For Sale: AI Video Platform With Content Licence Book Attached
Hello readers. It continues to be a ridiculously hot summer. Rain dancing shamans have been sent out across Europe in the vain hope that this incessant heat might break. You start to wonder why the industry has gone cold (excuse the pun) on sustainability.
We think sustainability will come back to ad tech with a vengeance in the coming months as the industry realises its performant value. Other signals (quality, attention) too will come to the fore again - the SSA (Super Signal Aggregator) reborn. Keep an eye out for all that in late Q3 and Q4.
Scaled Contextual Video Player For Sale
This newsletter edition isn’t about signal, though; instead, we are focused on an asset sale - an opportunity to buy a piece of scaled technology built by one of our portfolio companies.
The technology in question is a contextual video player that is no longer core to the company’s focus, as it is doubling down on its demand-side product.
The video player has been used by some of the biggest publishers in Europe and has access to a vast content library (via exclusive content syndication contracts). We think this will land well at a sell-side business that wants to own a proprietary player - and doesn’t want to pay huge rents to JWPlayer, Brightcove et al.
Here are a few top-line features for the video player:
The video player plays video content on publisher web pages and can be added to pages that don’t currently have video.
It selects which video to show based on the content of the page it’s being placed on, using a relevance score to match video to article.
It includes a dashboard that shows engagement data, such as number of plays, completion rates, and how quickly videos are matched to pages.
It includes licences to use sports video content (football, tennis, motorsport, boxing) from a number of different content providers, which can be shown through the player.
It includes a separate tool that can generate a short written article based on a video, which a user can then review before publishing.
Other video players such as JW Player typically charge an ongoing monthly or annual licence fee, with pricing usually quoted individually per customer.
This player would instead be acquired as a one-off purchase, without an ongoing licence fee attached.
In past deployments, an increase in video relevancy has consistently increased publisher CPMs.
The Sales Process
We are looking to sell this asset within 30 days. We are only selling the IP/asset but will offer one year of service to help with integrations and updates. As stated above, this would be perfect for any publisher-focused business, sell-side ad network or SSP.
If any parties are interested in discussing this in more detail, get in touch: contact@firstpartycapital.com. And on that glorious public notice, we will end there. Stay tuned for the slew of announcements coming your way.