Televisionation

This episode features Jason Manningham, Co-Founder and CEO of Blockgraph, an adtech company co-owned by Comcast/NBCUniversal, Charter Communications and Paramount, which offers a peer-to-peer platform designed to enable companies to create and implement privacy-focused targeting and measurement solutions. Among other things, Manningham provides an overview of Blockgraph’s flagship technology, the Identity Operating System (IDoS); outlines the problems that the technology is designed to solve; casts light on the company’s future plans; and more.

A native Virginian living in LA, Clay Tweel is a documentary director/producer/editor with a passion for telling great character-based stories. His works include Make Believe, Print the Legend, Finders Keepers, Out of Omaha, The Innocent Man and Gleason—the last of which was shortlisted for an Academy Award and named one of the 5 best documentaries of 2016 by the National Board of Review. His features have been distributed by Showtime, Netflix, and Amazon Studios while working closely with companies that include Open Road, The Orchard and Exhibit A. Most recently, Clay executive-produced and directed all four episodes of Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults, an examination of the UFO cult through the eyes of its former members and their loved ones. He is currently directing a feature documentary and producing numerous projects under his banner Parkside Films.

Since this interview was recorded, at the end of 2021, it has been announced that Clay is co-directing a feature documentary about uncovering corruption in soccer organization FIFA. Told through the lens of the late investigative journalist Andrew Jennings, it’s presumably another example of Clay’s emphasis on "singular viewpoints of characters and their experience.”

Clay and Lisa also cover:

His career evolution, starting as assistant editor on Seth Gordon’s arcade game competition documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, leading into the acclaimed Gleason and beyond
His desire “to figure out why people do what they do,” and the compassionate portrayal of complex human experience in the Heaven’s Gate docuseries
Working in “the golden age of nonfiction,” the future of true crime unscripted content, and Clay’s thought that Liz Garbus’s outstanding I’ll Be Gone in the Dark so powerfully explored the genre that we’re now “potentially in a post-true crime world”

(Televisionation: Screen Culture features Lisa Crawford—a cultural commentator and expert on the evolving relationship between fans and television creators—in conversation with prominent content creators and producers. She focuses on how television content impacts our culture.)

This episode features Vijay Sajja, Founder and CEO of Evergent, a provider of customer relationship management tools for streaming media and entertainment companies (customers include BritBox, the BBC, DirecTV, WarnerMedia and others), which currently supports around 600 million end-users on its platform.

Sajja describes Evergent’s CRM capabilities (which include managing registration, authentication, transaction gateways and more), and how these capabilities also allow it to generate large amounts of data on customer behavior for its clients, which the latter can then use in order to guide their product and marketing strategies. He also explains how Evergent uses AI/Machine Learning to make sense of the data it gathers, tells us which new developments in the streaming space he is most excited about, and updates us on the company’s latest news, including new partnerships with Microsoft and AWS.

This episode features Marianne Vita, SVP/Director of Integrated Strategy and Marketing at VAB, discussing two reports that that organization recently published: “Reaching ‘Corded’ and ‘Cordless’ Audiences through Video Streaming” and “Stream On: 23 Real-World Case Studies Highlighting How Video Streaming Drives Brand Success.”

ITVT/TVOT is pleased to present a new episode of “Televisionation,” our video/audio podcast exploring the advanced/interactive-TV industry. This episode features interviews with three senior executives from measurement company, Comscore: Chief Research Officer, Michael Vinson; CEO and Executive Chairman, Bill Livek; and Chief Commercial Officer, Chris Wilson. Among other things, Vinson discusses the difficulties inherent to audience measurement even with today’s digital technologies, explains how Comscore attempts to overcome those difficulties, and outlines how the company seeks to drive innovation. Livek, meanwhile, explains how he believes Comscore is differentiated in the measurement space, how the the company has adapted to the post-Covid environment, how it is embracing opportunities for greater transparency, innovation and collaboration, how it approaches the issue of attribution, and more. And finally Wilson discusses Comscore’s recently announced deal with Google to provide deduplicated connected-TV measurement for YouTube and YouTube TV.

ITVT/TVOT is pleased to present a new episode of “Televisionation,” our video/audio podcast exploring the advanced/interactive-TV industry. This episode features interviews with three senior executives from measurement company, Comscore: Chief Research Officer, Michael Vinson; CEO and Executive Chairman, Bill Livek; and Chief Commercial Officer, Chris Wilson. Among other things, Vinson discusses the difficulties inherent to audience measurement even with today’s digital technologies, explains how Comscore attempts to overcome those difficulties, and outlines how the company seeks to drive innovation. Livek, meanwhile, explains how he believes Comscore is differentiated in the measurement space, how the the company has adapted to the post-Covid environment, how it is embracing opportunities for greater transparency, innovation and collaboration, how it approaches the issue of attribution, and more. And finally Wilson discusses Comscore’s recently announced deal with Google to provide deduplicated connected-TV measurement for YouTube and YouTube TV.

This week’s highly entertaining episode of The Friday Fireside welcomes Dennis Gillespie from Outside, Inc. Dennis talks about the consumer appeal of Adventure Sports along with how attractive those consumers are to Advertisers (think youth, disposable income and time on their hands). And we learn how Dennis participated in some of the earliest televised sports betting (minus the cash) while interning at Qube in #Columbus, Ohio. Dennis was at the time a student at the good doctor’s Alma Mater, Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.

This episode features Darren Lepke, Head of Video Product Management at Edgecast (formerly Verizon Digital Media Services), a provider of CDN, edge computing, serverless computing and streaming-delivery services. The conversation focuses on the work that Edgecast is doing in streaming sports, including enabling livestreaming of the Super Bowl earlier this year. Lepke also discusses how the company overcomes the challenges involved in powering and scaling livestreaming events, outlines its business models, and casts light on the new, interactive features it has developed to enhance live sports programming.

This episode features John Piccone, President of QTT, a division of Viamedia that offers a cloud-based advertising solution which it bills as “request[ing] and receiv[ing] ads from programmatic digital ad exchanges to enable linear cable television ad insertion utilizing existing cable and broadcast TV infrastructure.” He discusses the challenges involved in delivering digital advertising to linear TV; explains how QTT’s solution works, including how it makes use of VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) tags and enables interoperability between linear and digital ecosystems; outlines the division’s roadmap; and more.

Our guest on this week’s Friday Fireside is Tsahi Levent-Levi, Analyst and Consultant for WebRTC, publisher of BlogGeek.me, and CEO of TestRTC. Tsahi takes us under the hood of this open-source technology that enables audio and video communications inside Web pages WITHOUT plug-ins. And he explains a critical benefit of WebRTC—significantly lower latency for live video. Low enough to permit in-game sports betting on television. That, RIGHT THERE, is reason enough for all of our viewers to ping Tsahi and learn more.