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Crystal Ball Time: 6 Online Video Advertising Predictions for '17

Some things are obvious: We'll all watch more streaming video next year, whether on mobile devices or our living room TVs. Video advertising will get more automated and targeted. The IP transition will continue and ad budgets will grow.

That much we know, but what else? Where is the industry headed? Where are the growth areas? For that, we asked a few industry experts to makes predictions for 2017.

Anyone and Everyone Will Go Live in VR

"We're seeing a lot of creativity in the live and VR market, and no industry will drive this growth more than live sports. Fans can now watch a sporting event together in-headset in a virtual room with friends scattered around the globe. Brands and publishers are jumping onboard to support this trend. NextVR partnered with the NBA and NFL while LiveLike partnered with the MLS to broadcast events in live VR. And, to mobilize the average user, Facebook just announced Facebook Live will support 360-degree video in 2017." —Vince Cacace, CEO of Vertebrae

The Amount of Viewer Data Will Explode

"From 2017 on, the world of TV measurement will fundamentally change: We will evolve beyond the 20,000 household model to a 100,000,000 household model, accounting for nearly the total U.S. viewing audience. Access to this wider audience will provide brands and advertisers with an unparalleled understanding of TV behavior and content consumption at a granular level. It will be an explosion of new data, at least 1,000X bigger than what was available 5 to 10 years ago, which is exciting and opens up many opportunities. Think about how much change we've seen so far: Years ago, the process to fully understand what people were watching took months, but, with the introduction of cross-screen technologies, we're now able to track viewership data across a grander scale of devices at a much faster rate. Expect that companies in this space are committed to continuing this evolution and refinement of measurement capabilities." —Ashish Chordia, CEO and co-founder of Alphonso

The SVOD World Is Far From Settled

"Streaming services are going to see a lot of innovation, a lot of success, and a lot of failure in 2017. As more offerings have begun to pop up, there's been a reaction in some areas that the market can only handle X number of these new services, but that's not true, at least not yet. There is no service—aside from Netflix—that's really killing it every time, which means customers are going to be experimenting and open to whatever's new. In the traditional pay TV world, new entrants to a market could expect to easily pick up five percent of the existing pay TV subscribers from other operators already in a market (That's how AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS managed to each acquire five million customers: They took them from Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and DirecTV). Amazon Prime Instant Video, thanks to the infrastructure and content deals it already has, is situated to become the next international cloud TV network, after Netflix. But there will be two, maybe three other companies that disrupt the relative stasis we're seeing in the marketplace." —Jim O'Neill, principal analyst at Ooyala

In-Banner Video Will Finally Die

"Everybody hates in-banner video. It creates a heavy load on the page and crashes browsers, leading to a bad user experience. Advertisers are combating these issues by requiring that content only play in medium and large players, while Google is moving to block Flash from autoplaying on small players (under 400 pixels). With Google cutting off supply and advertisers reducing demand, in-banner video will be snuffed out in 2017." —David Kashak, founder and CEO of Connatix

Live Online Events Will Bring New Opportunities

"Live video will continue to push dollars away from television, especially as new types of shows and live entertainment emerge. For example, Twitter partnered with BuzzFeed to cover election night, rather than a news channel like CNN or MSNBC. We'll see a new type of company pop up that takes advantage of the new live broadcast mechanism." —Nikhil Sethi, co-founder and CEO of Adaptly

Artificial Intelligence Will Lead to Fast and Accurate Decisions.

"The next wave digital distribution will come from artificial intelligence, which will have tangible applications for media for the first time. Until now, machine learning systems have performed siloed tasks such as metadata creation or content curation. In 2017, these systems will be more closely integrated and A.I. will be able to conduct multi-level analysis and decision-making in real-time. As a result, behavioral, geographic, device, and demographic segmentation will achieve high accuracy without the need for personally identifiable information. This will let individual brands and publishers reach strong scale and engagement levels for social on their own properties." —Rob Bardunias, CRO, Iris.TV

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net

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