A new service is bringing Internet video content to local television. Film shorts, animation, video blogs, webisode-style series, independent productions as well as local videos from community and sporting events can now be uploaded for TV viewing as well as for sharing with friends, family and TV subscribers.
Pegged as ‘broadcast advertising for the online age,’ US-based TellyTopia’s Internet-to-TV service i2TV has amassed over 10,000 ad revenue-sharing video producers since it launched in April, including Canada’s Larry Graves, UNICEF, Dadlabs, TrueNuff, US Army (DVIDs), I look like my mom productions, Diet.com, MadefitTV and icplaces.
The service is expcted to reach a million TV sets in the US by September, and next week an over-the-air broadcast in the San Francisco Bay area will reach up to four million people, according to TellyTopia founder and CEO, Kshitij Kumar. Cable providers currently on board include Coaxial Cable TV and Kuhn Communications in Pennsylvania and Surewest for IPTV in Sacramento, CA. Plans with cable cos in Canada are also currently in the works.
Producers uploading content online to a number of sites can now upload it to TV as well through the aggregation engine Tubemogul by selecting ‘i2TV’ or directly on TellyTopia’s i2TV system. ‘People who want to make a point about the local political hot-issues, people who have something interesting to say in the local area, people with content that makes sense locally,’ Kumar tells MiC, ‘all of them get the ability to reach the local television audience.’
Content partner Vancouver-based TrueNuff Entertainment, which is also providing the editorial direction, sends email notifications to producers when their videos are going to be on TV. TellyTopia filters the best videos and provides the back-end technology enabling the relationship with cable TV and IPTV to deliver the content, targeted to specified locations and content areas. TellyTopia VP and co-founder Dr. Ram Srinivasan says the i2TV service is hassle-free for cable and IPTV providers because all the content is checked for copyright and appropriateness for television.
Kumar tells MiC the co is currently heading into an ad-supported video stage, and is offering overlays (intrastitial ads) and in-betweens (interstitial ads) with geographic, content-based and personal targeting.
Cable and IPTV operators get a private site where their ads can be uploaded, and where any advertiser can go, buy an ad – even create an overlay ad, purchase it with a credit card, target it to specific types of videos they want to advertise to, and Tellytopia enables the delivery to TV. Ads can be sold by TSP, TellyTopia/i2TV or the producer. Advertising revs are shared among the TV service provider (usually a cableco), the producer and TellyTopia.
TellyTopia’s partnership with Tubemogul also allows the online video distributor to provide producers and advertisers a single source of metrics and predictive algorithms on where, when and how often the videos are viewed.
