The 10 companies shortlisted for Media Player of the Year in Marketing’s Nov. 14 issue were at the top of their game in 2011. We’ll be featuring each one online as a lead-up to our January 2012 issue, where you’ll find out which media company will reign supreme.
Broadband TV
This Vancouver-based game-changer figured out a new way to deal with online pirates. Rather than chase copyright lawyers, sell ads around the content instead
BroadbandTV is just three and a half years old, with a growing staff of only 15, and the brainchild of a 31-year-old entrepreneur who not long ago graduated with a computer sciences degree from the University of British Columbia. Yet the Vancouver-based upstart is turning heads and inciting the kind of chatter usually reserved for industry heavyweights like Facebook and Microsoft.
That’s because BroadbandTV is leading the charge in reshaping the media landscape online—for both traditional content providers and brand advertisers. The company uses various search algorithms to comb the internet for user-uploaded clips of copyrighted content on behalf of clients like Warner Bros., Endemol (Big Brother, Fear Factor) and the NBA.
Once BroadbandTV identifies the clips and filters for offensive and inappropriate material, it rebrands the content on behalf of clients and sells advertising against it. (BroadbandTV lets those who posted the videos know it’s doing so.) So instead of demonizing people who upload copyrighted content as “online pirates,” BroadbandTV is helping content providers harness the role fans can play in building and helping monetize their video assets.
“Fans are really the best content creators,” says Shahrzad Rafati, founder and CEO of BroadbandTV. “The reason why user-uploaded clips tend to become viral is because fans upload clips that really hit home with the audience, and they upload them quickly as well as share them with friends.”
In the case of the NBA, for instance, BroadbandTV can take a fan mashup of, say, the best slam dunks, rebrand it as official NBA content, and package it in a way that is attractive to advertisers, including through the provision of audience measurement data. The ad revenue is then shared between BroadbandTV and its partner content providers.
“The number of clips and the amount of impressions generated by user-generated content is pretty impressive,” says Rafati, who was also named one of Fast Company magazine’s “100 Most Creative People in Business this Year” and showed up on the cover of Canadian Business. “And what generally makes advertising with online video exciting is that it is far more emotive, and advertisers get to anchor their brands with that experience.”
There’s more! Check out the Nov. 14 issue of Marketing for the full profile, and subscribe to find out who will be named the Media Player of the Year for 2011.
