 "Amagi gears up for OTT revolution as TV advertisers ask for more personalised targeting")
Cloud-based television broadcast infrastructure provider Amagi is quickly building its capabilities in the over-the-top (OTT) services space as its sees a massive opportunity for personalised advertising similar to what online services such as YouTube currently offer.
The company, which currently offers geo-targeting services to advertisers on traditional television networks, hopes that it will be able to demand more money from advertisers for more precise targeting. Currently the company's solutions allows it to target consumers based on broad location such as in a city or a state for advertisers such as Unilever on television broadcasters such as Zee network and Viacom India.
"The platform that we've built, allows exactly a true view equivalent, where I can say he (viewer) has watched for the first quartile, second quartile, third or fourth of the ad and we'll charge exactly as per that. If it's on a mobile or a TV with an IP set top box, we can do everything that a YouTube equivalent does," said K A Srinivasan, co-founder of Amagi.
Today, with 80 per cent of India's television subscriptions being on cable, while the balance are mostly on direct-to-home connections, Srinivasan expects that digital or internet enabled television will take at least another 10 years to capture a sizeable chunk of the Indian market. High data costs, low bandwidth and lack of coverage in smaller towns and villages will need to be fixed before the uptake of digital TV can really kick off.
Local advertisers have so far been left out of advertising on popular national channels. They've for long turned to print and now even electronic ads despite the reach of television being far higher. With geographic and even personalised ad targeting, the market for television ads could be disrupted with local or ads of relevant products.
In order to further this, Amagi's solution allows advertisers to specify the demographic of the audience they want to target, and the company using data it has gathered suggests the best advertising plan for them. Local ads on the other hand would flourish on television since out of the 800 odd television channels in India, over 600 of them cater to regional audiences.
US-based on-demand video streaming service Netflix, which launched in India in January offers its service to customers for as low as Rs 500 per month. Netflix is one among the many companies that are coming up globally to disrupt television viewing, taking it away from a free to paid subscription model, and have found huge success.
Amagi, whose business revolves around advertisements on television however believes that services such as Netflix don't pose as great a threat as otherwise perceived. "There's always going to be a market where people are going to want things for free. That said, there's also always going to be a premium experience where people say I want an ad free experience, allow me to watch whatever I want, whenever I want," added Srinivasan.
Moreover, while the targeted television ad space is not free of competition globally, Amagi says it has an inherent advantage over giants such as Adobe who have come down from the digital ad space. Today, ads on the Internet are largely of low-quality, mirroring the quantity of user-generated and other content available online. Television on the other hand is exclusively high-quality video content and so is the advertising, which is what Amagi plans to stick to.
