Well-focused advertising is thought of as content

Posted on May 22, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, Insights |

That's according to Josh Goldman, CEO of IP TV aggregator Akimbo. Josh agreed to speak with Mediangle and gave some forthright opinions on where advertising is going.

"The world of forcing people to watch an advert - that is going away." 

Josh was also explaining his decision to do with a download model for IP TV. Akimbo currently has 11,000 hours of pogramming on offer and is about to launch with AT&T's Homezone, opening Akimbo content out to tens of millions of viewers. 

"Most on-demand systems have only hundreds, at most a small number of thousands of hours of video because when you stream you have to have a very different kind of server, and a very expensive server" says Josh. "We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars because the viewer is watching on your server, fast forwarding on your server, and rewinding on your server. Downloading overcomes this. And now we see devices with memory in the home, our business is based on that, storage in the home."

What's proving popular in Akimbo's electic content mix? "Foreign language content (Chinese, Indian, French, German, Korean); independent films, music videos now that MTV doesn't do so much music video, lifestyle programming. Gay and lesbian lifestyles not necessarily adult content. Lifestyle and political. Fawlty Towers was one of our biggest for weeks."

Can the small guy make money showing their content on Akimbo? It's like blogging suggests Josh. Good content well presented is making money for people and there are a few making a living from it on Akimbo. As Akimbo goes to the tens of millions of households life for the long tail of content providers is looking up. On adverts here's the last word.

"There are people who don't get it," says Josh,  "and who just hang on to the 30 second ad, asking us what's the most popular video." For those who do get it Akimbo has the demographics and profiling technology to make ads relevant enough that they appear like content.

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