itvt

–Launches Solution Suite for Targeted and Interactive Advertising
–Forms Global Partnership with Audience-Measurement Specialist, TNS
–Teams with Tata Sky on India’s First Hindi-Language EPG
–Teams with Cinea and Harmonic on VOD Solution

Interactive TV and conditional access technology provider, NDS, has generated a fair amount of news over the past few weeks:

• The company has launched a suite of advertising solutions, collectively branded as NDS Dynamic, which it says will allow pay TV operators to improve existing advertising sales and develop new advertising models, using viewing analysis, audience targeting and interactivity. NDS Dynamic will allow operators to identify target audiences, engage with them through interactive advertising, and instantly measure the impact of their campaigns, NDS says. “TV advertising has to change,” NDS chairman and CEO, Abe Peled, said in a prepared statement. “The fragmentation of media and the growth of online advertising led us to develop these new solutions to help TV advertising evolve and grow in relevance. NDS Dynamic is the result of extensive research and collaboration with our customers as well as the advertising industry.” According to NDS, the NDS Dynamic suite is comprised of three components:
  1. an audience measurement system that is the result of a partnership between NDS and audience-measurement specialist, TNS Media (see below);
  2. a targeted advertising system that a) replaces generic broadcast spots with advertising that is targeted according to household or audience profiles, location and other factors, and b) supports both video and graphic banner advertising; NDS claims that the solution allows operators to continue to sell ads based on the same terms and demographic data as before, but with the additional ability to segment the audience for every spot; operators can also generate premium advertising fees from selling to new targeted audiences, the company says;
  3. an interactive TV advertising solution that supports a) telescopic advertising (i.e. ads that link to longer-form content), b) EPG ads that link to advertorial content, c) Dedicated Advertiser Location (DAL) advertising (i.e. ads that link to a mini-site for the advertised product), and d) Request For Information (RFI) advertising (i.e. ads that allow viewers to contact advertisers with requests for more information or for samples).
• The company has formed a global partnership with audience- measurement specialist, TNS Media Research, to create and market an end-to-end set-top box audience-measurement solution for digital TV operators. The solution, which is based on NDS’s Dynamic Audience Measurement solution and the TNS Media Research Return Path Data (RPD) audience-measurement service, is part of the new NDS Dynamic offering. According to the companies, it is capable of polling large sample sizes for audiences that choose to opt in, and captures all viewing activity for a variety of services, including live, time-shifted and interactive TV (including EPG’s). TNS and NDS already cooperate in a number of audience-measurement services around the world, and they bill the new solution as a “natural extension” of this relationship, and as combining NDS’s expertise in set-top box data collection with TNS’s expertise in set-top box data processing and analysis. They say they also plan to explore “future opportunities” in set-top box audience measurement and advertising applications. “The ability to monitor any type of set-top box-related viewing activity is a vital tool in the measurement of digital TV and advertising accountability in the long term,” Nick Burfitt, head of RPD services at TNS, said in a prepared statement. “With NDS Dynamic Audience Measurement–the industry’s most widely deployed set-top box audience measurement software, NDS was a natural choice for us in this area. We believe this cooperation will provide TV operators with a credible and easy-to-deploy audience measurement solution that will give them better insight into their business and therefore generate more value for their platform.”
• The company has partnered with Indian satellite TV provider, Tata Sky, to launch India’s first Hindi-language EPG (note: Hindi is the first language of around 40% of India’s population). NDS has been a Tata Sky technology partner since the latter’s service launched in 2006: the service employs both NDS’s MediaHighway middleware (which the company claims has been deployed in over 92.5 million devices to date) and its VideoGuard conditional access system (which the company says has been deployed in over 90.3 million devices). NDS has local sales and support offices in Mumbai and New Delhi, and an R&D center in Bangalore. It employs over 1,000 people in the subcontinent. “We are the first company in India to introduce this advanced technology that will give subscribers the flexibility to choose the language in which they want to view their daily TV program listings at the press of a button,” Tata Sky managing director and CEO, Vikram Kaushik, said in a prepared statement. “The new EPG reinforces our commitment in building a state-of-the-art DTH operation in India, and we are confident that it will attract viewers from all over India to the Tata Sky platform.”
• The company has teamed with Dolby Laboratories-subsidiary, Cinea, and with digital video specialist, Harmonic, on an integrated VOD solution that is comprised of Cinea’s Running Marks watermarking technology (enables unique watermarking of individual video streams, in order to allow content providers and operators to identify piracy sources; and allows watermark message insertion at either the VOD headend or the set-top box), Harmonic’s VOD platform (including its StreamLiner video servers and Armada intelligent content-distribution network software), and NDS’s VideoGuard conditional access system. The partners are billing the solution as allowing operators to deploy VOD with built-in conditional access and session-based watermarking without needing to upgrade their deployed set-top boxes. “As film release windows become shorter and the popularity of VOD continues to grow, efficiently protecting on-demand content becomes more and more critical,” Harmonic’s VP of business development, David Price, said in a prepared statement. “The combination of Cinea’s forensic watermarking capability and NDS’s conditional access solutions with Harmonic’s VOD platform offers operators a best-in-class solution to meet their needs.” Added NDS’s chief marketing officer, Nigel Smith: “Customers of our market-leading content-protection technology are showing increased interest in adding forensic watermarking to their systems. We needed a solution that could be easily integrated within our security solutions, to enable new content-consumption models. Running Marks’ patented architecture combined with open API’s from NDS make it easy to do so. In addition, Running Marks is the only solution that supports session-specific watermarking of pre-encrypted VOD content, an important feature for IPTV.”
• The company also recently commissioned a survey of DVR users. For more on the results of that survey, and on NDS’s DVR strategy in general, see [itvt]’s interview with Steve Tranter, VP of broadband and interactive delivery for NDS Americas, in Issue 8.05.