LongTail Video Acquires Open Video Ads Project
Open Source Initiative Allows Users of the JW Player To Deliver IAB VAST-Compliant Ads to Their Video Players
New York(24 Aug 2010)
LongTail Video, creators of the popular open source video player, the JW Player, announced today that it has acquired the rights to the Open Video Ads (OVA), an open source initiative dedicated to enabling the delivery of IAB standard video advertisements into online players.
With LongTail Video's Open Video Ads, publishers can now easily deliver IAB VAST-compliant advertisements into any video player, including the JW Player and Flowplayer. "To help grow online video advertising, ad standards such as the ones supported by OVA must be broadly adopted into the marketplace," said Dave Otten, co-founder and CEO of LongTail Video, "With LongTail Video's acquisition of the OVA framework, million of publishers using the JW Player and Flowplayer now have a simple and affordable way to run VAST-compliant advertisements to their video players."
Since its launch in 2009, the OVA technology has been used by thousands of web publishers who can implement OVA either by using one of the "out-of-the-box" plug-ins for the JW Player or the Flowplayer or by customizing the freely available open source framework for their custom Flash player. Key features of the OVA technology include:
- VAST-compliant ad server communication
- VAST-compliant tracking of video ad performance
- Broad ad server and network support, including DoubleClick, OpenX, 24/7 Real Media, Microsoft Atlas, Adify, ADTECH and more
- Flexible configuration and ad scheduling options
Paul Schulz, the creator of the OVA project, has joined the LongTail team, where he will continue to build out and support the framework. In addition, LongTail Video has re-launched the OVA project on its website, where users can download the framework, access the source code, read documentation and receive support.
"I am extremely excited about partnering with LongTail Video," said Schulz. "Given the JW Player's popularity, LongTail provides a unique opportunity to rapidly expand usage of OVA. Moving forward, we will focus on introducing a ton of great new features to the project, including support for VPAID and HTML5 video."
LongTail Video is headquartered in New York City with a developer team based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. For more information, see www.longtailvideo.com.