Ooyala acquires Videoplaza
October 21, 2014
Establishing a presence in the fast-growing video advertising market, Ooyala, a Telstra subsidiary and video streaming, personalisation and analytics specialist is to acquire Videoplaza, a specilaist in video advertising technology and monetisation.
Videoplaza operates one of the world’s largest video ad serving platforms and programmatic trading solutions, delivering ads to viewers across all devices. It is used by broadcasters and media companies throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region to maximise video monetisation.
This acquisition allows Ooyala to tap into the fast-growing video ad market and build out a new business dimension in advertising. As more premium video viewing moves away from traditional TV to web and mobile consumption, major media agencies are recommending their clients move up to 25 per cent of their TV ad budgets to digital. In the US alone, digital video ad revenues will increase more than 40 per cent this year, compared to just over three percent growth for TV advertising.
For Ooyala, this acquisition is the first step in a multi-step strategy aimed at establishing global leadership in personalised cloud TV and video, following Ooyala’s acquisition by Telstra, the world’s tenth largest telecommunications and information services company. For Videoplaza, joining forces with Ooyala enables a rapid expansion into the US and helps address a broader range of customers around the world through Ooyala’s global sales force.
With Videoplaza, Ooyala will offer an expanded product portfolio addressing a full range of customer needs. These include content acquisition and workflow, playback experience, ad serving, programmatic trading, personalised content recommendation, and real-time analytics for audience behavior as well as content and ad performance. Each company’s individual offerings will remain in the market on a standalone basis. Over time, Ooyala will also offer a unified platform leveraging the strengths of both companies’ technologies and expertise.
“Ooyala helps media companies build the largest possible audiences online, while Videoplaza helps them extract as much value as possible from that audience. Our combined platforms will offer a more holistic view of content and ad performance across a broadcaster’s entire business, including granular data on not only what, how and where people are watching, but also where and how they can make the most money,” said Ooyala Chief Executive Officer Jay Fulcher. “Videoplaza’s team has clearly demonstrated strong leadership in the fast-growing video advertising market, and are closely aligned with our vision for growth and innovation in this new line of business.”
Videoplaza Founder and Chief Executive Officer Sorosh Tavakoli said, “We are excited to join forces with Ooyala and Telstra. We share their vision and believe their strong appetite to invest for the long term in building a global market leader will set us apart. This acquisition will allow us to expand our mission in helping broadcasters and premium publishers build highly profitable and sustainable businesses.”
Telstra Software Group’s President, Charlotte Yarkoni, said, “The combination of Videoplaza and Ooyala establishes a leading global personalised cloud TV and video company. Telstra is pleased to be facilitating this combination and is excited by the prospects of what this means for Ooyala’s market leadership. With Telstra’s support, Ooyala will continue to look at investment opportunities to continue to build the leading personalised video company.”
Tavakoli and his executive team will lead Ooyala’s video advertising business line, as its ad serving solution, Karbon, and programmatic trading platform, Konnect, are added to the Ooyala product portfolio. These solutions will be sold both in conjunction with, and separately from, Ooyala’s video platform.
Videoplaza already powers video advertising for some of the world’s largest video publishers, including half of Europe’s broadcasters and several tier-one media owners in the Asia Pacific region. Videoplaza’s client base includes affiliates of the RTL Group such as M6 (France) and IP Deutschland (Germany), members of the Bonnier Group such as TV4 (Sweden), Mediaset (Spain), STV (UK), MediaCorp (Asia), Sony Entertainment India and Singapore’s Mediacorp.
On its own, Ooyala powers video for hundreds of broadcasters and media companies. While many large customers such as ESPN and Univision are in the US, over half of its business is international. Ooyala sees billions of analytics events on a daily basis from 150 million viewers each month using Ooyala technology in nearly every country in the world.