--Cox, NBCU Team on Trial of Dynamic VOD Advertising
MaxPreps.com, a CBS Interactive-owned Web site that offers coverage of high-school sports, said Monday that it has signed a deal with Comcast to deliver an extensive line-up of high-school sports VOD programming on Comcast's Houston system. According to the company, the deal will see it producing "hundreds" of short-form features on high-school sports teams and athletes from the Houston area throughout the 2009-10 school year. The content will be available for free in the "Get Local" section of Comcast Houston's VOD platform.
Programming available as a result of the deal consists of three different types of feature:
- "At The Game": cut-downs and highlights from a range of games across 12 men's and women's Varsity sports.
- "Hometown Heroes": human interest stories about athletes involved in the community.
- "Recruiting Profiles": coverage of top Houston-area athletes who are being recruited to play in college.
The new service represents MaxPreps.com's initial foray into the cable VOD space. The company produces all its content in-house, and the content is then delivered to Comcast Houston by Clearleap, an Atlanta-based company which offers a technology platform for bringing Internet-sourced video content to television sets (note: earlier this year, Clearleap announced deployments with Atlantic Broadband and Bresnan--see the articles published on itvt.com, June 30th and September 13th). "Comcast is a terrific partner that understands the value of local sports content, and as the nation's leading high-school sports outlet, MaxPreps.com is able to utilize our extensive network to further serve fans in one of the nation's top sports markets," MaxPreps.com president, Andy Beal, said in a prepared statement. "Through this agreement MaxPreps.com is extending its capabilities to reach more fans through additional platforms and further showcase high-school sports locally."
In other VOD news:
- Shortly after announcing that it would add HD versions of six NBC primetime shows to its MyPrimetime VOD service (see the article published on itvt.com, November 11th), Cox Communications has announced that it is teaming with NBC Universal on a trial of dynamic VOD advertising in Phoenix that will see it dynamically inserting up to four different ads into episodes of NBC's "The Office" and USA Network's "Monk." The ads, including pre-rolls and interior breaks, will be refreshed several times per week for each show. The trial, which follows a trial earlier this year of dynamic advertising in VOD content from Cox's own Travel Channel, sees Cox collaborating with SeaChange International, Avail-TVN and Texscan NT. According to Cox and NBC Universal, the trial is intended to "explore the division of responsibilities, operational hand-offs and processes necessary to enable successful dynamic ad insertion," and is based on the SCTE-130 specifications for dynamic ad insertion, as well as various other broadcast and cable standards. Multichannel News's Todd Spangler has more detail.
- Motorola has now officially announced its acquisition of Israeli VOD technology provider, BitBand. [itvt] reported the acquisition--news of which was broken by the Israeli media over the weekend--in an article published on itvt.com, November 16th.
