Innovative startup companies leading the future for the digital media landscape will be showcased at the IBC2017 Startup Forum.
IBC2017 will showcase 75 global startups companies at the new feature event the Startup Forum.
The Forum features a pre-selcted networking hub to connect investors and media houses with the global startup and scaleup companies, who will have the opportunity to pitch to leading investors and executives.
Featuring a deal room for scheduled speed-meetings, an informal networking area, theatre for keynote speakers, pitches and sponsored sessions and an executive dinner to bring together high-level attendees prior to the event.
Read more hear from Valossa, Exponenta, PhenixP2P Inc, Filmstro and InterfereX Communications in part one of the IBC2017 Startup Forum.
In the second of a two part series hear from five of the start ups at IBC this year.
Promethean.tv
USA
Promethean TV is developing a platform that enables broadcasters and brands to monetise and engage video audiences using live, contextual and clickable overlays on top of any video.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
The measurable impact we have on engagement. Promethean TV licenses a tool that allows broadcasters to place contextual, relevant and clickable overlays onto live streams and VOD, with proven CTRs of up to 56%.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
Hugely so. Traditional broadcast is being outpaced. There has always been a qualitative difference to the OTT experience - more content, more readily available. Now OTT is offering a deeper user experience with technologies like Promethean’s. Enhanced viewing, incorporating metadata, social feeds and augmented UX is a high growth, high value area and is going places linear TV can’t follow.
Where do you see your business in 5 years time?
By 2020, for every second that passes, nearly a million minutes of video content will stream online. Video traffic will comprise over 80% of all consumer Internet traffic. Now, we know 4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it and we know that 80% of millennials use video content when researching a purchase decision.
Not surprisingly, business is predicted to spend $3bn dollars on video marketing. A couple of years after that, and augmented advertising and enhanced viewing solutions like ours will be essential to drive a return on that investment.
Choicely
Finland
Choicely is a global digital engagement platform for publishers and advertisers, integrating with existing websites and native apps, offering a flexible and cost-effective solution to engage and acquire new customers.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
We make engagement easy, fun and intuitive.
Our executive team brings together decades of experience in creating solutions for content owners from multiple perspectives: running a TV network, developing clean and intuitive human design interfaces and building and monetising audiences creatively and interactively with content.
As a result, we solve problems differently. We´ve built a very modular and flexible global platform that content owners can pick up and launch in minutes creating intuitive user experiences, which deliver exceptional results.
When we debuted Choicely earlier this year at NATPE, the largest TV marketplace in the Americas, the immediate feedback we received from top network executives was that our user interface is clean and they understand immediately what they are supposed to do.
In addition to Choicely´s fun, interactive tools, we also help content owners develop creative concepts that set the context for sponsorship integrations, as well as provide advertising products and premium services that further monetise the engagement.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
Our priority is first and foremost to create the best user experience for people.
It is incredibly important to utilise technologies that extend how people can interact with content and socially with other people to enjoy shared experiences. This is the fundamental intent of technology in media: giving consumers tools that allow for more natural engagement in the stories and people that matter to them. Developing technology for technology´s sake though is nonsensical. We think first about how we can create the best possible experience for consumers and then build technology around it that will accomplish this goal.
We see a lot of apps in the market that are over-engineered with too many features that ask too much of consumers, which detracts from the experience and turns people off. Also, fundamental engagement rules are commonly broken like forcing the user to click many times to get to the point where they can actually engage in an experience, which results also in poor performance. We develop only as much technology as needed to achieve the objective and eliminate all barriers to engagement.
Where do you see your business in 5 years time?
Our goal is to be the leading decision making platform in the world.
We see ourselves as a solution provider for any type of group decision making, whether between two individuals, casting for a local TV show or providing a global TV production company with a single, unified set of engagement tools in 180 countries. Media companies are limited in their understanding of audiences on a global scale, with data analytics being managed locally in each country, relying on local resources. This is highly inefficient.
Everyone benefits from utilising common data analytics globally to create more precise, intelligent decision making locally and globally. For the TV industry, we want to help producers make better shows, networks optimise their programming strategies to improve ratings and revenue and advertisers to more efficiently acquire new customers.
We believe we will unlock unlimited potential with new disruptive technologies like augmented and mixed reality by creating new ways in which people will interact with and integrate digital and physical experiences.
LiveWeatherViews
Australia
Vision TV, is developing a Timelapse camera system to help TV networks capture great weather vision with full automation over IP.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
LiveWeatherViews has been designed by broadcast professionals for broadcasters. We like to think we understand what broadcasters need and demand. LiveWeatherViews is scalable without any boundaries and restrictions. The GUI offers every user the ability to use their weather shots in realtime (live) or time-lapse, with single or multiple images, watermarks, points of interest with just a few mouse clicks all over 4G or LTE.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
It is very important to stay up-to-date with changing technologies. Our product LiveWeatherViews is all about IP and the world of IP technology is changing daily, likewise, our product is changing almost as quick with new features and functionality being added all the time we can do this because LiveWeatherViews is IP based.
Where do you see your business in 5 years time?
The five year plan for LiveWeatherViews is to have cameras on every continent providing users with unique weather shots from around the globe that will make them stand out from other broadcasters. We also have plans to have offices in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific offering support.
Appiness
Belgium
Appiness turns content into inspiration & data, increasing consumer relevance and content revenues through next generation video commerce app Spott.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
Spott technology is the most efficient enrichment of video with metadata globally. Appiness has a go-to-market strategy brought to the market together with the industry.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
It’s a competitive barrier: we continue to invest in R&D to stay ahead of the game and we collaborate with the best universities in the world to keep this competitive edge.
Where do you see your business in 5 years time?
Spott aims to be the most relevant inspiration platform for video content in the world.
Source Digital
USA
Source Digital is a technology product and service provider specialising in monetisation strategies around digital content.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
There have been prior efforts to make content “interactive” or allow viewers to immerse themselves in the content while watching a program. However, the ability to make an unlimited amount of information or engagements available at any moment for pure discovery and activation across any device and platform, including “listening” across the room, linking devices together and AR/VR extensions, hasn’t existed.
This is what Source Digital does over its competitors. Source Digital looks at the entire production eco-system from concept through post-production. Source Digital’s patented, cloud-based platform, SourceSync.io, allows viewers to further immerse themselves in any programming. It creates an extended experience of the program that lends itself to viewer engagement synchronous to content, such as video as a storefront, brand and product engagement, second level story lines and content discovery.
Unlike any other engagement strategy, Source Digital sees smart media creation via metadata and data association as the foundation and force that can bring consumer engagement to new heights.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
It is absolutely critical! The adaption rate of the viewer is accelerating at such an aggressive rate. Source ties directly into the content owners’ ability to not only understand their viewer, but also to leverage new forms of currency against brand and product integration and even “shoppable” content.
Our advancements in leveraging VR as a companion opportunity for adding more real estate for the content owner to leverage is a big example of that. Another example is the marketing technology component of digital transformation for brands, leading the way organisations focus on consumer expectations and experiences.
We need to provide solutions that create new revenue opportunities for marketers, rather than just solving a problem. We’re always taking our technology one step further, not just focusing on changes in production and distribution technology, but the integration and power of social media as part of the engagement process.
Where do you see your business in 5 years?
We are closely following the convergence of the viewer and consumer across content and commerce, and their desire for programming that is virtually ad free.
When you look at the evolution of entertainment and the fact that VR and AR will have a bigger market cap in 10 to 15 years than television alongside the integration of brand and content in programming, the opportunity to leverage our technology in this new immersive landscape is immense.
We truly are evolving to a “Minority Report” evolution in a way where content owners, brands and viewers will be able to use Source technology in five years to make content smart, in a way that within the content itself, the experiences for each viewer can be entirely personal right down to the placement of the brand and the most appealing way that viewer should experience its relationship to the story.
The Startup Forum will be held on Sunday 17 September in association with Media Honeypot.
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