I’m happy to announce our first Turkish client - Tikle. As of last week, they are using our platform to monetise their new VOD service portal that is deployed to Turkeys first and biggest cinema portal sinema.com.

Using both an ad funded (through us) and a paid model (through Tvinci), Sinema.com is quite an ambitious project unique for the Turkish market. The concept is quite simple, to be an aggregated destination for video content, primarily feature films and TV series. We’re happy to be a part of this project together with Israeli Tvinci, an OVP focusing on tier 1 publishers and operators globally.

And in case you didn’t know, Turkey has 35 million active Internet users (internetworldstats.com) which, believe it or not, makes it the 5th largest market in Europe(!).

We continue to work hard expanding our business across Europe and we will hopefully share more news with you soon, stay posted.

I’m happy to announce that we’re now managing the video ad serving for Unanimis, one of UK’s leading ad networks. Having worked with video for a while, Unanimis, acquired by Orange some time ago, are now moving into the next gear with video. Working with us is another step in that direction.

The first sites we’re working together on are Sony’s Crackle and WWE. Crackle’s YouTube channel which we’ll be serving ads into can be found here: Youtube.

I’m proud to announce our latest recruitment David Mühle, Commercial Director Nordics and RoW. David has been in the online industry during the last 10 years, most recently as Account Director and part of the management team at TradeDoubler. David will continue to push Videoplaza and monetisation of the New TV in our home markets Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Asking David why he joined us, he will tell you that he’s a big believer in the New TV and the opportunities around it for both publishers and advertisers.

While David is starting, Magnus Hultman will leave us to head up Smartclip in the Nordics. We are quite excited about this move too as we believe there is a big need for a network offering on the Nordic markets.

For us at Videoplaza, this is a big day. An enormous day actually. Today is the day when we make the biggest launch in the entire history of Videoplaza: we’re launching version 2.0 of our entire platform.

While generation 1.0 has been struggling on impressively, it’s hard to ignore the fact that it was initially constructed by a small startup team of only six people, with features being bolted on the initial codebase from right and left. It’s now been a year since we formally started working on what we’re unveiling today. Version 2.0 is here.

So what’s new? Apart from a completely revamped underlying infrastructure with a geographically distributed infrastructure coping with massive scaling in every distant corner of the globe while ensuring the best possible uptime, and a tailor made custom data base engine coping with real time calculations on enormous amounts of data that traditional relational databases (like MySQL and others) simply can’t handle, yeah, well apart from that, I have four items to highlight:

1. Campaign Manager 2.0

Videoplaza Monetizer 2.0 is equipped with our brand new user interface for configuring campaigns, getting overview of your account, pulling reports and all the other stuff you would expect from an ad server user interface. The difference is in how you do it.

The user feedback on our version 1 user interface and our approach to video ad serving has been fantastic. The workflow for in-stream was definitely superior to anything else conceived already with version 1 (you get much for free when you’re competing with companies not focused on video), but there still was a lot of room for improvement.

Let’s face it, the design of the old interface was ideal for companies first starting out with in-stream. It was designed for people working with pre-, mid- and postrolls and in-stream overlays but not much else. Further, it provided great overview of things as long as you were running something like 20-30 concurrent video campaigns. And that actually worked great for us and our clients, because we were all new to video back in the days.

Campaign Manager 2.0 on the other hand is designed for where we and our clients are today. Video is booming like nothing else, our clients (especially broadcasters) are growing like crazy with hundreds of concurrent campaigns, and new platforms and ad formats are popping up like mushrooms.

So we have pulled together a user interface built on 2010 technology that looks and feels like an installed app right within your browser. It’s designed for working with a multitude of platforms and ad formats and can streamline your workflow throughout the complicated beast the ‘new TV’ already is and definitely will continue to become.

I won’t provide more than a screenshot here, but please do make sure that you get a proper demo if you’re shopping around for adserving technology.

2. Proper forecasting

A really important feature of Campaign Manager 2.0 is the brand new Campaign Planner feature. This where you’re finally able to do in-stream forecasting right. Because of our plugin architecture within your videoplayer, we’re able to get the data collection right, and because of our brand new underlying database engine we’re also able to make complex calculations on that data in real time.

What this means is access to the most important data your sales team can have: proper forecasts and availability figures.

In Campaign Manager 2.0 you’re able to pull forecasts on any ad formats you’re using with any targeting criteria. The Campaign Planner will then crunch the numbers and in real-time come back to you with info on overall availability, but also how that is distributed over time and how existing campaigns (with other targeting rules) compete with the query you’re making.

This is when you finally can have multiple sales teams working on regional and national levels at the same time or when you can make up sales packages ad-hoc and still figure out your ability to deliver and how it impacts existing campaigns.

3. Next generation player plugin

As the rest of the platform, our videoplayer plugin (Videoplaza AdPlayer) has taken a big leap too. Apart form our recent launch of HTML5 support we obviously have more platforms to come, but that’s for separate announcements.

Feature-wise there’s however a lot going on: The Videoplaza AdPlayer now has it’s own internal API for ad formats which means true flexibility on new ad formats. We’re using this ourselves to launch a couple of new ad formats like branded player skins and commercial buffer messages before opening up also to external ad format development. What this means however is that the AdPlayer plugin can enable you to conceive your own ad formats and push them live with a minimal technical development effort as all the infrastructure of delivery and measurement is already in place.

Further, every Videoplaza ad format is now skinnable meaning that you can tweak look and feel to match your own videoplayer. And the ad formats can actually be controlled completely programmatically which means that even though you’re using an external player plugin, it can blend completely with your own player and be controlled from the videoplayer’s own set of controls.

4. VAST, VPAID and open APIs

Support for VAST actually isn’t something new to our platform, but things have improved. If you’re using us by implementing our AdPlayer plugin, obviously we take care of making your videoplayer VAST compliant (all versions) and thus enabling you to serve 3rd party ads from agencies or ad networks.

What’s more interesting is that the AdPlayer plugin actually also makes you VPAID compliant, in fact our own custom format APIs are based on VPAID which hopefully is a first step towards a future when interactive ad formats can be conceived and served from an external source.

On the other hand, if you’re in a situation where you for some reason can’t use the AdPlayer plugin, then we work great in a pure VAST setup too. All the benefits of proper forecasting and streamlined workflow is still there even though we’re obviously a little crippled by the shortcomings of VAST. Still, it’s the best (and only) standard we’ve got and we’re fully committed to it.

Further, the Monetizer 2.0 platform is completely open with APIs on both ends. Anything you can do in our own interface, can just as well be achieved through another platform over the APIs which means that you could actually sidestep our entire (brand new) interface if you for some reason would want to. In fact, our user interface is using the exact same API available for external integrations.

So that’s it folks. Expect more announcements from us at Videoplaza now that we’re up to speed and have the new underlying platform (prepared for further exciting innovation) out of the door!

I just wanted to make a small announcement: Just a minute ago at the Brightcove Monetisation Summit in London, our friend Cameron Church over at Brightcove demonstrated the easiness of publishing to different devices using Brightcove. One device that was especially exiting was the iPad – Cameron live demoed how their device recognition automatically switched from Flash to an HTML5 player when loaded on an iPad, and moreover – the content was monetised by our fresh new Monetizer AdPlayer for HTML5!

Videoplaza's Monetizer AdPlayer for HTML5 live on the iPad from Videoplaza Crew on Vimeo.

What is this HTML5 all about?

If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s the next generation of the HTML language that is underlying all of the web. And the reason for why everybody in this business is excited is that HTML5 (unlike previous versions) has built-in support for video, meaning that we can finally stream video in regular web browsers without having to rely on 3rd party technologies like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.

This last piece has been made extra important by Apple who seems to have a beef going on with Adobe, and has decided against allowing Flash to run on iPhone and iPad. This means that HTML5 is the way to go if you want to stream video in Safari on these platforms.

Since Videoplaza has just one sole reason of existence – to make online video profitable – obviously we’re excited about HTML5 too. It’s not only that it gives us the tools we need to monetise content on iPhones and iPads — HTML5 will truly be a leap forward on all platforms once the technology has matured a bit, browsers supporting it have reached a big enough install base and the mainstream services perform a switch.

Introducing Monetizer AdPlayer for HTML5

We always do everything we can to enable publishers to monetise their video content regardless of platform and that means that HTML5 is a logical next step.

This is why we’re introducing the HTML5 version of our Monetizer AdPlayer today.

Once again the benefits of the plugin architecture we pioneered with the Flash version of our Monetizer AdPlayer shines. It’s completely compatible with the HTML5 way of doing things, means that we can pre-integrate ourselves in platforms like Brightcove and most important: take care of all the challenges that surrounds in-stream advertising.

Challenges ahead

It’s going to be really interesting to follow the pace of HTML5 adoption. The standard is not finalized yet, and the technology is obviously in it’s infancy. There’s an underlying conflict going on about which video codec that should be used (H.264, Ogg Theora or WebM).

Further, HTML5 is also suffering from the same problem that a couple of years ago was partly responsible for holding Flash back: lack of support for DRM.

While Flash ultimately overcame this and became the de-facto standard it is today, it could probably have turned out completely different if services like Youtube, Sky [UK] and M6 [FR] would have picked another technology. In the same way, HTML5 is probably going to need some high profile evangelists and migrations of major services in order to become mainstream and get content owners across the globe to recognize the standard and allow their content to be streamed in this way.

But then again, speaking of evangelists, Steve Jobs and Apple has already made a good start driving HTML5 adoption. And he’s not alone.

I’m really happy to announce two additions to our senior advisory board – Andreas Ehn and Nils Winkler.

Andreas Ehn is a super star coder and the architect behind Spotify where he was CTO for the first three years of the company. With that comes of course a deep expertise in how to scale a business with loads of data, massive traffic while keeping everything super quick. I’m happy to know we have priority on his diary now.

Nils Winkler is probably THE best sales guy in our industry. He headed up the sales at ADTECH in Germany and was later the first guy on the ground both in the Nordics but then also the US. Currently, Nils is heading up micropayments firm Hi-Media Payments/Allopass as their CEO in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. All of this makes him an expert on how to expand our business to new markets, something that is very much on the agenda right now. And not only that, he’s also a terrific guy to just hang around with.

Enough from me, read more in our press release here

Quite recently, we have seen a couple of users on Twitter being excited by the fact that they realised how they can block ads coming from our system and hence make our clients’ services free of ads. Because of this, I think it’s a good time to elaborate a little bit on what we’re thinking when it comes to ad blocking and how one should deal with it.

For respect of our clients, I will not link directly to people explaining how they are blocking us as I would then help spreading knowledge on how to damage our clients business. But it’s not rocket science, so if that’s the info you’re looking for, I’m sure you will find your way.

Before diving into my actual thoughts, I should confess that my initial reaction on this was actually pride. People are blocking us in exactly the same way as ad blockers have blocked other ad servers since the day ad blockers were invented (by blocking requests going to our servers) and we have always known that it was just a matter of time until we too would be blocked.

Anyway, here’s my two cents regarding ad blocking:

• The problem is limited, relatively few people know how to do this which means spending to much energy and resources on how to deal with it might keep you from focusing on what really is important.
• It’s technically very easy to build an online video service to fail completely if the ad server fails to respond with ads. Some of the people twittering about this noted that other services than our clients seemed to be unblockable because of the fact that the entire service stopped working once they blocked the ads. It’s important to note here that this is rather a feature to us. We’re enabling (and are giving our clients the advice) that services should be built to keep working even if the ad server fails to respond. Because of the above argument (that only a few people are actually blocking ads) it’s much more probable that a failure is caused by an error in the adserver than that the user is blocking it, and hence, you’re much better off having a service that actually remains stable even if the ad server fails to respond. With that said, if you disagree, it’s actually easier to make it the other way (that the service goes down if the ad server doesn’t respond).
• We are however working on what we think is a good solution. We can quite easily detect if we’re being blocked rather than having a malfunction. With that detection in place, you can then decide what should happen to users blocking the ads. You could shut down the service for them or decide to do nothing. My best advice however, is to follow Hulu’s lead and use this detection to tell the relevant users that the show they are trying to watch is actually available because someone else (the advertiser) is paying for it. Such information can be really effective in combination with delaying the start of the video with 20-30 seconds, just enough to make sure that the user blocking the ads doesn’t save time by doing so.
• But again, even with such detection in place, this is a race that will be hard to win in every case. Talented and creative people will probably find ways around this, but the question is, if there’s enough of them out there to motivate you focusing on them rather than building the best possible service that can attract as many legitimate viewers as possible?

Do you agree? Looking forward to hear your thoughts on the subject.

It’s been a tough and exciting day at work, as usual. I’m the last in our new big echoing office writing a post about the funding that is about to be announced tomorrow morning. I’m asking myself what to put here that is not the usual corporate BS, something you will actually care about.

Why raise money?

Raising money is not necessarily a good thing, even if reading too much TechCrunch might make you believe so. If your clients can’t fund you someone else has to. That’s basically what it means. Done in the right way though can be a good thing for the company, its clients and partners.

Having been going for nearly 2,5 years now, we’re seeing a massive demand for what we do. We have an approach we believe in and that we know helps publishers make more money. We have clients in 8 markets now (we signed the first Russian client yesterday) getting more and more incoming leads as our product is used by more happy clients. And to be honest, we can’t help them all today in the way we would like to. There’s still so much to be done!

In parallel to this huge client demand, we look ahead at the market and see how it all comes together. Video consumption is really changing in its roots. The old TV is being replaced by the new TV, quicker than we expected.

The new TV needs a new advertising platform and Videoplaza is building that platform.

Having set that vision in place, it’s a no brainer that investing more money than only our profits will not only be a good thing, but also strictly necessary. This is why we’ve raised 3,5M EUR (details here).

What it means

So securing this round of finance will only be good for the ones we care about – our clients and partners.

• We are expanding our development team so they can keep on making wonders to our product. This means more and smarter features.
• We will have more resources to integrate with syndication partners as well as into new emerging platforms and devices. So also here more and smarter integrations.
• We are staffing up our new Client Relations team. This will improve our service level to all of our existing and new clients. We have tons of good ideas to implement here.
• We’re staffing up our commercial team as well, helping us to help more publishers in markets we haven’t been present in before.

So, let’s get to work now! We have a bold vision and in delivering that we will be focused on one thing only – to help publishers monetise their videos in the best possible way.

Our new office by night

Next week Dagens Media is hosting a half-day seminar about online video for media buyers. The event is held at Berns in Stockholm, March 24th. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the agenda posted online, but it seems really promising with interesting people from all the different parts of the business of in-stream advertising.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to the panel discussion with Aftonbladet, Expressen, TV4 and Kanal 5. I am expecting some badgering on the pro’s and con’s with long-form content versus short-form which can really be interesting. The latter two, being broadcasters, obviously advocates long-form content and it’s tv-like experience while the first two don’t lack arguments for why short-form content is better.

Myself, I’m gonna have 20 minutes on stage to explain what online video advertising is today, how the media is best used and what cool stuff is coming up in the near future. I’m hoping to have enough time to also show some inspiring examples of cool campaigns and talk about the upcoming Swedish IAB guide to in-stream advertising that we’re launching at the event.

Unfortunately the event is already over-booked, but I really encourage you all to try to get in anyway. I think it will be worth the effort!

On Monday morning 9.30am GMT online video specialist video blog/site Beet.tv will be in London hosting an executive roundtable that will be streamed live. I’m one the participants in the panel together with a bunch of good people from the industry. The panel will be lead by PaidContent’s Robert Andrews and Beet.tv’s Andy Plesser. It’ll be very interesting to see where the discussions will lead us.

Read more here.

Here’s the line up:
Steve Allison, Technical Evangelist, Adobe Systems EMEA
Greg Beitchman, Global Editor, Reuters News Agency
Emily Bell, Director of Digital Content, Guardian News & Media
Caroline Casey, Director, Digital Development, Turner Broadcasting
Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor, The Economist
Mary Hockaday, Head of BBC Newsroom
Stephen Pinches, Lead Product Development Manager, FT.com
Dewi Price, Head of Technology, Global Web Properties, BBC Worldwide Digital Media
Sorosh Tavakoli, Founder and CEO, Videoplaza
Jeff Whatcott, Senior Vice President, Brightcove