Technology lets TV target ads to mobile viewers

By JEFFRY SCOTT

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Television is going through its next revolution as live TV and recorded video are migrating to the Internet and mobile devices in what the media industry calls a “three screen” revolution.

According to ratings service Nielsen, in 2008 Americans watched television an average 151 hours a month, streaming TV and video on the Internet three hours and on mobile devices four hours a month.

Every day, industry analysts said, more people are jumping from one screen to the other. A 43-year-old Duluth-based company, Concurrent Computer Corp., is betting its future that it will be in the thick of this revolution.

Concurrent is selling a technology it calls MediaHawk that it said makes it easier for service providers such as Comcast and AT&T to distribute video to the Web and mobile devices.

The company, which last year had revenues of $71.6 million, with an adjusted net income of $2.2 million, is taking its technology to market this month against formidable rivals. Cisco Systems and Motorola, among others, are marketing similar technologies.

But Concurrent claims a competitive advantage. It said that its system, unlike theirs, collects data on more than 700 million video transactions a month and that data can be used by the service providers to sell advertising.

“That information allows the companies to track users’ preferences and that enables advertisers to do very targeted ads,” said Concurrent chief marketing and strategy officer David King in an interview last week.

By tracking how and when a videos are viewed, the companies can then insert different ads into the video streams for different customers. “That makes the value of that ad go up,” King said.

Atlanta-based TV programmers Cable News Network and The Weather Channel have stepped up their efforts to move their streaming TV and video to the Internet and wireless devices, as have other cable and broadcast networks.

Yet all of them, said analysts, are struggling with the same problem: How to hold their fragmented and mobile audiences while still making money off them? They fear eroding their revenues from TV by giving programs away “free” the way print publishers have lost revenue.

This summer, cable operator Comcast and Time Warner, which owns Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting, began testing one protectionist scheme: Limiting Internet access to Turner’s cable networks to Comcast’s paying cable customers.

It’s hard to say whether Concurrent’s technology is one of the ways companies will cash in on the three-screen revolution, said Atlanta-based telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan. Billions of dollars are at stake, and huge, deep-pocketed companies are in the fray.

“This is a multi-step process that will take years as the technology continues to change and advance and customers’ expectations mature,” he said. “Right now, the industry is still trying to figure out things like, ‘how do we bill,’ and ‘who makes how much on each viewing?’ ”