Archive for April, 2009

Since last summer we’ve been part of the IAB UK Video Council contributing to the brand new Video Guide that was released today. The guide contains comprehensive information addressing most of the questions still surrounding the business of online video advertising, and hopefully it will play it’s role in growing the business for us all by making it easier for media buyers to grasp the subject.

An important part of the handbook is the new guidelines on ad formats. The idea is that publishers and technology providers should adapt to these guidelines and thus enable creative assets to be reused across different sites without adaptation. We’re of course doing our part of the job to enable that.

Here in Sweden, we’re trying hard to catch up. I’m chairing IAB Sweden’s Video Task Force and I assure you that a Swedish guideline is on it’s way. Let’s get these prerolls, midrolls, postrolls and overlays standardized world wide!

To our clients this is old news, but we have switched CDN partner to world famous Akamai. As you can read in Akamai’s press release, we’re more than happy with the performance that we have experienced for a couple of months now.

The reason for switching is simple: To be able to bring our clients the most reliable service with the best possible end user experience, our choice of CDN partner is crucial and Akamai is simply the best CDN available. It doesn’t matter if your discussing bandwitdh, reliability, response times or global coverage — Akamai seem to win on every point.

Here’s some impressive facts about the Akamai network (and thus our performance and reliability):

• The network handles more than 300 billion requests every day
• 10-20% of the total internet traffic is handled by Akamai
• The network consists of about 42 000 servers in 70 countries and 950 networks
• Akamai servers are one hop (as close as you can get) from 85% of the world’s internet users

More stats here, and if you’re as nerdy as I am, you can be impressed by the live visualization of Akamai’s traffic. 4-5 million http requests every second…

Anyway, bottom line is that the Videoplaza experience is now powered by the best CDN available. Regardless of where in the world your audience happen to reside, we can now provide the best possible end user experience available.

After having launched their catch up service TV4 Replay in January, TV4 today took the next big step towards a complete online offering. Unlike TV4 Replay, the new service launching today called TV4 Play, will consist of both short and long form content.

After a quick test-drive I can easily say they currently have the best commercial online video offering in the Nordics, in the broadcast league at least. They’ve pushed the new player very hard to having everything from external embedding, chapters and Facebook connect-powered chat. The experience is great and reminding a lot of the big successes out there being BBC iPlayer, Hulu and SVT Play.

The site is currently being monetised through prerolls, midrolls and overlays using our technology. There’s very few display ads around, which I think is good, encouraging more video consumption and thus more valuable in-stream inventory.

The challenge is to find the perfect balance between a pleasant user experience, large enough ad inventory and value for the advertisers. The key here I believe is to work with the different frequency settings and Monetizer is full of them since video is mainly a time based medium.

I’m really excited to work with a proactive client like this, we have a lot to learn from each other and explore together.

Here’s an example of their embedded player (it doesn’t seem to be geo-blocked outside Sweden, yet):

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about how you make online video profitable at Den store medie revolution in Copenhagen. The half day conference is organized by our Danish partners In2media (Brandzation) together with one of the leading Danish daily papers Berlinske Tidende.

Other speakers are from Brandzation, RedBull, Storyplanet, Omnicom etc.

Come and say hi if you are around!

We are growing fast and need help! With more clients, a more mature product and a higher demand from the market, we now need to fill the following roles:

• Account management
• Marketing
• Random biz dev projects

All of these roles will be more or less filled by one person, the multi-talented Entrepreneur. This is not only the most challenging role we’ve recruited for so far (if you ask me at least), this is also an opportunity to work with the core of the company and have real influence on the strategy ahead.

If you’ve ever been dreaming of founding your own company, or if you just feel that you are a multi-talented brilliant person with the capacity of solving problems you’ve never even known existed before: This is your dream job.

The entrepreneur will be based in our HQ in Stockholm but frequently visit our clients around Europe.

You can find a lot more info in this job description. Last date for applying is May 10th so get busy!

Last week I was interviewed by the Swedish morning paper SvD about Videoplaza. The interview that is in Swedish was published yesterday and can be seen here or just below.

Working with a niche tech product with a limited target group, premium media companies, it makes sense to early on expand to new markets. After spreading our wings to the Nordic countries and the UK, we’re now moving a bit more south to the European mainland and France!

Videoplaza Country Manager France – Sophie Davidas

Not only do we appreciate good French cheese and wine, we’ve also fallen in love with Sophie Davidas who will be our main woman in Paris. Sophie is joining the team as Country manager France and has dedicated herself to help exporting the Swedish model, making online video a profitable business for French media companies.

Sophie is a smart and charming doer with a diverse background from different areas. She has run her own companies, written movie scripts and done consultancy in mobile and online video areas. She also has an MBA from INSEAD.

Kick-starting with Adtech tomorrow

We are kick-starting our expansion in France by attending and participating at the Adtech conference in Paris tomorrow and on Wednesday. Make sure to come by and say hi to us and Sophie if you are around, it’s free to attend.

Sophie can be reached at +33 670 019 048 and sophie@videoplaza.com.

If you want to know more about the people behind Creandum, our largest external investor, make sure to subscribe to one of very few Nordic VC blogs around: VC Perspectives.