HEARST ANYSCREEN
A Higher Standard in OTT

Reach your audience, anytime, anywhere, on any screen. Hearst Anyscreen offers a targeted OTT platform that provides a single, centralized access point to the streaming TV marketplace.

With a unique focus on quality, Hearst Anyscreen delivers premium “living room experience” television that is served primarily on Connected TVs.

Monday December 6, 2021

Facebook Messenger announced it is testing a “Split Payments” feature enabling users to split the cost of bills through the app. “If you’ve struggled with dividing up (and getting paid back for) group dinners, shared household expenses or even the monthly rent, it’s about to get easier,” said the company said in a blog post.

fuboTV Inc. has closed its acquisition of Edisn.ai, an AI-powered computer vision platform with video recognition technologies. Edisn.ai’s computer vision technology – which can recognize and track key objects in live video feeds (including athletes, actors, brand logos, products, events and more) – will enable fuboTV to further innovate its interactive live TV streaming experience, and help fuboTV to expand its ad tech capabilities, such as better detection of ad breaks and targeted contextual advertising, in addition to creating the potential for integrated e-commerce.

TV and Film online content marketplace Vuulr is partnering with content supply chain and media management platform Mediagenix to provide rights holders with an integrated and seamless way to monetize all their available content across their catalogues. Clients of Mediagenix’s media business management platform, What’son, will now be able to directly publish their content on the Vuulr platform, allowing clients to monetize their content and generate content licensing revenue more efficiently.

Playground, a new platform for creators, has opened for beta testing, with a public launch set for January. Once a profile has been created and basic interests and information have been recorded, users can browse a discovery page of global communities and explore shared content. From there, users can “save” or “favorite” the content most interesting to them or subscribe to receive newsletters and SMS notifications from their desired communities. “We see ourselves as the next meaningful social platform built around group features that encourage play—events, community profiles and chats,” said founder and creator Jia Ling Yang. “We intentionally stripped out the scrolling and filtering and passive entertainment. What’s left is a platform that empowers creators to build community and inspires people to participate.”

Univision Communications Inc. and Mediahub are partnering with EDO and datafuelX to leverage proprietary consumer behavior data to predict engagement performance for advertiser campaigns across Univision’s linear networks. EDO measures the spike in consumer engagement behaviors, such as online search, for a brand in the moments after a TV ad airs; the deal aims to aid Mediahub, Univision, and their advertisers in ensuring ads are placed in the right contextual environment.

AT&T ad platform Xandr added a feature the company describes as content metadata for video. The new feature will standardize content metadata, enabling Xandr to take the thousands of unique genre values and simplify them into standardized categories using its fields including duration, delivery type, genre, program type, rating, network, and language.

The Canada Media Fund renewed its partnership with Parrot Analytics to track domestic and international demand for Canadian content. According to Parrot data, Canadian TV series accounted for 5.2 percent of the demand share for all non-US content with global audiences, the sixth best performance out of more than 80 markets.

At least half of Covid misinformation “superspreader” accounts on Facebook and Twitter are still active over a year after they were flagged by fake news watchdog NewsGuard at the start of the pandemic. More than half have seen no visible action taken against them by the platforms, according to NewsGuard, and nearly a quarter of them have grown. “Of the 26 accounts NewsGuard flagged to Twitter, 13 were still active and 10 gained 358,927 new followers between them, an increase by over 23.7 percent on average,” noted NewsGuard’s November Misinformation Monitor. Of the 59 accounts NewsGuard flagged to Facebook, 31 were still active and nine gained 718,000 new “likes” between them, an increase of just under four percent on average.

Future plc, the global platform for specialist media, announced its 2021 financial results. The company reached $808.5 million in revenue, up 79% year-over-year. Additionally, Future’s digital advertising and eCommerce areas saw revenue growth of 27% and 36%, respectively.

Customer data platform Treasure Data announced its CDP for Service offering is now available on Genesys AppFoundry, the marketplace focused on customer experience solutions. The AppFoundry allows Genesys customers from all market segments to discover and rapidly deploy a broad range of solutions that make it easier to interact with consumers, engage employees and optimize their workforce.

At its re-invent conference, AWS announced AWS re:Post, a new question and answer service driven by the community of AWS customers, partners, and employees. AWS re:Post is an AWS-managed Q&A service offering crowd-sourced, expert-reviewed answers to technical questions about AWS that replaces the original AWS Forums. Community members can earn reputation points to build up their community expert status by providing accepted answers and reviewing answers from other users, helping to continually expand the availability of public knowledge across all AWS services.

AWS also unveiled Amplify Studio, a Figma-connected no-code/low-code service aimed at helping developers quickly build cloud-connected apps. Amplify Studio is an extension of the existing AWS Amplify service.

HEARST ANYSCREEN
A Higher Standard in OTT

Reach your audience, anytime, anywhere, on any screen. Hearst Anyscreen offers a targeted OTT platform that provides a single, centralized access point to the streaming TV marketplace.

With a unique focus on quality, Hearst Anyscreen delivers premium “living room experience” television that is served primarily on Connected TVs.

Ad management firm Mediavine announced that its first-party data toolkit, Grow, has integrated with Yahoo ConnectID. Grow collects consented data from the audiences of its 8,400+ publishers and securely transmits the data to Yahoo ConnectID, empowering publishers to connect authenticated user data with various advertiser demand. The technology incentivizes users to authenticate by offering exclusive tools including social sharing, favorites and recipe cards as well as Spotlight Subscribe for email opt-ins.

Synamedia and Malaysian content and entertainment company Astro announced a partnership to launch the first addressable TV advertising service in South East Asia. Using Synamedia Iris’s unified addressable advertising platform, Astro will make it easier for advertisers to reach the top 50% of Malaysian households across live, streaming and catch-up in a single measurable campaign. Leveraging Synamedia’s technology, advertisers will be able to show different ads to different households while they are watching the same program, based on data such as location and demographics.

Mediaocean has received a patent for CTV fraud verification focused on publishers’ servers. “Going forward, we won’t just chase and penalize bad actors, or identify fraud or inventory which is non-safe or non-suitable after the fact, but we will weed it out before ads are served and put a premium on transparency at the root,” said John Nardone, President at Mediaocean.

Integral Ad Science has expanded its Context Control solution for advertisers and publishers globally, giving customers more control over the context of digital ad placements. Publishers can now activate Context Control segments directly in their ad servers to avoid or target towards contextually relevant content.

Redbox announced it has deployed digital video signage on the top of over 2,000 kiosks across the US, with nearly 4,000 expected total installations. Through a partnership with Velocity, the video screens give the company a new way to partner with Hollywood studios to promote new release movies, its free streaming service, as well as provide advertising opportunities for national and hyper-local media campaigns. Velocity, which has expanded its footprint of digital signage networks, will source, operate, and support the Redbox signage network.

Vistar Media has been selected by Uber OOH, Uber’s digital cartop advertising network, as a new programmatic partner. Uber OOH will leverage the Vistar SPP to allow buyers to purchase cartop digital inventory programmatically via an open exchange or private marketplace deals.

MADE TO MEASURE

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement working with The Project X Institute and TRev on a guide to converged TV measurement providers in the US. “With the increase of streaming and viewing across connected platforms, new industry initiatives, buy-side demands for more comprehensive measurement and, of course, the growing range of providers, the pace of change at which the industry is now accelerating is rapid,” said CIMM CEO Jane Clarke. “This has propelled the need for us to take a look at the key converged TV measurement providers and create an impartial guide to dispel any confusion that might exist across the industry.”

Tubular Labs announced the ability to correlate social video viewing with e-commerce on Amazon. By leveraging global opt-in behavioral data panels and official measurement partnerships, Tubular is connecting public video viewership across key social platforms with viewers’ shopping behaviors, such as product browsing, in-cart activities, purchasing and posting reviews on Amazon. “Social video has weaved its way into the cultural fabric of our society, but until now its impact on commerce was unconventional wisdom,” said Josh Schmiesing, Chief Marketing Officer, Tubular Labs. “Now that the business and publisher communities can see unique reach, frequency and get conversion rates for ecommerce, brands can rethink how they invest in social video and unlock its potential.”

The AccuWeather Network entered into a multiyear agreement with Nielsen for cable TV measurement. The partnership aims to deepen AccuWeather’s ability to profile its evolving audience, identify trends in viewer behaviors and provide greater insights into engagement.

CNBC and First in Business Worldwide inked a deal with Just Capital, a platform for tracking and measuring corporate performance in the stakeholder economy, through which CNBC will use Just Capital’s data and analysis across its television, digital and events platforms.

Cinedigm and LiveLike are partnering to deliver new community and gamification elements to Cinedigm’s portfolio of streaming direct-to-consumer subscription services. LiveLike integrates features such as influencer-driven chats, watch parties, loyalty rewards, user rankings, and more, which can be integrated with sponsors. “LiveLike’s platform offers some very compelling engagement capabilities as we look to launch the next major version of our proprietary Matchpoint Blueprint development framework with plans for much deeper fan engagement such as integrated user rankings, loyalty points, digital NFT collectibles and more,” said Cinedigm Chief Technology & Product Officer Tony Huidor.

Univision Communications Inc. launchedNoticias Univision 24/7, a news streaming channel featuring breaking news, original lifestyle content, opinion, and information curated for Spanish-speaking audiences. Platform is the first news streaming channel to launch on PrendeTV’s newly created News category.

Netflix said it has thus far invested $100 million in six US, Black-led financial institutions. The investments are part of a pledge to allocate 2 percent of cash holdings into banks serving Black communities the company made in June 2020 amid protests for racial equality.

Vizio has expanded its WatchFree+ free streaming service to include AVOD. “Today’s audiences want quality on demand movies and TV shows on their own terms,” said Mike O’Donnell, Chief Revenue Officer at VIZIO. “With the evolution of WatchFree+ on demand programming, SmartCast users can now browse through hundreds of shows and movies to watch at any time, for free, and without any subscriptions or logins required.”

ViacomCBS Networks International and Nordic Entertainment Group are teaming for a new Pluto TV service to debut across Sweden, Denmark and Norway in 2022. The service combines ViacomCBS’ free ad-supported streaming TV platform with pan-Nordic AVOD platform Viafree. NENT Group will serve as the platform’s leading ad sales partner.

UK SVOD service True Royalty TV has announced a 25 million pounds fundraising round to capitalize on the success of its recent distribution deal with Amazon Prime. The service has grown subscribers and revenue by 75 percent since launching on
Amazon in May.