In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Xuomo is in advanced conversations to be acquired by Comcast. Today, the companies announced the deal.
Launched in 2011 by MySpace owner Viant together with Panasonic, Xumo offers more than 160 channels on smart TVs from Hisense, Magnavox, Panasonic, Philips, Sanyo, Sharp and VIZIO, plus on LG TVs and as a Roku channel.
“Consumers are getting a little burned out on all the SVOD options,” says CEO Colin Petrie-Norris in this video interview with Beet.TV recorded in September at the Xandr Relevance conference in Santa Barbara.
“Some will have three or four or five subscription packages, but a lot of the market (will) maybe have one or two, maybe Netflix and they’re looking for something to compliment their OTT experience.”
Channels offered by Xumo include NowThis News, Billboard, Hollywood Reporter and PeopleTV.
But, if the new crop of “AVOD” services is to be successful, it will also have to be very different from TV.
After all, the rise of subscription (SVOD) is, in part, thanks to that model coming without any ads, welcomed by a generation of viewers tired of interruptions and excessive ad load.
Those are sensitivities which Xuomo’s Petrie-Norris is live to.
“You don’t want to just barrage them … because I want to see those users come back the next week and the next day,” he says.
“We’ve been able to innovate a new technology which dynamically adjusts ad loads in different types of content, at different hours of the day, even to certain types of user.
“What we’re doing is managing that engagement-to-yield trade-off to bring the ad load up to a point where the consumer says, ‘This is acceptable for this type of content’.
This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. It was taped in September. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr. Please visit this page to find more videos from the series.
