Brands line up for Kate Modern

Bebo is hoping the explosive start to the new series of Kate Modern will continue to hold the attention of the show's massive fan base and its sponsors.

The second series will run for 24 weeks. About 120 episodes will be made and uploaded at an average of five per week.

Second series sponsors - which get to see their products placed within the video - will be Cadbury's Creme Egg and Toyota's youth-targeted car Aygo. Sponsors of the first series included Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Warner Music, Paramount and Orange, which each paid up to £250,000 to appear within the show.

The first series, which was made up of 155 episodes, lasting between one and four minutes each, that ran from July 16 until January 1, drew a total audience of more than 35m videos viewed - an average of 1.5m per week.

No figures have been revealed about what each company might pay to be involved with the second series. However, each company stumps up cash based on the amount its brand is integrated into the storyline, which includes monitoring the number of times it appears in the video and is mentioned in the script.

Warner Music, for example, used its sponsorship to put its act The Days into the show, while Paramount used the series to promote movie Hallam Foe by featuring actor Jamie Bell.

The popularity of the first series of Kate Modern, produced by LG15, the company behind the internet TV hit LonelyGirl15, has led to the development of other programmes for social networking sites.

Bebo has since commissioned two more series, the Sony-made Sofia's Diary, and "interactive online reality drama" The Gap Year, produced by Big Brother maker Endemol.

Online Video Brightcove Forecast

As video content owners and website publishers walk into 2008, we expect several major trends will shape their strategies in the Internet video market.

Branded Destinations
Nothing about the Internet changes the fundamentals of media—value is created by controlling the content or controlling access to the audience. Media companies with established brands and new start-ups will continue to build successful branded destinations so they can control the access to audiences. We expect these destinations will leverage Internet TV Platforms, Community Platforms, and Ad Platforms to compete with the major aggregators by offering consumers a more focused and differentiated experience, including exclusive content, and by giving advertisers a better environment to build their brands.

Audience Networks
Because of the power of the big aggregators to reach new audiences, content owners will continue to develop distribution strategies that place elements of their content library into wide distribution, in most cases with advertising attached. Because there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution, content owners will depend on Internet TV Platforms to help them manage the complex policy and technology challenges associated with implementing Internet distribution strategies. They will use audience networks to bridge the gap between aggregators and their own branded destinations, which will make the web as a whole a much more interesting place.

Audience Monetization
To date the advertising focus in the Internet TV market has been on monetizing video streams. But this focus is both shortsighted and not nearly as effective as thinking about how to monetize audience. By developing audience-centric strategies, content owners will look for new ways to blend ad formats, insertion policies, and targeting tactics across pages, short-form video clips, long-form shows, and open distribution. While they are more difficult to plan and execute these ad strategies deliver greater yield and a much better user experience, which means better sustainability. These strategies will also take advantage of both direct selling and integration with Uber Ad Platforms.

Contextual Publishing
One of the key insights from the last two years is that short-form online video does best when it’s placed in a context. The context could be created by pages in a website, comments from users, line-ups in a player, etc. Regardless of how it’s done, getting the context right means you can put the right video clips in front of a viewer, which makes everyone happy. We expect that contextual in-page video publishing will grow, and that it will be extended to slideshows and audio content as more and more rich media is brought out of silos and into the core of websites.

High-Quality Video
The explosive growth that has happened with the major network episode players, and the increasing access that consumers have to long form, high-quality video will push Internet TV closer to traditional broadcast TV, and widen the opportunity for brand marketers that covet the deep engagement created by a full-screen, immersive experience.

Extract by Jeremy Allaire, Founder/CEO & Adam Berrey, SVP Marketing, Brightcove

Online Video Vernacular

Below is a glossary of some online video terms frequently in use:

Alpha video
Animations that pop up on the page without affecting its other content or functionality. An alpha video can be a sponsor’s mascot or spokesperson, for instance.

In-stream advertising
Ads that run within the video content, either as a pre-roll, post-roll or mid-roll.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand)
The amount of money an advertiser pays for every 1,000 times an ad is seen on a Web page.

Mash-up tools
Editing software tools that let a user to take the video they are watching and combine that with other video or other content to form new content. For example, a user could take clips of a certain video and combine them with other video to make a new video.

Overlays/Flash overlays
Ads shown on the bottom 1/3 of the video screen consisting mostly of text with minimal graphics. The overlays can be clicked on to take the user to other content, such as a sponsor’s Web site or a full-length ad.

Post-roll
A video advertisement shown at the end of the video a user has selected to view. Typically 15 or 30 seconds in length.

Pre-roll
A video advertisement that plays before the start of a video that a user has selected to play shown prior to the user's selected content starting to play. Typically 15 or 30 seconds in length.

Pre-roll bumpers
Short pre-roll video ads or content previews shown before a user's selected content starts to play. Typically 8 seconds in length.

Product and brand integration
A video that includes identifiable products or logos embedded into a video’s content, such as a character in the video is holding a brand-name can of soft drink.

Rate card
The price list of the various forms of advertising on a particular Web site.

Reminder unit
A static ad that runs outside a video player, below a video ad from the same advertiser.

Reservation-purchase basis
An advance reservation for an ad, meaning the ad must be bought and reserved in advance.

Roadblock
Full-screen ad that usually takes over the home page of a Web site when a visitor lands there. The ads, which can usually be bypassed by users who can find a “skip this ad” message, can run for any length of time. Most run 15 or 20 seconds. Alt. def: An advertising package that gives a sponsor all the ad units on a Web site.

Video ads
Ads in the form of a video, rather than a banner, display or text ad.

Video buy
An ad buy involving video.

EU Bienvenue à Product Placement

European Union lawmakers gave the final green light last month to ground breaking new EU rules allowing broadcasters to raise more money through product placement in order to off-set new technologies such as video-on-demand and PVRs. Euro MPs adopted the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which aims to update EU broadcasting law to cater for developments such as the Internet and mobile TV. The new rules will now be sent to national capitals, and the EU's 27 member countries will have until the end of 2009 to implement them into their statute books. The European Commission said the new rules would meet the demands of a fast-moving and dynamic industry, citing the new text should help European media business remain competitive in the digital era.

According to FremantleMedia, product placement on European television could bring in revenues of €150m (£107m) by 2010.

Recent figures from countries that permit product placement, such as Australia suggest that clearer rules should help the European audiovisual industry become more competitive, especially compared with the U.S.