Archive for January, 2010

Videoplaza now supports the industry leading VAST standard – Digital Video Ad Serving Template (IAB). The industry has been talking about this for years and it seems 2010 will be the year it finally happens. Being VAST compliant we can finally serve, both in and out, 3rd party ads for our clients. This means a more open and transparent video advertising eco system, something we are confident will help grow the industry

So what can VAST do for me?

The core benefit of VAST is facilitating 3rd party ad serving, enabling the following:

• Enable your clients, agencies and advertisers, to 3rd party serve ads through Adform, Eyeblaster etc.
• Seamless 3rd party ad serving when syndicating to aggregators such as Dailymotion, Metacafe, Youtube (not quite yet) etc.
• Super easy ad network integrations
• And hopefully, if the standard gets adopted the way we hope: Ad serving into any platform or technology whether using Flash, Silverlight, iPhone, IPTV set-top boxes etc.

adMonsters just posted an excellent introduction to what VAST is, what it can do for operations and the challenges ahead. You don’t even have to be a programmer to understand it.

If you have any questions, ideas or general thoughts on VAST please contact us at Videoplaza. This will shake up the online video industry and we want everybody to join the revolution.

I just wanted to share a very good summary over Europe’s most interesting online video market. PaidContent UK has looked into its glass ball at the key VOD players in the UK and judged their success. Among SeeSaw, iPlayer, Canvas, Hulu, Youtube etc. they believe that the safest bet is still on the broadcasters own websites such as itv.com. I would agree.

I would also argue that one of the key success factors for the aggregators will be to make sure that the syndicators will be empowered to sell and serve their own ads, preferably through their own ad server.

2010 will be a very interesting year indeed!