The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Future of TV OTT NBC

How ColorTV is helping content owners reach consumers in a crowded OTT world

Author

By Natan Edelsburg, SVP

July 25, 2016 | 5 min read

ColorTV

San Francisco based ColorTV is betting on the fact that apps will change TV as much as they changed phones. They say by 2020 there will be nearly 1 billion connected TVs globally. The company, which just raised $1.5 million in funding from Foxconn is trying to build the best marketing platform possible for the OTT world.

ColorTV

ColorTV

Found Remote interviewed CEO and Cofounder Giancarlo Maniaci about their platform and recent funding.

Found Remote: How is ColorTV helping push the future of the industry?

Giancarlo Maniaci: First, we help the consumer. The new "first world problem" that we are presented with in the new OTT space is "what to watch and what to play". The Apple, Android, Amazon and Roku store is filled with thousands of apps and channels. Millions of hours of content and entertainment. Where does one start? We help change this with our Content & Game Discovery Center. This product line makes relevant recommendation to the consumer of content, shows, apps and games that may meet their fancy so their OTT experience won't lack excitement.

Second, we help the content publisher. With thousands of apps across all the OTT platforms, with unbundling and cord cutting on the rise, their are a tsunami of major players (NBC, HBO, ESPN) that are racing to ensure they get their apps get installed and used on consumers OTT devices to securitize their position within the industry as well as stay relevant. We help these content publishers with distribution and help get them discovered by millions of consumers with OTT set top boxes. We also drive tune in for these content publishers, so consumers can continue to engage and discovery new content within their apps.

FR: What TV companies are you working with and how?

GM: We are working with many top of the chart games, such as Final Kick, QuizTix, 100 Pics and more. We are also working with companies like Pivmo and NBC. There are lots of others that we will be able to talk about in the next 30 days!

FR: What will your new funding be used for?

GM: Gold teeth, fur coats and popping bottles! Just kidding, $1.5m does not go that far these days. We are pretty far along technically, and have some really happy customers. This money will be used to bring on more of those happy customers to our platform. We will be hiring more sales executives - so, we are hiring!!

FR: How large is the marketing opportunity on connected TVs?

GM: The market as it stands is a great opportunity. There are +/- 400MM connected TVS globally (about 40MM in a North America), and by the year 2020 there will be nearly 1 billion connected TVs globally. TVs just became a whole lot more interesting with the arrival of the App stores in Apple TV, Android and Amazon. Just think how much more interesting our phones became when the app stores arrives to our phones. Our phones were literally used to do 2 functions (1) call mom and (2) send SMS messages to your mates (we will leave playing snake on our Nokia out of this equation). When the App Store arrived, our phones went from being a "phone" to being a "device" and was driven by the creativity of app developers around the world, building at scale for these platforms.

We are betting on this same phenomenon in the TV space.

FR: Anything else?

GM: I think that we want to be clear that user experience is everything for TV. It's a part of your home. It's in many ways more sacrosanct than our mobile devices. We are committed to making sure to keep it that way. We are dedicated to making the advertising, discovery and data useful, tasteful and un-annoying. There are so many top websites that we can barely visit any longer without getting bombarded with tasteless marketing - we are here to make sure that does not come near to OTT.

You can access the Future of TV hub here. Sign up to receive The Drum's Future of TV newsletter.

Future of TV OTT NBC

More from Future of TV

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +