There were 9 billion reasons last year why TV programmers and operators should get on the same page for VOD advertising.
That’s the estimated number of free VOD views in 2012 that weren’t monetized, according to SNL Kagan. In 2011, Rentrak calculated 6.8 billion free VOD plays -- a potential $1 billion opportunity that’s lying fallow, according to the company.
Content deals that encompass VOD advertising are progressing but the big logistical and workflow roadblocks remain the same, says Joni Kinsley, vice president of product development for multiplatform video services provider Avail-TVN. For dynamic ad insertion for VOD to hit scale, “we really do need more ecosystems out there that utilize the standards,” Kinsley says. “Even within the standards there are different ways of interpreting them.”
Avail-TVN is releasing a white paper that provides a suggested blueprint laying out the progression from Nielsen C3 -- in which the ad load is the same as in the original broadcast -- to DAI, and discusses the standards, workflow and technical issues involved. (The paper will be distributed at today’s Multichannel News/B&C Advanced Advertising event in New York, and it’s also available by request from the company.)
With VOD DAI, the entire industry must follow the same metadata processes and define business rules in the same way to efficiently place and track on-demand ads, Kinsley says. Meanwhile, Canoe Ventures (the stripped-down 2.0 version) is standing up its VOD DAI infrastructure this year to enable campaign stewardship across multiple MSOs.
Says Kinsley, “We’re in a crawl phase right now.”
Seems like we’ve been in the “crawl” phase for the last several years. Maybe 2013 is when the baby starts to stand on two legs?
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