Robert Andrews

It made all the early running – but can Netflix keep its place at the head of the SVOD pack? Irwin Gotlieb doesn’t think so. The veteran media and technology watcher spent years as global CEO of media agency GroupM. In this video interview with Beet.TV, he says he foresees “fall-out” from the streaming wars, […]

Viewers still love TV, they use it to de-stress, and they have more of it available than ever. But the plethora of viewing options threatens to make audiences’ lives more complex, not less. That is according to research commissioned by Viacom. The owner of MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Channel 5 recently published Today’s TV, […]

LONDON — After its UK subsidiary Virgin Media spent the last two years integrating with rival pay-TV operator Sky to light up targeted TV ad capabilities, Liberty Global will use the deal as a template for future European roll-outs. In 2017, rival Virgin Media, a cable TV operator, announced it would take on Sky’s AdSmart to power […]

LONDON — It’s a fragmented world, and none more so than in a fragmented continent. Advertisers want to be able to reach viewers across the plethora of video screens and services – but their agencies are hard-pressed to measure their impact. That goes doubly so when new services keep popping up which don’t necessarily subscribe […]

LONDON – It was one of the most promising early pioneers of the digital video technology world. Could Sorenson Media finally be about to make it big? Nielsen last year acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed […]

Two publicly-traded ad-tech companies say they want to merge, in order to seize the opportunity emerging in connected TV advertising alongside inventory of other digital channels. Rubicon Project and Telaria announced their agreement on Thursday, without putting a price on it. They say the combined company – owned 47.1% by Telaria shareholders and 52.9% by […]

LONDON – Live sports used to be the cornerstone of pay-TV providers’ bundled strategy. But, with classical pay-TV subscriptions around the world plateauing, many pay-TV companies are now peeling out sports from their bundle, via over-the-top internet streaming offerings. Case in point – Australia’s Foxtel, which has around three million total subscribers but which last […]

LONDON – Samsung knows what you use your TV for – now it just needs to encourage advertisers to use that data. The electronics manufacturer’s Samsung Ads division has access to viewing data from 45 million US owners of Samsung Smart TVs plus 200 million connected devices. The business unit is able to understand actual […]

LONDON — It’s half a year since three of the biggest US cable TV groups came together to unite TV distributors around addressable targeting technology. Going in to a new year, one of the technical partners delivering the project says it will pilot the initiative in 2020. Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications announced On […]

LONDON – Ad agencies are rearchitecting themselves to meet the opportunities of advanced TV technology that promises them the ability to reach individual households or precision-targeted groups of individuals. That is the observation from one group providing a helping hand to agencies under the banner of the world’s largest agency holding group. Finecast claims to […]

LONDON – It is already helping advertisers understand what viewers are watching on TV channels around the world. Now it is gearing up to increase its European footprint significantly in the year ahead. TV ad-tech firm Samba TV tells Beet.TV it just inked a deal that will allow it to so so. “We recently did […]

Roku is the world’s most popular add-on internet TV device. But, in a world where more new TV sets are now shipping with internet services built in, Roku is going to need to change to defend its position. After previously getting its software embedded on TVs from TCL, Sharp and Hisense in the US, Roku […]

It is the addressable TV technology that started by storing alternative commercials on satellite subscribers’ set-top boxes, then grew in to one of the world’s most revered such systems. Can Sky’s AdSmart now become a global standard in the deployment of household-targetable TV advertising? After the European provider’s acquisition by Comcast last year, after it […]

2019 was the year during which the proliferating range of options for buying targeted TV ads proved enticing but confusing for marketers. That precipitated a range of initiatives, collaborations and consortia aimed at making things simpler, achieving scale and reducing the number of players buyers need to work with. But, outside of the US, things […]

The promise of addressable TV – the technology which allows advertisers to reach individual households – may seem to be all about the targeting. But true use of the opportunity is running wider than that. This is according to one man whose addressable TV company is celebrating having achieved a depth of real use cases. […]

If you are a Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare wizard, Cathy Oh may know about it. As global head of marketing and analytics at Samsung Ads, Oh boasts that her employer can see what 45 million owners of Samsung Smart TVs are doing on their sets. Of course, it is all anonymized. But, for Oh, […]

LONDON – With initiatives like OpenAP, Ampersand, Project OAR and more making big announcements, it is clear that 2019 was the year when collaboration became the key imperative in seizing the opportunities of advanced TV ad targeting. In Europe, the leading pay-TV provider Sky has long been forging a collaborative path with its pioneering AdSmart […]

LONDON –   A year after acquiring the former Videoplaza video ad technology from its latest owner, ad-tech firm INVIDI says it has launched a new software suite, aimed at uniting the disparate worlds of advanced TV advertising. In December 2018, INVIDI, which is owned by a consortium of groups, acquired Pulse, the technology of the […]

The upcoming holiday season is likely to lead to a greater deployment of smart TVs that may help smoothe the path for advertisers to buy advanced, addressable targeting ad campaigns using the latest OTT technology. That is the hope of the addressable TV leader at Modi Media, the advanced TV wing of media agency Group […]

LONDON – The ability to precision-target TV ads at individual households – currently limited to a relatively small proportion of available broadcast time – will soon expand to the majority of inventory, according to one exec making it happen. Keith Kryszczun, president of global sales at Cadent, a technology company which enables the practice for […]