Here’s what happened this week in the world of video advertising. For a weekly summary of industry news and insights, sign up to the weekly Video Round-Up.
Amazon Bought Twitch
Ecommerce giant Amazon bought Twitch, a streaming platform, for $970 million platform, in a move that looks set to present a challenge to YouTube’s dominance at that end of the video market.
Read Full Story on VAN
Read VAN Interview with Twitch’s VP of Revenue (May 2014)
Video Advertising Grows by 76% in Australia
Video advertising in Australia grew to $196m for the financial year ended 30th June 2014, according to a report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) IAB Australia. That growth is being fuelled by FMCG advertisers who spend 18.2 percent of the budgets spent on video. That figure is more than 2.5 times higher than FMCG’s 7.2 percent share of general display advertising.
Microsoft Planning a Chromecast Rival
Microsoft is thought to be planning an HDMI TV dongle designed to compete with Google’s chromecast dongle. According to Windows Phone Daily and Nokia Power User who picked up on an FCC filing , the device will be called ‘Miracast’ and will allow users to mirror whatever is on their phone on to a TV or projector via a wireless connection.
BT Chooses thePlatform
BT chose thePlatform, a white-label video publishing company and independent subsidiary of Comcast, to provide its cloud-based video publishing system for BT TV, and for the support of ‘other video-related initiatives’. Previously, thePlatform served as the back-end video management system for BT’s IP-based TV services, which now serve over one million subscribers in the UK. Under the new multiyear agreement, thePlatform will continue that role for BT’s new YouView+ box, and host the service via thePlatform’s European datacenter.
Minteye say that based on some campaigns in US and Europe, the company found that (figures have not been independently verified and are based on averages):
- Guaranteed brand exposure of at least 5.5 seconds (when consumers “slide to skip”) for the 34% who prefer to skip the ad
- 3.5% of those exposed click-through to the marketer’s landing page vs. a 0.6% click-through rate for typical pre-roll ads (source: TubeMogul, non-mobile, US)
- Over 4X more consumers who “slide to skip” visit the marketer’s landing page than those who let the pre-roll video ad run entirely
Ad of the Week, Skol, ‘Bats’, Saatchi & Saatchi (Sao Paulo)
