BitTorrent Entertainment Network to get ad-supported downloads

posted by soulxtc in bittorrent // 646 days 13 hours 8 minutes ago

YuMe Networks has announced that it is launching the "First-Ever Online Advertising Within Downloaded Video on the BitTorrent Entertainment Network."

YuMe Networks is set to launch a new dedicated advertising network created and optimized for broadband video that will allow advertisers to insert dynamically served video advertising within downloadable content.

“Today we are launching a game-changing capability that will take online video advertising to another level,” said Jayant Kadambi, CEO and co-founder of YuMe Networks. “We are excited to bring advertisers a solution that enables them to insert dynamic, targeted and customizable campaigns in content downloaded from online destinations such as BitTorrent to any device — PC, mobile, IPTV and more.”

The company claims that it will also be able to allow companies to measure and track user viewing and continually optimize the ads delivered with downloaded video based on the results. The first campaign will promote the upcoming video and PC game "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary" published by Eidos Interactive, said YuMe. The ads will be featured on video files from Comcast Networks' G4 TV and distributed on BitTorrent.

“We have been working diligently with a range of video publishers from the largest movie studios to the creators of independent video to advocate the role advertising can play in delivering their content to the BitTorrent community,” said Ashwin Navin, President and co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc. “The combination of our extensive user base, worldwide content relationships and powerfully efficient distribution model, is enabling a rapid shift toward free, ad-supported content available on the BitTorrent Entertainment Network.”

Until today, downloaded content was made available to consumers as free content or on a pay-per-download basis. It hasn’t been possible to insert advertising in downloaded content in the past because Web publishers couldn’t measure and track viewings of the ads. In addition, YuMe’s measurement and creative optimization capabilities have never before been available to online video advertisers, who currently can buy only untargeted, “run of site” placement on web sites and receive only basic metrics about how often their ad played.

YuMe’s new technology actually measures “view-throughs” rather than “click-throughs” to report back exactly how many people viewed and the number of times they viewed, in addition to whether they clicked. Because this new “view-through” metric directly measures and reports the viewer’s behavior, it is likely to become the new performance method used to determine how an advertiser will pay a publisher for online video advertising.

"More free content will now be available," said Kadambi. "Our technology allows P2P sites to determine the best monetization model by content type... Some content lends itself more to a pay-to-own model, like movies, whereas episodic programming lends itself better to an ad-supported model."

"Ad systems today are very good at taking content from HTML pages and then deciding contextually what is the most relevant search link or what is the most relevant text associated with that content and sending back a banner or text ad to associate with that," said Kadambi. "What we're saying is that video streaming is a fundamentally different thing. You need to do it cross-platform and you should be able to take a video ad, associate it with a set of content and demographics and allow the advertiser to associate that regardless of where the content is being watched -- be it the Web, a mobile phone or a BitTorrent download -- and aggregate the reporting all across that."

I think this is good news for the BitTorrent community and BitTorrent Inc. as well, seeing how so many have been reluctant to purchase video content from the BitTorrent Entertainment Network because of price, DRM, and playback concerns. Now that ad-supported content will be offered for free, this will remove each of these concerns and make the whole system more palatable to all.