So you’re asking what does adRise have to do with Foundation Capital and Netflix. Some of you may be asking “who’s Foundation Capital?”. Good question. We’ll answer that shortly. If you’re asking “What’s Netflix?” — well, you might be reading the wrong blog.
After a customary courtship of startup and VC firm between adRise and Foundation Capital, a leading VC firm in Silicon Valley, a VC financing round resulted.
Foundation Capital is a great partner for us because they’ve had great successful with both technology and content-focused companies. The best example is their investment in Netflix, on which they still sit on the board. I’m not sure if the analogy really works, but we’re now sort of in-laws to the content-technology Goliath that is Netflix.
Foundation Capital is an investor in a lot of other great companies that are relevant to us, including Freewheel, which is standard for content owners who want to track their rights and revenue across various digital platforms. And, yes, Freewheel and adRise have done an integration already so content owners can use Freewheel to monitor and schedule their ad campaigns on Connected TVs via adRise’s apps or ad SDKs.
We just released our first White Paper along with a PR for “The Connected TV Market Report”. There’s lots of fun facts about what viewers are doing on CTV devices. What differentiates this data is that it’s based on what we’ve collected (of course non-PII) from actual CTV viewers and CTV apps.
So the men and women holding the bags of money have congregated and dropped some knowledge about advertising on Connected TVs. This is sort of important since content owners typically are interested in the green stuff.
It’s actually interesting for those in the content, advertising or CTV tech world. Not date-worthy, “hey, lets watch this video” interesting, but you get the point.
Also, I should mention Jeremy Lockhorn of Razorfish citing us at the 9:50 mark “adRise, … born on the smart TV world.” Thanks for the shout-out Jeremy.
We’ve officially released “The Bold and the Beautiful” app on Roku. It’s been live for a bit but we thought this is newsworthy for those in the content and advertising world. After all, “B&B” is the world’s most popular soap in the world.
Watch the best cat-fights and back-stabbing hijinks on daytime time, now available for the CTV platforms we support. It’s live on Roku and will be live on other CTV devices in the near future. Here’s a peek at the app:
We know Connected TV platforms and the OEMs behind each TV platform.
We think of them as a familial members, each with their own positives and a few blemishes here and there. After spending thousands of hours on the various TV platforms from building apps and SDKs, submitting apps, working with engineering, business and marketing executives from each of the TV platforms, it’s safe to say we’ve gotten to know what is what.
We’re going to share with you our learnings in snapshot form. This isn’t meant to be exhaustive, just a few tidbits for each major TV platform. It’s just what we’ve seen and we wanted to pass on our learned lesson. It’s also meant to rectify some of the misinformation thrown around by Connected TV “experts” at conferences, blogs or on white papers.
There’s been a lot of talk about social TV apps and how it will revolutionize the viewing experience of those watching TV, expand advertising opportunities, and generally be a good thing for content owners. It’ll essentially reinvent the TV experience.
We’re seeing the same increased usage across all of our Connected TV platforms. It’s actually greater than 30%.
Essentially, people are watching more and more film and TV content via Connected TVs. It’s nice to see that a basic premise of our business is being born out in our analytics and research by third parties.
This is our first Consumer Reports-eque post, providing insight on whether to buy a TV dongle to Internet-ify your TV.
First, let’s get to the serious stuff — what’s dongle? Funny word. Bonus points for anyone who can drop some etymology knowledge about dongle. Alright, back to the post.
So, there seems to be a new PR every day about the latest company that has ported Android 4.0 onto a thumbdrive so you can turn your non-Internet TV into an Internet connected TV.
All this talk about Connected TV apps requires me to show one that’s out in the wild. Here’s a Roku app built for Anyclip, which shows clips of Hollywood films. It’s an SD recording but you’ll get the gist of how we’ve built the app (focusing on ease of use and getting the viewer quickly to the videos). Like our other apps, we built this for free.
This may be shocking but people are watching a lot of TV shows and films on Connected TV platforms. After all, they’re TVs. This data point however may get lost in all the hoopla about “smart” TVs and technology features they bring.
Showing video ads on Connected TVs is really easy.
Actually, that’s completely untrue.
Ad SDKs enable video ads to be targeted and delivered properly. To build ad SDKs for the fragmented Connected TV platforms is really hard since there are at least 15+ major Connected TV players. That’s 15+ ad SDKs that need to be developed and maintained on TV platforms, which are not exactly the easiest development environments.
adRise only launched in the fall of 2011 and we only started to distribute our content partners in December 2011. Since then, we’ve signed a number of content partners including Starz, The Bold & The Beautiful, Warner Brother’s Flixster, Digital Media Rights, and many others in a short 7 month period. We’re working with a lot of other great content partners to release them in the upcoming months. So stay tuned.
In future posts, we’ll highlight some of the content on our content partner apps.
