Google to deliver ads to online Olympic video

Google's DoubleClick technology now can be used to deliver video advertising shown with Microsoft's Silverlight technology, and it will be used for that purpose with the Olympics video that NBC Universal plans to show online using a player based on Silverlight 2.

Google announced the Silverlight ad capability, called DoubleClick In-Stream, on Tuesday. It already could be used to deliver video ads using Flash, RealMedia, and Windows Media technology. In-Stream also can show static ads within video, which Microsoft and NBC concluded was the best approach for live video.

NBC Universal, already a DoubleClick customer, was bullish about the Sliverlight support. "Thanks to DoubleClick, In-Stream's new support for Silverlight 2, we are able to monetize our groundbreaking online-video coverage on the same platform we already use for display and mobile advertising. This lets our sales and operations teams work together really efficiently," Steven Gold, vice president of sales planning and operations at NBC Universal Digital Media, said in a statement.

(Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News)

Microsoft is betting on the Olympics to help spur adoption of Silverlight, a browser plug-in technology that competes with Adobe Systems' Flash for bringing multimedia, animation, and other rich content to the Web. Distributing the Olympics online coverage, both prepackaged and live, is a technologically complicated task given how popular the sporting event is among viewers.

DoubleClick In-Stream is integrated with Google's DART technology for letting publishers serve ads over the Internet as well as target ads at specific categories of users, track ad campaign success, and create ad forecasts.

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Ability to monetize content is very important as it gives content owners a reason to push their content out via any distribution channel that supports monetization. Silverlight is the next generation technology designed to create engaging rich media applications but without advertising components, it was not a complete solution. If this industry will continue to grow, we need leading platform providers such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google to collaborate. Needless to say other ad service providers should follow and hopefully speed up their efforts to integrate existing and future online advertising technologies (i.e., pre-, post-rolls, video overlays and other) into Silverlight.

[andrewvive]

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