As content to the cloud becomes more and more omnipresent, it’s only a matter of time before mobile TV uses it to its advantage. Now, one company is bringing the cloud to the masses in a big way, while also delivering dedicated ad revenue, which mobile content producers always love hearing about.
Many Hearst-owned stations in the United States are delivering short-form content from the cloud to mobile devices using the service Yospace. The content provider delivers programming to many platforms while tying in an advertising engine. The company’s technology not only brings the clips but also links up with the broadcaster’s ad server to specifically target pre-roll advertising geared toward the viewer.
Entertainment clips and news videos are uploaded to the Yospace servers, while rolling in local and national advertising. The content is distributed through the various mobile device apps that reside in the Hearst Television SmartPhone platform, as well as being available on its key mobile websites. Once a request for a clip hits the server, the content provider detects what device it is going to and figures out the area to be targeted.
The service then pulls a specific commercial tied into the local area that is relevant, sets it up as a pre-roll, arranges the correct video bandwidth and format, and streams it out to the end user. This all happens within seconds, and is typically seen as instantaneous when a consumer chooses to view a clip. This method covers all major platforms including smartphones, iPhone, iPad, mobile and Internet.
Logging, creating and queuing up pre-rolls can be a daunting task, but for Hearst, the system is easy. It can set it all up ahead of time using Yospace, and then let the servers do all the heavy lifting concerning what clip and what commercial go where. And, because Yospace is all cloud-based, it can scale up dramatically as user demand swells.
The alliance has started to really increase this year and is already going live in more than 25 Hearst markets. Yospace has leveraged cloud-server content to mobile TV with a system that allows targeted marketing and detailed analytic tracking. We expect to see many more options along these lines as the year progresses.