According to Tricia Duryee of MocoNews, The Weather Channel and MSNBC.com have added video and integrated ads into the videos on their mobile sites with the help of Transpera, a Santa Monica, California-based company that offers the industry's first comprehensive platform for monetizing videos on mobile phones. Transpera's award winning mobile video delivery and advertising platform provides online content owners, network operators and advertisers with a turnkey solution that connects all the necessary pieces involved in successful and profitable mobile video deployments.
Transpera currently hosts the video section of The Weather Channel mobile Web site and also powers the video delivery and ad-insertion into these pages. What this means is that mobile users, like those with a Palm Centro running the Blazer browser on an unlimited data plan, will have access to The Weather Channel content such as video forecasts for 100 U.S. cities, updated frequently throughout the day just by typing http://mvideo.weather.com.
Quick test drive: On my Centro, I went to The Weather Channel site and clicked on the Traveler’s Forecast. The Kinoma player somehow became engaged and within seconds, a mobile video clip appeared. It ran smoothly with no audio or video glitches.
Duryee remarked:
"This move is pretty interesting. In the past, it seemed big brand names like these exclusively delivered video in applications because it was easier to know what kind of phone and network the user was on, and could guarantee a certain level of quality. The fact that they are now extending it to mobile sites shows that they are getting more confident about the capability of networks and handsets, and the number of users they are getting—there's no point in integrating ads if there isn't the traffic to justify it."
Note: The MSNBC site is slated to do mobile videos starting in March. Also, expect to see embedded video ads of 10-30 seconds in length soon.
