iSpot.tv Comes Out Of Stealth To Become The IMDB Of Commercials And Provide A New Second-Screen Marketing Platform
There are a few places where users can already find their favorite TV spots online, but no definitive repository of commercials. That’s why iSpot.tv wants to be the place to find TV ads online. The startup has been working to catalog commercials by automatically tracking and monitoring them from live TV.
Using proprietary audio and video fingerprinting technology, the company extracts product advertisements, movie trailers, and other show promos, and then catalogs them by product and brand. Once a commercial is in its database, it then tracks that ad whenever it appears on a number of broadcast and cable networks. As a result, it has a huge library of content already: The startup claims to have tracked down more than 13,200 commercials that have been aired more than 1.8 million times.
While offering up a repository of ads could be valuable to consumers, the bigger picture here is iSpot.tv’s hopes to provide data around those ads. It’s looking to partner with brands and agencies to get more relevant metadata around the ads that it scrapes, while also keeping track of when they appear to help measure effectiveness.
There’s another part of this story, though — in addition to its commercial destination site, iSpot.tv wants to help provide brands and marketers with tools to cash in on the number of people who are using mobile devices while watching TV ads. More shows are using hashtags to increase promotion on sites like Twitter, and brands are doing so as well. iSpot.tv wants to help advertisers increase brand awareness with a tool that will allow marketers to connect directly with users tweeting about their products.
It works like this: Advertisers can incorporate hashtags into their ads to enable users to get coupons or discounts for goods by tweeting about a certain platform. The platform then automatically recognizes when a Twitter user has tweeted using that hashtag, and uses the brand account or another account to reply to the user with a link to redeem the deal through a mobile-optimized website. Since iSpot.tv can track different airings of the same ad, it will give brands real-time information about when those ads are most effective in driving user awareness.
iSpot.tv was founded by former Demand Media executives, including former CTO Sean Muller, who is co-founder and CEO of the new venture. Paul Stahura, who was founder and CEO of eNom before selling to Demand Media, is also on the board and has invested in the startup. The company has raised $575,000 in seed funding that also included participation from Pagewise co-founder David Hehman, Hillclimb Media founders Doug Colbeck and Bryce Stevens, LoveToKnow founder Howard Love, and Oversee.net founder Fred Hsu, among others.
Read More →Cinsay Promotes Crowdfunding Projects and Provides Branded Merchandise for Social Entrepreneurs
Cinsay, a leader in social video commerce technology, is also playing a part with Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, StartSomeGood.com and Indiegogo.com.From filmmakers and artists to inventors and social entrepreneurs, people are coupling their microfunding efforts with Cinsay’s Smart Store™ platform to extend their reach on the web and to increase revenues with on demand,branded merchandise that’s built right into the video player. This month, Cinsay is offering Kickstarter and other microfunding users a free Cinsay On Demand account. Users simply upload their existing promotion video along with customized artwork for the merchandise and a link-back to their funding site.
SOURCE:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/11/prweb10138495.htm
Tags: cinsay, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, kickstarter, social-video-commerce-technology, tools, video
Read More →Vimeo Creators Can Now Make Money Off Their Videos
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Vimeo’s president, Dae Mellencamp, likened Tip Jar to crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo, but distinguished the feature as “crowdsourcing payments rather than funding.”
Tip Jar isn’t the only monetization platform Vimeo has in the works. The company also announced its new Vimeo pay-to-view service, which will officially launch in early 2013.
Vimeo describes its pay-to-view feature as an “open platform for video creators to sell access to their films and videos.” Think of it as the traditional VOD (Video On Demand) and rental model, but with more democratization.
SOURCE LINK to the full article: http://mashable.com/2012/09/19/vimeo-tip-jar/
Tags: caines-arcade, credit-cards, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, paypal, tip-jar, vimeo
Read More →Demand Media Alums Invest $575,000 In iSpot.tv, A Platform For Social Marketing On TV
Since more and more people are watching TV with their mobile phones and tablets in hand, brands and advertisers are increasingly faced with a big problem: How do you reach audiences that are turning to these second-screen devices whenever a commercial break comes on? To solve that problem, former Demand Media CTO Sean Muller founded iSpot.tv seven months ago, hoping to provide an elegant and mobile-first solution for reaching those audiences.
The company is still in stealth mode, so without giving too much away, Muller said the company was trying to find out how to connect TV campaigns to social media. But he did say that the startup has built is a a platform for brands to engage with audiences both on the TV and on social networks.
A number of Demand Media alums have put money into the startup, including Muller and Paul Stahura, who was founder and CEO of eNom before selling to Demand Media and becoming its president and COO. Stahura, who recently raised $100 million for new gTLDs as the founder and CEO of Donuts.com, also sits on the iSpot.tv board. The round also included participation from Pagewise co-founder David Hehman, as well as Hillclimb Media founders Doug Colbeck and Bryce Stevens, who also sold their companies to Demand Media. Howard Love, founder of LoveToKnow, and Fred Hsu, founder of Oversee.net, also invested, along with a few other angels.
It’s still early days for iSpot.tv. The company has five full-time employees in Seattle, and it expects initial trials to begin within the next month or two in the local TV market. Once those trials are done, it’s planning to raise additional funding to make the technology available to marketers in other areas.
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