DENVER — Comcast and Charter Communications arrived here at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo this week intent on selling their video platform joint venture, Xumo, to the rest of the U.S. cable industry. 

And they already have a taker in Middletown, New York-based Mediacom Communications, which Marcien Jenckes, president of the Xumo JV said Tuesday at an SCTE show-floor presentation, said will start distributing the new Xumo Stream Box to its customers. 

Also Read: Xumo Stream Box Reviewed: The First OTT Player From Comcast and Charter’s JV Has a Few Bugs and Limitations, but We Can Still See Potential

Jenckes offered little details about Mediacom's deployment — like when it’ll start — but he did say: “This is just the beginning with more to come. We’d like to be working with a lot more operators, and we’ll be doing that in the coming months and years."

UPDATED: The Xumo JV released an official statement two days after Jenckes' disclosure, indicating that the Stream Box will be distributed to Mediacom Xtream internet customers "in the coming months." The release didn't say if Mediacom would charge them for the device, and if so, how much.

"Through our partnership with Xumo, we will be able to significantly enhance the value of our broadband services by combining our market-leading speeds with a new world-class streaming experience," said Tapan Dandnaik, Mediacom's senior VP of operations, product strategy and customer experience. "Xumo Stram Box is incredibly versatile and consumer-friendly, and we are excited to be among the first companies to bring this cutting-edge device to market."

The Mediacom announcement comes two weeks after the JV formally introduced the Xumo Stream Box player, which in addition to playing the cable companies’ core pay TV apps — Charter's Spectrum app and the Xfinity Stream TV app — supports all major SVOD services and around 200 apps in all. 

Last week, Light Reading reported that Xumo was in talks with a number of tier 2 and 3 cable operators about offering the Xumo platform to their customers under ad-revenue sharing terms. The NCTC cooperative, which represents hundreds of smaller cable operators, reportedly expressed interest in the JV's proposition. 

The National Content & Technology Cooperative (NCTC) and other smaller cable interests are looking for ways to provide video to their now mostly broadband-oriented constituency, with rising content costs sapping their profitability and interest in linear video in recent years. 

For its part, Charter said the OTT platform — which is powered by Comcast voice-remote technology — had already replaced its linear set-tops as its “go-to” video platform.

“It’s the primary video box that we are deploying today,” Charter CEO Christopher Winfrey said during Tuesday’s Expo opening session. “It’s been hard for us lately to be excited about our video product. This is about as excited as we've been in 15 years." 

The advertising-sales arms of top cable operators Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications have produced a playbook designed to help distributors, programmers, media buyers and advertisers take advantage of their addressable advertising capabilities.

The playbook is the latest step in the cable operators’ On Addressability initiative, started in 2019 as a way to increase the effectiveness and value of television advertising.

Featured in the playbook, available to anyone in the industry via the website OnAddressability.com, are a step-by-step technical guide to help programmers and distributors launch addressable advertising, a buyer’s guide to addressable TV and a seller’s guide to addressable TV advertising. There are also definitions of terms used in addressable advertising and an overview of standards that the group hopes the industry will adopt in order achieve scale and simplicity of use.

“Since the launch of On Addressability, we’ve been talking with major programmers and distributors to help marketers incorporate addressability into their TV strategies to drive better results,” Comcast Advertising president Marcien Jenckes said. “Despite this progress, however, there are still challenges for both buyers and sellers alike. That was the impetus for the playbook. The timing could not be better. In the current environment, advertisers are ready to pivot, and we need to be ready, too. The technology is there. Now we just need to bring advertisers a more scalable and consistent offering — and do it quickly.”

Jenckes, Charter executive VP David Kline (president of Spectrum Reach) and Cox Media senior VP Louis Gump discussed the initiative at the Advanced Advertising Summit on Sept. 15, part of Future’s Fall TV Events 2020. 

The companies have a combined reach of more than 30 million homes for addressable ads, Kline said, with AMC Networks and Discovery doing the first tests and the program being fully implemented in Q4. “I think we’re going to probably, before we’re done with this, add more [distributors] to it, so we can scale the way the industry needs,” he said.

Gump said Cox customers wanted more capabilities in terms of measuring ad-sales results, prompting Cox to join forces with the other companies. He said, though, “we can’t do it alone. If we are truly going to serve our customers, it has to be a joint effort. And so I would think of this as something that is not just the MSOs, but it’s also agencies, it’s brands and  various enablers around the ecosystem” looking to build businesses and serve consumers better. 

Traditional TV-advertising growth was slow before the pandemic hit, closing business and forcing those that were open to rethink how they were spending their advertising dollars. 

The industry has touted addressable advertising — the ability to send different targeted messages to different audiences rather than broadcast the same commercial to all viewers — as a way to be more effective and better compete with digital media.

With different distributors using different technology and protocols in different parts of the country, advertisers and media buyers found it complicated to do addressable ad campaigns at scale, leading to calls for industry-wide standards and more cooperation and interoperability among cable operators and other distributors.

The On Addressability campaign is designed to tell marketers that the industry now has the capability to run campaigns at scale, and that it has become easier to plan, buy and evaluate addressable TV campaigns.

To view this panel and other Advanced Advertising Summit sessions on demand,
go to falltvevents.com.

Fox Networks Group has begun selling advertising in the video-on-demand content from its channels that is addressable on an individual household basis through Comcast Cable set-top boxes and streaming via Hulu.

TV networks are looking for ways to create innovations in advertising that can increase its value in an increasingly digital age. Fox has already been selling precision audience targeted ads on its linear network with its AIM solution. It is also a partner in Open AP, which is attempting to standardize selling ads based on specific audience targets rather than the traditional broad age and sex base demographic groups.

Comcast Cable has done addressable ad campaigns using dynamic ad insertion technology with its corporate sibling NBCUniversal.

Working with Fox is part of a trial program to see how the distributor can work with programmers on addressable advertising. A source indicated that Comcast is conducting addressable trials with another, unnamed, network group.

Both Fox and Comcast use Freewheel, a division of Comcast, to handle ad insertions.

Fox’s addressable effort is unique because in addition to working with Comcast’s subscribers, it can also offer viewers streaming on-demand programming from Fox Networks including Fox Broadcasting, FX, National Geographic and Fox Sports via Hulu.

Noah Levine, senior VP, advertising data & technology solution at Fox Network Group says that between Comcast and Hulu and its advertising clients more than 10 million households on an addressable basis.

Levine was expected to announce Fox’s new addressable advertising effort at the B&C/Multichannel News Next TV Summit in New York Wednesday (Oct. 18), part of NYC Television Week.

Read More: Complete Coverage of NYC Television Week

“Our strategy is to continue selling to linear buyer through Fox AIM linear,” Levine said. “Now we can also work with the addressable buyers to pursue the addressable opportunity.” Fox is looking to add cross-platform precision audience targeting.

“Our goal is to be able to provide audience targeting across our very wide portfolio of content regardless of the distribution modality,” Levine said.

Read More: Complete Coverage of the Next TV Summit

In addition to working with NBCU, Comcast’s local systems sell addressable ad campaigns to local advertisers.

“We think it’s really important that TV advertising becomes more sophisticated and this VOD trial is one way networks can unify their audiences and marketers reach their targets,” said Marcien Jenckes, president of advertising at Comcast.

With on-demand programming and steaming, Levine said the Fox’s addressable advertising can reach audiences that may not be watching linear.

He noted that addressable would be great for a financial advertisers that uses linear advertising to promote its brand but targets viewers of a different income and lifestyles for particular financial products.

Read More: Complete Coverage of the Advanced Advertising Event

Levine said Fox’s addressable solution is different than what most cable or satellite operators can offer because it can be overlaid with precision targeted programming on the Fox networks, which reach all of the markets in the country.

“That’s national scale,” he says. In addition, Fox has all of its national inventory while distributors only have access to two minute per hour.

That should make the Fox offering attractive to national advertisers.

“By combining addressable components with the linear components, we’ll be able to come up with very acceptable CPM ranges,” Levine said. He added that with addressable advertising, Fox benefits financially because there is very little waste once it and the advertisers have agreed on a data set and reporting method.

Addressable advertising is also good for viewers. “It allows is to provide more relevant advertising that s potential more interesting to the audience,” he said.

TV advertising needs to get more sophisticated, Marcien Jenkes, president of advertising at Comcast, said at NYC Television Week Wednesday (Oct. 18).

Television advertising is seen as relatively unsophisticated when compared with digital, Jenckes said, speaking at the B&C/Multichannel News Advanced Advertising event in New York.

Read More: Complete Coverage of the Advanced Advertising Event

”The only way this industry is going to survive and thrive is if you take this unsophisticated bucket and make it sophisticated," he said. "Make it targetable, make it data-enabled and make it accountable. If you can do that, unified across your full audience, there’s no better way for marketers to drive their business.”

Jenckes said that for a long time, TV took its advantages as an ad medium for granted. It didn’t bring data to the table or move ahead with better targeting. In the meantime, digital advertising earned its place at the table.

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At Comcast, advertising is a big revenue generator, behind video and high-speed internet, he said. The company moved to make its advertising business more sophisticated by buying a number of firms, including FreeWheel, Strata, Visible World and Sticky Ads, and incorporated them into its ad business.

“They all don’t exist separately,” Jenckes said. "They’re part of the advanced advertising group, which wants to serve the industry. We want to serve our own interest, but we want to make television the most effective form of advertising.”

To do that, Comcast is working with companies that can do real-time attribution studies, such as tvty and 605.

“Every day we’ll get more sophisticated,” Jenckes said. “Everyday we make a little more progress down the road.”

Comcast Cable has promoted Marcien Jenckes to president, advertising, where he now heads up all of the company’s advertising assets and businesses, including Comcast Spotlight.

Word of Jenckes’s new role at Comcast has been circulating for weeks, but is now confirmed by his updated bio on Comcast’s corporate web site.

Jenckes most recently was EVP, consumer services at Comcast Cable, where he oversaw the company’s video, Internet, voice, and Xfinity Home businesses. Comcast has not named a permanent replacement for Jenckes’s prior role.

In his new role, Jenckes’s leadership on the advertising side of the house expands broadly.

Last year, as part of an operational reorg, Jenckes took over Comcast’s ad-tech operations, which have been expanding following the company’s buying spree in the sector in recent years that included the acquisitions of companies such as FreeWheel, StickyADS.tv, Visible World, This Technology, and Strata, a company that powers more than 1,200 media buying agencies and in-house advertisers.

RELATED: Visible World Joins Comcast’s Ad Orbit

Jenckes now also runs Comcast Spotlight, the unit focused on local, regional and national spot-advertising.

Charlie Thurston, the former president for Comcast Spotlight, has stepped away from the day-to-day running of that division, but is still serving Comcast in an advisory role, industry sources said.

Prior to joining Comcast, Marcien was with digital ad and media syndication startups such as Grab Networks and Voxant, and is also late of AOL and McKinsey & Company. He holds a MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia, and a BA in economics and political science from New York University.