Almost Live from NAB: Anvato Leads the Way for Seamless Facebook Video Integration
[Note: This sponsored interview was recorded at NAB 2015.]
TV Everywhere specialist Anvato brought several major pieces of news to this year's NAB conference. As Anvato's chief evangelist Matt Smith explained, the company's recently released Watch application was a major draw for cable operators and other providers.
"Here at the show we are talking about our Anvato Watch application that enables broadcast brands or those who offer packages of channels like cable operators the turnkey ability to put those together and enable things like catch-up TV, cloud DVR, watching on the tablet of the handset, obviously. We've added some functionality to it that we're showing people here at the show," Smith said. "The uptake has been very good and we're excited about it."
Anvato was one of the first companies to offer Facebook distribution with the new Facebook API.
"A few weeks ago the Facebook developer conference called F8, Mark Zuckerberg was on stage and mentioned that we were one of the first companies to integrate their video API," Smith explained. "What this means is that Facebook is introducing a new way for our customers and brands to deliver video to the Facebook platform. If these brands want it to auto play or if there's other features that I'm sure they're going to integrate later, you have to kind of hand it over the wall to them in the way they want it."
For more Anvato news, watch the video interview below.
Eric: Hi, I'm Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, editor of Streaming Media Magazine here at NAB 2015 with Matt Smith who is the chief evangelist of Anvato. How you doing Matt?
Matt: Good. Good to see you.
Eric: Good to have you here. You've got some announcements here at the NAB show, right?
Matt: We do, we have some exciting things. Here at the show we are talking about our Anvato Watch application that enables broadcast brands or those who offer packages of channels like cable operators, the turnkey ability to put those together and enable things like catch-up TV, Cloud DVR, watching on the tablet of the handset, obviously. We've added some functionality to it that we're showing people here at the show, the uptake has been very good and we're excited about it.
Eric: Okay, and you've also announced recently a couple of partnerships. You're working with Facebook, you also announced a partnership with Grass Valley. What do those partnerships mean for broadcasters and content owners?
Matt: Great question. So the Grass Valley partnership that we announced at the show is very advantageous for broadcasters who use the GV Stratus platform. So this is a platform where people are building newscasts in a newsroom, very powerful platform, but while they're putting the newscast together there might be breaking news or something's going on: a car chase, a sporting event. They can simply, with a few keystrokes in the strata system, mark a clip and say start and stop, sends a command to our platform, we clip that in real time and syndicate it out to Facebook and Twitter. So for those broadcast brands getting their content out in those massive social audiences has tremendous value. The faster to market the better. In our case, with our integration, that clip is generally out there available on their dot com and their apps in about a minute.
Eric: Wow.
Matt: So relative to your question about Facebook, a few weeks ago the Facebook developer conference called F8, Mark Zuckerberg was on stage and mentioned that we were one of the first companies to integrate their video API. What this means is that Facebook is introducing a new way for our customers and brands to deliver video to the Facebook platform. If these brands want it to auto play or if there's other features that I'm sure they're going to integrate later, you have to kind of hand it over the wall to them in the way they want it. We're familiar with that, we're well versed with the API. We're doing this for our big media brands today. It doesn't mean that you can't not publish video in the old way, it's going to be more advantageous in terms of the features and functionality ... one would suspect once audience builds a revenue share with ad monetization.
Eric: Right. Speaking of monetization, that's obviously a huge topic for OTT publishers and content owners. What is that model doing in terms of monetization specifically ad insertion?
Matt: We've been doing ad insertion for a couple of years. Anyway, we were one of the first in the state to do it. We enable the replacement of ads that exist in broadcast in the TV everywhere, the OTT component. However, a caveat there. Sometimes with very big broadcast brands, there's so much revenue being spent as an entire package that sometimes we allow the broadcast ads to play through.
Eric: Okay.
Matt: What's really interesting and kind of new-ish is the idea that we can target by region, even target down to the zip code. What that means for a regional sports network is that we enable them to upload commercials relevant to that area. For example, the tri-state Ford dealers want to buy 250,000 ad impressions against a broadcaster's content, we can enable that using a Avast free tech so when that ad break hits we know that of a three minute long pod, two minutes of it is for national payload and the last minute is regional or localized. We can take it even further. The technology and the architecture is there so that on the east or the west side of town, we can deliver ads to people specifically down to the zip code. The ad space hasn't really gotten that religion yet but I think it's just a matter of time before they do.
Eric: Sure. You've announced publicly a few customers in the past, Fox Sports, Universal ... are there other recent customer developments that you can share?
Matt: There are some very interesting things that I can't talk about yet here at the show. Active testing and really kicking the tires. We're excited and we think we're going to be announcing some things at Streaming Media East that we think will be very exciting and we look forward to talking about it then.
Eric: Alright, well I look forward to talking with you about that as well. This is Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen talking to Matt Smith from Anvato here at NAB 2015.
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