With more people watching connected TV and more ad dollars spilling into ad-supported streaming, more research is being done into how consumers react to commercials. 

A new study by Wurl based on more than 1 million transitions from FAST channel content to ad breaks, found that 4% of viewers are lost per minute, which means during a two minute ad break, a channel loses 8% of its audience.

“Wurl’s data shows what you would expect,” The report states. “Viewers frequently change channels during ad breaks when the content and ads are not aligned, with a portion not returning after the ad break.”

In traditional TV, a commercial runs regardless of how many people are watching. In streaming, ads can’t be served to viewers who are no longer available, so there’s a lost opportunity.

At the same time, if the commercial is not a good fit with the content, the result could be a negative association for the brand.

The report contends that the percentage of viewers avoiding commercials can be reduced when the ads are a better match for the content being watched.

“Viewers are more engaged when content and ads align Improving the congruence between ad creatives and programming can significantly increase ad acceptance and brand recall. Contextual targeting, which ensures the delivery of the right ad at the right time, leverages the storytelling power of CTV by priming viewers, the report said.

Wurl ran a test to see if creating higher emotional resonance between ads and content correlated to a lower rate of viewer loss.

It used an algorithm that gave streaming content and ad creative an “emotional score” and then calculated the correlation between those scores.

Wurl found that the closer the correlation was to 1, the closer the emotions matched. Scenes and ads with a score of 1.0 resulted in nearly a 50% reduction in user loss compared to a score of 0.4. Ads with a cosine similarity of 0.75 or higher significantly improved user retention. 

“The data is fairly clear on this point: ensuring your ads match the tone of the content around them makes viewers less likely to switch away,” the report said. “For advertisers looking to ensure audiences are aware of their ad and engaged in the content, finding the right context is critical.”

The report said that the CTV world continues to evolve and that advertisers will have to be agile to adapt to the changing environment.

“New and innovative solutions are emerging to deal with some of the headaches marketers have faced when trying to buy programmatically on CTV,” the report concluded. “With new approaches to metadata, context analysis, and audience targeting, we’re entering a new era where brands can harness CTV's full potential to create impactful and effective advertising campaigns that drive real business results.”

Opening a connected television (CTV) interface presents a unique challenge for someone who is looking to turn on their TV for a lazy session of viewing. With several visual boxes on-screen, all with varying logos or screengrabs showcasing what can be consumed, taking the first steps to viewing content over CTV is a lot like opening the menu at The Cheesecake Factory — more choices than one person can fully process.

The litany of streaming platforms, channels and applications available across the CTV ecosystem is growing every day and with good reason. Insider Intelligence forecasts that CTV households will hit 115.1 million by next year — more than doubling traditional pay TV households. The transition from traditional TV viewing to streaming over internet-connected television has arrived.

All of this underscores that the time for streamers and publishers to get their content in front of viewers is now. But, there’s a challenge that lies at the core of this mandate, and every other new frontier with services jockeying for their share of the market: discoverability.

Streaming Choice Overload

Just as many consumers express extreme overwhelm when sitting down to select a meal from The Cheesecake Factory’s famously expansive menu, the approaching ubiquity of CTV interfaces often leads to choice overload — a specific type of indecision born out of having too many choices. 

CTV comes with an incredible number of options among advertising-based video on demand (AVOD), subscription-based video on demand (SVOD), and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels. Hulu, Disney Plus, Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Peacock are just a handful of the streaming apps available, and we’re seeing more FAST channels — from names like Amazon and Comcast — launch every day.

For the average consumer, these choices are more or less indistinguishable from one another. Making a decision about which platform to subscribe to or which app to download and test often has to do with which options are presented on-screen most prominently. Otherwise, viewers who know exactly what they want to watch and where to watch it will choose their streaming option accordingly — though this is less often the case than a user who turns on the TV without a specific agenda hoping to be pleasantly surprised. And, even if one is familiar with their CTV interface, being creatures of habit, there’s often little room to connect with users who might consider a new streaming service — free or not.

This challenge of discoverability is not unique. The job of a marketer is to cut through the noise to find new customers who are likely to purchase a product again and again. Similarly for content distributors, finding viewers likely to enjoy their specific library of content, enticing them to download or open the corresponding app and encouraging them to return to watch content on a regular basis is the million-dollar question the streaming ecosystem has in front of it.

Not-so-distant industry history provides a glimpse of how this might play out. Performance-based marketing solutions revolutionized customer acquisition for the web and mobile apps. From this point forward, the same approach to data-driven targeting and measurement has the potential to effectively transform streaming advertising.

Understanding Content Is Key

A first requirement of getting in front of the right viewers is for the technology to truly learn and understand your content. Are you a FAST channel focused on live sports, a publisher centered around local news, a streamer with a myriad of programming across genres or in some other niche? Once the technology knows your content, it can then pave a better path to finding — with compounding effectiveness — the user profiles most likely to download and engage with your content library. Like any performance marketing effort, the goal becomes to acquire new viewers at such an effective rate that the cost of spending on advertising becomes revenue positive.

Solving the discoverability challenge clearly stands as the next frontier in assisting viewers to find their way through the comprehensive CTV menu. Imagine a future state where content distributors advertising their streaming services and content can swiftly find and actively promote to the most high-value viewers. The increasingly positive outcomes, both in terms of volume and efficiency, would begin to speak for themselves.

Earlier this month, FAST software developer Frequency and data-driven solutions provider Wurl announced a new partnership — yes, a “strategic” one. Wurl will be Frequency’s preferred advertising monetization source, while Frequency will be Wurl’s go-to supplier of advanced FAST channel creation.

Customers will now be able to utilize Frequency’s scheduling and playing services while simultaneously taking advantage of Wurl’s monetization capabilities.

Looking to dive a little deeper into the technologists driving change in the video industry, Next TV had a phone conversation with Frequency CEO Blair Harrison on Monday, June 26 to discuss the new collaboration.

Here’s how that went:

Next TV: Tell us a bit more about the Frequency-Wurl partnership. Why Wurl? Why now?

Blair Harrison: We here at Frequency consider ourselves a product service. We don't participate in the advertising. We don't provide any monetization in terms of ad sales or backfill anything for our customers who are the content providers, nor do we do the same on the distribution side of things. So we have been singularly focused on the heart of actually creating and distributing and managing very complex distribution of channels and not on monetization. Wurl has almost sort of the inverse of that model. They have long been focused on monetizing their customers’ channels, and doing that very well. And since they are now part of a company that is pure advertising in its DNA, the shift towards monetization for them has accelerated. 

NTV: What’s the motivation behind this partnership?

BH: We certainly consider ourselves to be by far the best platform out there for creating channels to do that, because ultimately what we're trying to do is get the best possible experience on screen and do that for the viewer in a way that is as efficient for our customers as possible. Our partners, Wurl, are extremely good at monetization. So increasingly customers want both of those things and they don't always want them under one roof. They want to be able to buy the best channel creation platform and the best monetization services. And the better we work together, the better the integrations are between our services, the better opportunity we have of providing the best possible solution collaboratively to customers. Together we have a combined solution that is more valuable than the sum of the parts. 

NTV: What does this agreement look like? Is there exclusivity?

BH: The fact that this partnership exists means that we both believe that life is better when we work with each other. There are other competitors in the industry, and we believe that our alliance is going to provide a better solution for customers than the additive offerings. But there is no implied or actual exclusivity. We are now doing something that we hadn't previously done, which is that we are very explicitly introducing Wurl as our partner — before we would do some version of telling our customers, Hey, there’s loads of places you can go for monetization services — what we're now doing is explicitly involving Wurl in our deal process. 

NTV: Tell me a bit more about the content Discovery service available to Frequency customers.

BH: There are now thousands of channels and billions and billions of dollars flowing through the veins of the FAST industry. And increasingly for customers who are the content owners getting their stuff discovered, acquiring viewers one way or another was increasingly important. So, the approach to this through content discovery is that by working with the content owners, by working with the distributors, they can effectively drive viewers to that content discovery entry point, get them to watch a channel, download an app, etc. 

NTV: What would you like to tell consumers?

BH: If you want the most powerful channel creation platform with the best functionality and the lowest total cost of operation, we’ve got you. And if you want monetization services, we’ve got you too. And in an ideal world, regardless of whether that customer comes to Wurl or Frequency first, we have a collaborative approach to pursuing that. We don't have any joint marketing materials live today, but that's going to change very, very quickly.

Palo Alto-based connected TV software and service provider Wurl has been swallowed by a bigger Silicon Valley fish, marketing platform operator AppLovin, for $430 million, the companies announced. 

The deal, comprised of 55% cash and 45% AppLovin equity, will leave Wurl's management team, led by CEO and Co-Founder Sean Doherty Sr., intact. It's expected to close in the first half of 2022. 

Wurl is one of the more active backend technology vendors in the OTT business, creating and selling software products like the recently introduced Global FAST Pass that enable media company clients including A+E Networks, AMC Networks, Scripps and Bloomberg to distribute their content on a wide range of OTT platforms. 

Founded in 2011, AppLovin has been bankrolled with $1.4 billion in funding and provides a platform for developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. 

“Our shared vision and values made the opportunity to join forces compelling and unique,” Doherty said in a statement “AppLovin brings enormous new demand from advertisers and our partnership will enable current customers to realize even more benefits including expanded ad revenue, new viewers, and enhanced distribution to global CTV audiences. Together, we’ll pursue our mission and dramatically impact the CTV market.”

For its part, AppLovin noted that advertisers spent $14.4 billion on connected TV in 2021, up 60% over 2020. 

Added Adam Foroughi, CEO and co-founder of AppLovin: “The acquisition of Wurl will further our commitment to building and growing the world’s largest, most-effective digital marketing platform by providing advertisers a seamless way to tap into the highly addressable and measurable CTV market. We believe our software marketing expertise can further optimize the experience for advertisers and consumers as well as enable content companies to expand their audiences and increase monetization.”

Technology vendor Wurl said that it has launched on its network 42 of the 80 live-linear channels being hoisted by streaming service Plex.

The channels include Reuters, The Bob Ross Channel, Game Show Central, Deal or No Deal, Wipeout Xtra, FailArmy, The Pet Collective, People Are Awesome and WeatherSpy. They from lstudios including Reuters, Cinedigm, Game Show Network, Endemol Shine Group (now Banijay) and Jukin Media.

Also read: Plex: Everything You Need to Know About the Geek Streaming Platform Flexing for Mainstream Attention

“As streamers increasingly shift their viewing to free, ad-supported linear programming, the Wurl Network is becoming the go-to CTV network for entertainment services like Plex, enabling them to achieve optimized channel performance while maximizing ad revenue,” said Sean Doherty, Wurl’s CEO.

Plex, which combines a popular media server software solution to a growing AVOD catalog of content and features, announced in late July that it would be adding 80 live-linear channels to its service.

Samsung has expanded the free over-the-top viewing options for its smart TV users with the addition of programming channels from Pluto TV and Wurl.

Samsung, which is an investor in Pluto, has quietly integrated around 20 of the Los Angeles start-ups digital channels into its free-to-consumer TV Plus platform, which had previously delivered mostly over-the-air programming to consumers.

Meanwhile, Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up Wurl announced today that three more of its digital channels—Outside TV, Danger TV and RiffTrax—are now available on TV Plus platform. Wurl said other OTT channels distributed on its network will soon be available on TV Plus.

Smart TV makers including Samsung are looking for ways to differentiate largely commoditized hardware offerings with unique blends of ad-supported OTT programming.

"TV Plus provides enormous validation of the unstoppable migration of TV to the Internet," said Sean Doherty, CEO of Wurl, in a statement. "Samsung is breaking down the legacy TV silos and providing video producers with a more open opportunity to reach viewers and generate revenue."

WurlTV Network said it forged deals with Bonnier, Busca, Splash News, Sportskool and Zoomin.TV for an platform that will enable its MVPD partners to deliver over-the-top content on Internet-connected set-top boxes.

Wurl has previously said that more than 50 operators have signed on to distribute a mix of ad-supported, over-the-top streaming channels that will appear in set-top guides alongside traditional, linear TV services.  A good portion of those include MVPDs that use the Arris Whole Home Solution (a product/platform sold recently to Espial) or a TiVo-powered platform.

Wurl’s announced MVPD partners include WideOpenWest,  Fidelity Communications and TDS.

RELATED: Wurl, IGN Launch Streaming TV Channel 

Among the new content partners, Bonnier  Corp. works with brands such as Popular Science, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life and Saveur; Busca features content for Spanish-speaking audiences, with digital properties that include LevelUp, Tomatazos (Rotten Tomatoes in Spanish), Qore, SanDiegoRed, and Tarreo, and Splash News specializes in celebrity-focused and breaking news. Sportskool is dedicated to sports lifestyle and entertainment programming, and Zoomin.TV offers human interest and light news stories gathered from a global network of video journalists.

Wurl has previously announced that its platform will feature a mix of its own aggregated/curated streaming channels -- The Alt Channel (“millennial-targeted” content), Streaming News Network, and The Sports Feed – and content sourced from other partners, including Popcornflix Channel and Baeble Music TV.

Media company Wurl TV has partnered with IGN Entertainment to launch a new, video game-centric cable TV offering, IGN TV.

Programming centers around video game and entertainment news, with game reviews, movie and TV reviews, and IGN original programming, including eSports Weekly, Daily Fix, Up At Noon, and Game Scoop!

RELATED: Wurl Launches Batch of Streaming Channels

The agreement also includes an on-demand offering for IGN TV. IGN currently has more than 68 million monthly users on its site and apps, with 9 million subscribers on YouTube.

Read more at B&C.

Wurl said more than 50 operators have signed on to distribute a handful of ad-supported, over-the-top streaming channels that will appear in set-top guides alongside traditional, linear TV services. 

Wurl, a Palo Alto-based company that specializes in streaming video services for pay TV operators, said it’s booting up the offering with a mix of its own aggregated/curated streaming channels -- The Alt Channel (“millennial-targeted” content), Streaming News Network, and The Sports Feed -- as well as two offerings sourced from programming partners: the Popcornflix Channel and Baeble Music TV.

All five are designed to appear in a set-top’s on-screen guide like regular linear channels. In addition to accessing those channels as a linear-style feed, viewers will also have the option to access on-demand programming from those OTT channels. 

Content from those channels have typically been accessible via digital platforms (such as the Web, mobile devices and streaming media players), but, with Wurl’s cloud-based platform, are now being made available on set-tops from MVPDs, Sean Doherty, Wurl’s CEO and co-founder, explained.

“This is a very cable-friendly way to let pay TV subscribers access streaming content,” he said.

As for technical requirements, set-tops must have an IP connection to pipe in Wurl’s streaming channels. Wurl has also been integrating its platform with middleware and set-top software partners to get its content stitched into guides alongside more traditional programming.

Wurl said more than 50 operators representing 13.5 million subscribers have agreed to carry its streaming channels. Doherty said most of its initial partners use the Arris Whole Home Solution or a TiVo-powered platform.

The first and only announced distribution partner announced is Fidelity Communications, an independent operator that serves parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. Fidelity offers the Arris Whole Home Solution (WHS), an IP-capable platform, under the “Fido” brand. Wurl and Arris, which recently sold the WHS assets to Espial,  announced an OTT integration deal in July 2014.

“We now have a new source of programming and new interactive viewing features that will give us a competitive edge,” Loren King, product manager at Fidelity, said in a statement.

Doherty said it’s offering its OTT channels at no cost to the operator, and that it drives revenues from a programmatic, cloud-based ad management and insertion system called AdSpring. Wurl uses that platforms to sell ads, but also enables its programmers and operator partners to sell inventory on its platform as well.

Wurl timed the announcement with this week’s The Independent Show in Orlando. 

Mobile and over-the-top platforms are cutting into overall video usage patterns, but traditional pay TV still leads the way – by a big margin.

That’s according to streaming video platform vendor Wurl, which introduced a U.S.-focused  index called AMOV (an acronym for Average Minutes of Viewing) that quantifies results based on a mix of public sources, including Nielsen, the NCTA, Pew Research, media reports and the OTT platform and service providers themselves.

The index takes into account both usage (minutes of viewing) and reach (percentage of U.S. adults that use the service) and outlines how it arrived at its findings. 

As the first report shows (Wurl intends to offer quarterly updates),  the monthly pay TV AMOV was 7,644 minutes, followed by Netflix (579 minutes), MVPD-provided guides (396 minutes),  YouTube (166 minutes), video via mobile (78 minutes), Roku (0.7 minutes) and the Apple TV (0.3 minutes).

Sean Doherty, CEO and co-Founder of Wurl, said the report aims to bring more context around the usage of these various platforms, noting that content providers need to get a better sense of how they are being used by consumers beyond data such as shipment figures.

“We got tired of hearing about big numbers…we were wondering about usage,”  Doherty said, noting that while smartphones are seeing usage climb, apps usage on smart TVs are “very low” despite having a huge installed base.

He also allows that the numbers will skew differently when viewed through a demographic lens, noting that usage among millennials will be much higher on mobile and OTT platforms than on pay TV.

He said Wurl also hopes that the report will flush some OTT suppliers out of the pocket and cause them to be more transparent about their data, but acknowledged that Wurl’s report “erred on the side of being generous on each of these platforms,” based on the data the company could locate and interpret.

The usage data, he said, shows that IP-connected set-top boxes from MVPDs such as Comcast, DirecTV and Dish Network provide the best way to blend traditional video services with OTT.

MVPDs, he said, have the potential to be the leader if they act quickly because they still have the usage advantage. If they don’t, consumers will continue to gravitate to other platforms like Roku and the Apple TV.

Some are moving faster than others. Dish does offer Netflix on its Hopper platform, Comcast is expected to bring an OTT service called Watchable to X1, and TiVo has built a platform that blends TV with OTT. WideOpenWest, meanwhile, is also integrating OTT on an Arris system that uses Wurl’s technology.

MVPDs have time to adjust, but the window is closing, Doherty said, noting that Wurl has other MVPD-facing deals in the works. Some include tighter integrations whereby “you don’t know what’s a streaming channel and what’s a linear channel.”

In a partnership that seemingly will compete with TiVo’s approach with cable operators, Arris and Wurl Inc. have launched Arris Market, a new cable-tailored, “open” platform that enables MSOs to mix over-the-top content with traditional linear video services to set-top boxes, starting with the Arris Whole Home Solution.

They said the resulting platform is standards-based and features an HTML5 interface that “integrates thousands of OTT content choices into a single, seamless experience.”  Additionally, Arris Market will allow operators the ability to customize and brand the look and feel of that environment.

They will demonstrate Arris Market at next week’s The Independent Show in Kansas City, an event put on by the National Cable Television Cooperative and the American Cable Association.

By targeting that event, it would seem that Arris Market is being developed for tier 2/3 operators – a market that TiVo has found success with for operator partnerships that enable MSOs to support next-gen video service that mix live, on-demand and OTT content on a unified platform.

Comcast has shown some interest in licensing its X1 platform to other cable operators, including independent MSOs,  but has not announced any agreements involving trials or deployments. Cox Communications and Comcast confirmed in January that they’ve held some X1-related licensing discussions.

"The Wurl platform enables cable operators using the ARRIS Whole Home Solution to give their subscribers access to a broad selection of popular streaming services without the complex setup of additional third-party devices or 'smart TV' technology," said Sean Doherty, CEO of Wurl, in a statement. "This new capacity to select and discover both traditional and OTT content from one remote control has exciting implications for the future of set-top functionality."

"We view the launch of the ARRIS Market as a cornerstone in developing and deploying tomorrow's interactive video services," added Debbie Stackis, SVP and GM, consumer solutions at Arris. "We continue to advance our roadmap and focus on the principles of quality, flexibility, and efficiency to foster our leadership position in content delivery."

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Wurl based in Palo Alto and founded in 2010, provides online video programming, metadata and cloud-based services to video service providers via APIs and hosted apps.