called AWS Elemental Media Services on Monday, designed to help live and on-demand video content providers manage workflow. It is available only as a managed service for now. “We’re trying to […]
The French video platform Dailymotion is a fraction of Google’s size – YouTube’s 1.5 billion-plus monthly viewers dwarf Dailymotion’s 300 million. But scale isn’t stopping the company from repositioning its platform to woo US advertisers and publishers from the dominant video-sharing site. Breaking into a video market ruled by streaming video services such as Netflix […]
In its short, two-year lifespan, FuboTV, a streaming video service specializing in live sports content, has mostly monetized through paid subscriptions. But after raising a $55 million Series C round in June – and pushing to grow subscribers for its new skinny bundle, Fubo Premier – it’s turned its attention to its tech stack. FuboTV […]
Dish’s streaming TV service, Sling TV, which reportedly topped 1 million subscribers last fall, is now focused on monetizing its audience cross-platform. Connecting the pipes for programmatic monetization across Sling TV, Dish and Dish Anywhere didn’t happen overnight, but Adam Lowy, GM of advanced TV, said years of work are paying off. Dish has been “quietly […]
Comcast’s acquisition of French video supply-side platform StickyAds on Monday will give its video ad tech division a serious boost. Comcast’s video ad server FreeWheel will be able to streamline the way big TV broadcasters allocate inventory by embedding StickyAds’ private exchange tech into its own video ad server. The capability will let FreeWheel’s TV […]
Updated with comment from FreeWheel’s CEO. Comcast has acquired StickyAds.tv, a French video ad tech startup focused on publishers. Re/code first reported the news Sunday night, and Comcast confirmed it Monday morning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Business Insider claimed the deal was an all-cash transaction and worth “at least $100 million.” […]
True[X], the video ad platform Fox acquired last December, partnered Tuesday with Comcast’s TV ad-serving platform FreeWheel to bring more “engagement-based” video ads to broadcasters. The deal will give True[X] greater sell-in among FreeWheel’s base of media and entertainment brands, which include NBCUniversal, Turner Broadcasting, Viacom, Sky, DirecTV and ABC. True[X] creates interactive video ad […]
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 […]
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,” […]
As consumers cut cords and stream more video, advertisers are tightening their purse strings at the TV upfronts. But content owners shouldn’t fear too much. They aren’t losing their audiences, just watching them transition to IP-based connections. In 2014, broadcasters experienced 67% growth in digital video ad views for shows in their first season, according […]
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, […]
It’s hard to bucket Ooyala. The seven-year-old company, which already dabbles in both video monetization and digital content management, wants to be for TV “what Cisco is to network computing.” While Ooyala’s a full-service consultancy that helps traditional networks migrate to the cloud, it also has a software business. The Ooyala Platform hooks up to […]
Video ad platform BrightRoll is looking long-term. In the words of Tod Sacerdoti, its founder and CEO, “we’ve been focused on building an alternative stack to Google for a long time.” And BrightRoll’s got just the man to do it. Barely a day after it brought on DoubleClick vet Bruce Falck as COO to scale […]
Hulu, Condé Nast Entertainment and other members of the digital video and television industry laid out their measurement and monetization challenges on Wednesday at VideoNuze’s Online Video Advertising Summit. Brands and publishers are well aware of the growing popularity of applying programmatic to direct buys. Hulu for instance has reportedly beta-tested a programmatic exchange for more […]
Following its glitzy, star-studded digital NewFront in April, AOL got down to business. It closed in on marketing attribution vendor Convertro the same day Google grabbed pure-play competitor Adometry in early May. Then it went shopping again, snapping up TV audience-targeting platform PrecisionDemand. AOL’s acquisitive behavior is not entirely surprising. The company is constructing an […]
This upfront season, a number of media conglomerates flirted with programmatic TV. ABC, for instance, is beta testing data-driven ad sales via video ad server FreeWheel’s new FourFronts Programmatic tool. Likewise, NBCUniversal’s ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino has spoken of opening up portions of premium network inventory to programmatic sales. As marketer and media company interest […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jon Heller, co-CEO and co-founder at FreeWheel. When the MRC recently announced it had lifted its advisory on viewable impressions for display advertising, it noted that enhancements to standards on […]
Amazon’s rumored development of an ad-supported, free streaming media service, reported first by the Wall Street Journal Thursday, but subsequently denied by a company spokesperson, could solidify its relationship with FreeWheel. FreeWheel is a video ad platform used by Comcast and Amazon among others. When Comcast announced its intent to acquire FreeWheel earlier this month, […]
The repercussions of cable heavyweight Comcast’s planned acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and video ad-serving platform FreeWheel are still unknown. One of the biggest questions for ad industry insiders is the extent to which the preexisting relationship between Amazon and FreeWheel, announced in early February, will continue. Although neither Amazon nor FreeWheel have confirmed whether […]
Comcast’s acquisition Thursday of video ad serving platform FreeWheel generated numerous questions, the most common being: What does this mean for the future of Pay TV and digital video ecosystem? Beyond anticipating the convergence of linear TV and digital video ad dollars, there’s still tremendous fragmentation between the worlds of the television operator and programmer, […]
Comcast will acquire video ad-serving platform FreeWheel, the companies confirmed Thursday. The development comes just weeks after the cable giant made public its intent to acquire Time Warner Cable for $42.5 billion. TechCrunch first reported the news, and Re/code confirmed Thursday it’s a done deal and pegged its value at approximately $360 million. That’s roughly in line with […]
