--Companies to Explore Collaboration on Interactive Video Advertising
Japanese incumbent telco, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), announced Tuesday that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Silicon Valley-based Ooyala, to launch a "joint exploration of the business potential and technologies related to interactive video advertising." Ooyala, which was founded in 2007 by former Google employees, Bismark Lepe, Belsasar Lepe and Sean Knapp and which last year announced that it had raised $8.5 million in a funding round led by Sierra Ventures, offers an interactive video platform which it claims, among other things, automates video object recognition and tracking, and allows the creation of clickable objects within a video, enabling viewers, for example, to access more information on products featured in a commercial or show.
According to NTT and Ooyala, which say they are both seeking to create an interactive video advertising business, the MOU calls for them to explore: 1) the provision of new services through the integration of Ooyala's in-video advertising platform with NTT's infrastructure services such as network and hosting services; and 2) the potential for customizing and refining an in-video advertising platform tailored to the Japanese market, and then expanding their business in the Asian region and globally. The companies say that they plan to "immediately initiate" a research team that will study "how to concretize this vision" and explore possibilities for collaboration between them.
A press release from Ooyala vendor, Control Group, provides more information on how the company's interactive video technology works: "When video is processed with Ooyala's tools, content producers can identify and associate metadata with specific people, objects and shapes within the video by using a simple framing tool in the ingest UI," the release reads. "Ooyala's backend video processing platform, based on complex computer vision algorithms, then tracks these tagged objects as they move through the content, preserving their identities and associated metadata. When processed video is displayed in any application using Ooyala's player, these objects "broadcast" their metadata information to the surrounding application whenever and wherever they appear in the video. For example, this data may include objects' identities, descriptions, and their x-y coordinates and dimensions within the video frame. In sum, this technology enables groundbreaking integration capabilities for both active and passive user experiences."
Demos of Ooyala's interactive video technology can be seen at: http://www.ooyala.com/products/ivideo
