Mike Hudack on Blip.TV's Quicktime Downloads Measurement Tool

Video downloading via iTunes is a massive platform for video producers. For publishers and advertisers, there are problems: Although publishers know who subscribes or downloads videos via iTunes, they don't know much more. Moreover, advertising served into videos are "baked-in" to files. Blip.tv, the New York online video publishing site, has a solution, according to CEO and co-founder Mike Hudack. Mike made the announcement of this new product offering at our online video roundtable.

Mike Hudack on Blip.TV's Quicktime Downloads Measurement Tool Andy Plesser: In the good all days of video blogging there was none of this flash up. Well there was but it really before that it was podcast which evolve into video podcast, which still are very, very poor. Now I'll check you guys extremely huge number of as downloadable media. So talking about downloadable media for a minute, I want to ask you Mike first of all you know you’ve got some subscribers. You don’t know whose watching and if you put an ad into a downloadable media it kind of sticks there and it can't be swap out when the car is older, a company is out of business. So what's happening with downloadable media and how? Give us some update. Mike Hudack: Well Andy, we haven’t officially announced this yet but everybody keep it quiet. So we found a number of things. One is that we deal with episodic content. We go with content that people subscribe to and they want every new episode delivered to them on a regular basis. And so a lot of our traffic comes from iTunes, comes from people subscribing in iTunes or subscribing in other pod captures if you will. And pretty much all those work in HD 64 and we are also very happy that you know flash supports HD 64 now had been SilverLite does as well and traditionally the problem has been that you can't really first measure and secondly effectively monetize downloadable quick tab. We’ve spend the last five or six months developing some technology that allow us to do first of all, dynamic ad and search at QuickTime. So at the point that the video is requested we’re pinging DFP or pinging guard and we’re asking what ad should we serve into this. And then we are doing dynamic in searching literally baking into the video, the creative and it be proved all post were overlay. We are then manipulating the QuickTime contender a little bit to put basically hyper links to additional assets. When the video is downloaded then playback, we actually go back to the server and we ask what pre-role should I run, what overlay should I run. And that is actually in sort of then in real time. It’s tracked by dark. It’s track by DFP and then the pre-roles or post roles and the overlays are all clickable and the overlays in fact are closeable and fully interactive in the same way that they can be close in flash or in SilverLite. So it’s really extending that same advertising experience that you have on the web browser straight down in iTunes and we find that probably about half to three quarters of the people who subscribe to the podcast and iTunes actually watch the video on iTunes. So in that case are getting fully dynamic, fully third-party verified advertising, and then for those people who go and watch the video on their Apple TV or on their iPhone or on their iPod they continue to see the creative even though it’s not being third-party tracked and verified. And we’ve done a couple of campaigns for this now. The most recently Puma and they wanted to target women who are into golf and we happen to have a couple different shows targeted at women, believe it or not. And then we extended that by across a number of different sports team shows and women targeted shows from no targeted shows. It was very powerful and it was very effective because Puma could only show wherever was you, whether there's on the web, whether there was on iTunes, whether was on the Apple TV. And it has really worked very well for us so far. Andy Plesser: When did you start doing this? Mike Hudack: So we started doing the first actual live ads about a month ago. Andy Plesser: So what percentage of your viewership as the iTunes? Mike Hudack: In terms of downloadable QuickTime views whether it’s iTunes or Apple TV or whatever it maybe is about 15-18%. Andy Plesser: Yeah, that’s what I found on my show. Mike Hudack: Yup.