TV of tomorrow

SAN FRANCISCO — Viggle has set about enabling a virtuous “circle” of TV discovery and reward after acquiring Dijit in January. Dijit’s NextGuide product lets broadcasters place a “reminder” button on their pages so that viewers can receive notifications of upcoming shows. Viggle, a check-in app that gives users rewards for watching shows, acquired the […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Once conceived as an ambitious cable industry effort to insert ads in interactive TV, Canoe Ventures says it is now making headway after pivoting from its original goal. The venture flipped three years ago to help TV content owners benefit from ad sales in their own content when it is hosted on cable operators’ […]

SAN FRANCISCO — After launching to let viewers consume live and recorded US broadcast TV on a multitude of devices in 2011, Simple.TV will soon launch in the UK. CEO Mark Ely tells Beet.TV: “A lot of there most watched, most popular content is available through the major networks. We are the TV Everywhere solution for […]

SAN FRANCISCO — It was the operating system that nobody loved. When LG Electronics acquired webOS from HP in 2013, it bought a technically sound OS that had struggled to make headway during the mobile platform wars. Now the electronics group is hoping webOS can finally flourish by simplifying the smart TV experience, with the […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Ad group WPP is already making video and TV shows on behalf of advertisers, through its GroupM Entertainment division. But it wants to bring distribution platforms together to take its content to larger audiences. “The big aggregators have advantages, whether they’re Yahoo, AOL, Google or YouTube,” says the division’s CEO Peter Tortocici. “They […]

SAN FRANCISCO — TV subscribers want to be able to watch their programming digitally wherever they are. But creating a harmonious access point when the US’ patchwork market comprises dozens of different operators is a significant undertaking. Angie Britt, the advanced products VP at cable operators’ joint marketing association CTAM, says the sector-wide “TV Everywhere” initiative […]

SAN FRANCISCO —  BlackArrow SVP Chris Hock says the company helps pay-TV operators make money from their content, no matter what screen it is served on. The San Jose, CA, firm’s technology is used by traditional cable operators in up to 32 million US homes, Hock says. The outfit’s product suites include software for campaigns, […]

CANNES  — Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr a year ago was all about helping brands go beyond conventional display ad formats. And now Yahoo has started promoting Tumblr content marketing slots across its network. “The traditional inventory … haven’t really provided marketers the environment to tell a rich, engaging, robust story,” says Yahoo’s head of the […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Lifestyle TV company Scripps Networks Interactive is already doing plenty in digital media – now it wants to better marry those activities with its core TV strategy. “Ninety-five percent of our revenue comes from linear – and yet we have a gargantuan digital side,” the company’s senior advisor Channing Dawson tells Beet.TV. […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Can crunching gigabytes of data help TV companies give viewers more of what they want? Christy Martin, chief technology advisor at search and recommendation firm ThinkAnalytics, thinks so. “There’s tons of opportunity that’s still untapped,” she tells Beet.TV. “With all the fragmentation that’s out there – for programmers making sure that their content […]

The UK may not have a joint “TV Everywhere” initiative like that in the US – but subscription satellite TV and broadband operator  BSkyB is seeing mobile viewing boom despite (or perhaps because) of that. “We are seeing … a third of our customer base using ‘TV everywhere’ every month,” says BSkyB‘s business developer VP Hilary […]

SAN FRANCISCO — The TV Everywhere system for allowing online viewers to watch channels from the US’ patchwork of cable operators is booming thanks to sports popularity. “We saw about a 250% increase in TV Everywhere streams this past quarter over the previous year,” says Adobe’s Primetime VP Jeremy Helfand. “Live sports has been a […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Mobile devices, led by the Apple operating system, are fueling the spread of TV Everywhere, says Tamara Gaffney, Principal Analyst with Adobe Digital Index in this video interview. “The iOS app has surpassed the browser as the most common access point for TV Everywhere,” she says, sharing the details of a just-released study […]