VOD Ads Must Remove ‘Friction’ to Hit Scale

NEW YORK — About 30 million U.S. cable homes are currently equipped to view dynamically inserted ads in free videoon- demand, but programmers and operators still have to grease the skids to make it bigger.

“We’re trying to get rid of the friction in the system,” Channing Dawson, senior advisor to Scripps Networks Interactive, said. “But it will take a year or two to get that frictionless. It is going to take another 18 months to figure out what we want to do in this space.”

Scripps announced an agreement last week with Clearleap, which is providing quick-turnaround processing of 100-plus hours of the programmer’s VOD content and IP-based distribution. The goal for Scripps is to get credit under the Nielsen C3 program, which counts on-demand views in a 75-hour window after initial broadcast.

With the evolution of VOD and TV Everywhere, “we realized we needed a more robust form of transport,” Dawson said.

Whereas it used to take Scripps as long as six weeks to process and distribute VOD assets, now it’s been reduced to a few hours, according to Dawson. But Scripps and the industry at large must still develop workflow processes and standards for VOD ads to reach critical mass.