When I wrote a post earlier today suggesting that YouTube was not the first to use a Flash overlay advertisement for online video, I didn’t realize I’d be getting so many emails and comments disputing exactly who first invented the unit.
VideoEgg has certainly been doing this for a year or so. In a comment to that post, though, an (unconfirmed) ex-YouTuber says the idea was “discussed long ago inside the company” and follows up with:
All other video sharing websites that came out around the time YouTube emerged were still using Quicktime or Windows Media. YouTube might as well accuse VideoEgg of stealing the idea of using a Flash video player.
Next up was Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan, who emailed me to say that Adbrite has had their own overlay product for nearly a year. He also pointed out that I wrote about it. The ad unit is less sophisticated, but it is certainly a Flash video overlay ad unit.
And finally, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire sent me a long email saying they’ve been doing this as far back as October 2005. He also says the ad units are not particularly popular with advertisers:
I caught your post on VideoEgg taking credit for video overlays as an ad format vis a vis the latest YouTube ad product introduction.
To reinforce this point, while I don’t want to claim “invention”, we were certainly very well ahead of the market when we introduced video overlay ads back in October of 2005, just as YouTube was getting their first pirated episodes of The Sopranos on their site. At the Web 2.0 conference that fall, Brightcove debuted our beta service and as part of that both demo’d and discussed how we wanted to changing video and television advertising with new formats that could engage the user in a non-intrusive manner while creating opt-in ‘takeover sponsorship’ units that a marketer would be excited about. We demo’d overlay ads from Coca Cola running in a MTV Networks channel that we were just launching with them. The New York Times covered this debut.
We subsequently demo’d and introduced these formats again at AdTech in New York that fall, and if you speak with any number of a major content owner brand partners, it has been part of our platform since then, along with a wide range of other innovations in video ad formats, policies and targetting mechanisms.
Interestingly, despite having been 18+ months “ahead of the market”, to our disappointment, there has been extremely limited uptake by the advertising community around these formats. There are a lot of factors behind this limited uptake, including:
- the advertising community buying video have been very focused on leveraging existing creative and buying patterns in the online video space
- most content publishers and media owners have been focused on getting the ‘basics’ up and running, and also responding to the RFPs from marketers and advertisers, which are almost 100% focused on basic short-form video commercials
- for premium brands and content, the basic pre-roll and companion banners are yielding extremely attractive CPMs and there is little evidence that :15 ads have any negative impact on end-user viewership behavior — in fact, our own metrics show that sites that run without any ads, and then introduce :15 pre-rolls and banners achieve identical usage and performance (e.g. no drop-off in users because of ads) on their content.Nonetheless, we remain very bullish about ‘composite’ video advertising formats that combine overlays and unique and non-intrusive calls to action with deeper interactive marketing experiences. We’ve been pushing this for years and only now are starting to see the publishers and media owners that we work with begin to take an interest in these formats. I believe this is because we’re now entering a phase where content companies are looking at ways to maximize yield and revenue within their content, and they are introducing more mid and long-form content which require, by economic necessity, a different suite of formats to deliver a good user experience.
So where does that leave us? Maybe none of these startups did – Om says it all goes back to old school television. We’ll see if VideoEgg’s patent filing is unique enough to be issued. But they’ve already said they won’t be using it offensively to stop others from doing this. The market will sort it all out.
cartoon credit: the amazing Hugh MacLeod
If VideoEgg accuse Youtube for stealing ideas. They can’t get into IPO for some reasons. Well, you can put GPL open source.
There is an ancient saying” a bad idea comes to few, because it is in fact a bad idea, but a good idea comes to many, because it is only logical for it to be so.”
I have a long history in broadcast video and in computer programming. I was writing code on many of the earliest microprocessors and so on. There are many from my generation who’s work built the foundation for the current digital world to rest on. Much like the turtle under the feet of Atlas, we are rarely noticed. Big corporations very seldom create anything new. The vast majority of technical advancements are created by people who simply did not know at the time, that what they were doing was impossible, so for them it was not. Many a lone inventor has gone to his or her grave in poverty, while the corporation that profited from their work live on. This is the way of capitalism, it is the way it is supposed to work.
Right after the fall of the Soviet Union my small group of Russian programmers and scientists created an application foundation we called DNA, or dynamic network animation. Fully vector based, but much tighter code than Flash. In 1999 we produced our first video CODEC with motion interpolation, wavelet based compression and also included integrated elliptical curve encryption within the CODEC. This allowed fully protected full motion SD video at ~ 1 Mbs to easily be transmitted over the Internet. Next we added overlay capability by combining DNA with our CODEC. My broadcast experience told me this was a logical next step. Advertising was simply the next logical progression after that. All this I did out of pocket, to keep my Russian friends from continuing there work on weapons of mass destruction and to prove it could be done. My pocket has never been deep for very long because there is always someone in need. Stray cat or stray human, you do what you can.
So before 2000 all these wonders existed, but who cares. Everything has it’s time. Let us all just be grateful for all the folks who have done so much for the rest of us, not out of greed, but simply to prove it could be done. Wait to you see what we are doing in the field of alternative energy.
Go further back!
Actually my old friend, David Weinfeld’s company, clipshow had it first, I believe. And that was just before the bubble 1.0 burst. He was just too much ahead of his time.
http://www.zdmg...p.com/about.php
I think the issue is not:
“which website had overlay ads first?”
but rather:
“which website THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS had overlay ads first?”
By that standard, YouTube wins.
BTW, the videoegg front-page right now: embarrassing!
Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I invented this in 1985 in my social studies class.
This is not actually an “invention” what videoegg did. Its rather an obvious thing and the accusing some like #1 said is ridiculous. Thousands of people would have already thought about that.
thousands?
Yeah, I like the Adbrite’s founder Philip Kaplan! He is a really good man!
I like Pud, too.
Honestly there’s no way any of these people and companies could ever argue for being innovative on this considering TV has had this kind of advertising (albeit obviously without flash) for quite a while. We just have to realize that over 3 years ago online video wasn’t what it is today, so it didn’t even make sense to apply the concept to the medium. Now it does, and these guys are all running for the hill trying to claim ownership of the idea – but there’s really nothing new to “own” here.
Hugh’s cartoon here is definitely appropriate.
Who cares who came up with the idea first?
It’s all about execution, and in this case, since YouTube is the 800 pound gorilla, it’s them who’re going to make most of the money from online video ads.
VideoEgg is just trying (and apparently succeeding too) to get some free press and clickthroughs.
The difference between VideoEgg and Brightcove/YouTube is that the later were smart enough to realize that this market was/is too young while the former are pompous dicks blowing smoke
VideoEgg, not only were you not first, not only does your response to this make you look silly, but both Google and Brightcove are going to eat you for breakfast
Just to clear things up for when YouTube rips my idea from me, I want it to be known now that I invented underlayed ads – which nobody is using right now
With underlayed ads, they play underneath the video – so you get both the benefit of having an ad impression without having to distract the user from their viewing experience
My father invented gobstoppers in ‘63 and I got the notice-banner to Mr. Wonka on my site to prove it! Just waitin for the checks to start rollin in…………still waitin…………crap.
I agree with the above posters. The idea seemed ‘obvious’ to me ever since video on in the internet became a possibility. It is all about execution.
Hi Michael,
It is always a good thing, someone clarifies what could be a mistake. But in this case who was the first it is not so relevant as:
What would be the real effect of ads over Youtube?
I think the more business sense they make to recover the huge investment, the less sexy Youtube gets. Are you going to use video with ads in your presentations? I rather go somewhere else.
Is Youtube going to have more legal conflicts putting ads on a video they do not own? Probably so.
Mario Ruiz
@ http://www.oursheet.com
However, H264 is coming …
I thought about video overlay ads once in 2004.
it doesn’t really matter who came up with it first. Youtube will make it mainstream, so everybody will benefit from it.
no I am spartacus
The concept is hardly new though by definition execution technologies on broadband PC Web TV will be recent…but whats interesting is the only reason there is all this hoo-ha is because this is the format YouTube has gone with for Ads.
Could this be publicity seeking by les autres perhaps
And in that vein, we blogged about it here
…referencing this post of course.
Who cares other than those with bruised egos?
enough with the crunchbase already – so freaking stupid. we want to go to the site, not to your f’ing directory.
As someone noted above, this format is very common on television channels, and has been for awhile. When we were designing this format at Brightcove we drew our influence directly from the animated overlays hat TV channels would use after a commercial break to do promotion for other shows, new episodes and the like.
The concept of interactive overlay objects on networked video goes back to late 80’s early 90’s. Most active in the discussions were SMIL and MPEG standard working groups. dotcom days were full of web video startups far ahead of time. Futuretel created interactive streaming h.263/MPEG technology with several issued patents in the early 90’s.
Fast forward to Adobe use of standard h.263 video compression in flash7 player for http progressive download (plays a file while downloading) and opensource ffmpeg offering h.263 encoder with simple flv container support.
These technology events created the opportunity for today’s UGC. Standing on the shoulder of giants, it was not too hard for the technically astute to implement a web page to upload media by http post to a linux server running ffmpeg to transcode to a flv file and then serve the file by http progressive download it to a viewer with flash 7 player. Getting the system to scale and most importantly having the cash to feed the beast (servers and bandwidth), has to go to youtube.
Learning that you can put a clickable object on the flv is inherent to flash so discovering this seems an odd discussion. Having the web ad ecosystem adopt a new paradigm for how the ads are sold, presented and accounted for was difficult. I agree with brightcove, several companies presented this concept in ‘05/06 with little to no interest to disrupt the existing ad ecosystem. Today the ecosystem is changing and I do believe that the organisms in the ecosystem are working together to offer the consumers a better product.
A couple next gen features will be; coupling user behavior to the equation so that the ads will dynamically move in the video based on user interest and contextual information, ads not stuck inside flash stage, segment selection with comments and audio to text, as well as going beyond commodity transcoding and offering the option to render the ads into the video by web API and XML so the ads/branding can travel to podcast and mobile.
yes, thousands….
how hard is… this leap ?
we have an ad, we have a video …. hmmm
whoa, get this, lets put the ad on the video ?
Snake Oil 2.0….I just about fell out of my chair laughing. Love that pic.
Videoegg’s management made a bet on a “David vs Goliath” opportunistic marketing tactic. Sure, they look silly, but it looks like the resulting lift will likely outweigh the sheer daffiness of their posturing.
As many have noted above the idea is not a new one (I can’t speak to the patent). With regard to the Internet possibilities, I know that Jeremy has been actively thinking about online video and advertising formats at least since late ‘93.
It doesn’t matter what kind of overlay you use. The business model remains bizzare. I mean, 99% of videos on YouTube are amateur or pirated. You won’t get any ads on them, because no brand wants to be associated with piracy or a boy acting silly in front a webcam. So, at the end, you have a site with 99% of its huge bandwith that doesn’t make a penny, while the remaining 1%, the few featured and approved videos, get some money in. Something is wrong here.
Oh man, I LOVE the latent bitterness in Brightcove’s tone (Soprano’s epis). What a sad state for a grown man to be in.
There is no such thing is “INVENTION” it’s either “REMODELING” or “MODIFICATION”.
Quoting a line from the tv series, “Burn Notice”, they are like little girls and bitches… ‘nuf said.
Lots of people seem to think it doesn’t matter. Just wait till the Patent war starts, then see how much it matters. If nothing else, this is a lot of posturing just to be sure that the gEmpire doesn’t get a patent for it (pre-existing art and all that), assuming they’re planning to file.
whatever happened to subliminal advertising?
it seems so natural to splice momentary flashes of one word or closeup photo into the middle short form web videos. Right?
http://mattishness.com
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* OH, NO YOU DIDN’T…. *
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* I GOT THE PATENT… SEARCH USPTO.COM FOR “SNEATS” *
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* I PREDATE ALL OF YOU. I EVEN COVER MORE THAN VIDEO. *
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* I KNEW WAY BEFORE AND DID THE SMART THING BECAUSE *
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* NO ONE BELIEVED IN THE IDEA CUZ NETWORK MONEY *
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* WAS TOO GOOD. BUT I WANT TO GIVE THE POWER TO THE *
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* PEOPLE. I WANT THEM TO GET BLIP’D. HERE IS THE PROOF. *
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* NOW ISN’T THAT JUST FUNNY. *
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* SOON, EVERYONE IS GOING TO GET BLIP’D! *
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man, I swear I saw video overlays ever since I first saw flash video guys playing around with it back in 2000 or 2001. flashforward NYC I believe was the place I saw that.
anyway, there’s nothing like throwing out totally unsubstantiated claims like this — so my apologies for not taking the time to research & find a specific reference.
This is too funny………….. I hate to burst everyone’s bubble but I’m the dude
who patented the overlay idea before everyone…. even brightcove! I even do more than overlay some video. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and read my patent at USPTO.COM and search for “SNEATS”.
I did a provisional so April is the filing of the utility.
Well, you never heard of me. But now you do. I’m the reason why “soon, everyone is going to get blip’d”. Look that up too if you like.
Blipd.com……………… pretty fucking amazing no one believed me at the time cuz they were too drunk with doubleclick or network money.
Oh yeah, I do have demos. I presented it last night at the facebook developer’s conference.
I wonder if Michael is actually going to read my patent………
This is waste of time debating like 5 years olds and talking about snake oil saleman 2.0. Seriously… Do we need to argue bias subject?
This debate could turn into war in iraq. It’s like we can’t find WMD. Come on, get over it. Entrepreneurs here waste their time reading, debating, and couldn’t get their jobs done.
stick with Web 2.0 thing.
Ty, dude you don’t have a patent, it’s applied not issued. You still have a long, expensive way to go. Good luck.
I truly believe I came up with this idea first!
Who cares who came up with it first? It’s great news for everyone selling online video overlay ads that Youtube/Google has embraced the format. They are the only players who have the scale and the relationships to turn it into a standard, which is good for everyone who sells the unit. More at the Lightspeed blog at http://lsvp.wor...ts-competitors/
Jeremy is right and you should read his blog, it’s good. And VideoEgg is just doing smart business – and really they are happy about this because once the format is standardized they benefit because they have a (relatively) mature offering and a growing (distributed) inventory.
@TY….not sure what you applied for, but as i said in my post on top back in 2000 clipshow a company by one of my friends already had the whole video sharing with ads and everything. So, I am sorry to say, there is a bit of prior art on that.
Yeah, won’t be using their patent offensively because the patent is most likely non-defensible. What company would allow others to openly infringe on patent rights and allow the market to sort it out…this would be contrary to the goals of any company, and especially a start up who could likely use all the revenue it can get. Besides, this entire discussion is fruitless…we need to stop and ask ourselves “who the hell cares?”
perhaps its time to turn this over to ali g.
http://youtube....h?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc
snake oil 2.0 picture is very funny. ha ha – we never know this can become a concept next.
~ MIR – http://www.mailsiread.com
Jeremy, thanks for taking the time to write your piece, and, especially, explaining the lack of any positive performance data for the overlay ad format to date. Talk about much ado about nothing! Once again, we have the “TechCrunch 50k” getting waay ahead of themselves…
Who cares who invented it? But when Charles Wilson says Jeremy was thinking about this stuff in ‘93, believe it. Because they were working side by side in those days, right here in Bloomington, Minnesota, about a mile from where I sit — in the skunkworks in the 8400 Tower. Seems like only yesterday, huh, guys?
>Who cares who invented it?
Nobody in the world, except for 3 people:
1. People who think they own the patent already
2. People who already have competing technology they would like to patent
3. People who would like to patent this technology
Advertising technology AND Patent/IP – the Holy Grail of what Startups do these days. A site like techcrunch should get that more than most.
Google and others are claiming that these overlay ads are not intrusive. Of course they are intrusive. If you are watching a video and you see an ad it is intrusive – as good advertising should be. Let’s cut the charade and admit that it is intrusive. Nobody would watch an ad if it wasn’t.
Check out the Ad-Supported Music Central blog:
http://ad-suppo...c.blogspot.com/
Meanwhile, YouTubers could probably give a crap who did it first, they’re too busy being pissed off in general.
Yay echoes!
Kirk — Not even Youtube would actually have a patent for the very common fact that it takes more than 4-5 years to get one approved. Every single company staking a claim to overlay in this discussion will have it patent pending. Obviously it’s implied like all other parties who said similar. My Patent is published pending which took a seriously long time just for that.
Crazy — You really must be loco if you think I was stupid enough to think that overlay itself could be patented. What I did, if you read it, is what happens after you define an overlay ad system.
Let me state something that is so needed in this conversation because some of you are just idiots bantering about without any fair reasoning. Patents sometimes protect inventors who cannot obtain the resources to build companies for whatever reason. Therefore, patenting their ideas are the ONLY way to protect their passion for the idea in the event someone else with more resources tries to claim they were first. Patents are a godsend for people trying to make something better for their peers and if they are fortunate enough to self-fund the patent through application then place another notch on why this country is one of the greatest countries in the world. Patents give smart people a second chance when someone else validates their reason for inventing the next big thing.
For the record, you guys are providing one hell of a validation for overlay as a whole, much more than Adobe Media Player did.
The funny thing is, all the activity, overlay and all is still happening in the propretary youtube or videoegg widget. Some other blogs bring this story back down to earth (TC did Ok but commenter’s are blowing overboard).
Perhaps if you stop and think, you’ll realize it’s just another form of “in-video” advertising. Nothing happens outside the widget. Nothing NEW is introduced in the business model. Even if you go a few thoughts ahead and really do this thing like it should be done, I already done it… It’s the reason why I have been saying for quite some time that soon, everyone is going to get blip’d!
I hope anyone reading this goes out and patents their idea before ‘the man’ tries to keep you down.
Power to the People.