• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 12, 2012

Verizon Digital Media Services spent two years and $370 million to solve the problem of taking pieces of media, matching them with ads and making this available on various mobile devices, says Louisa Shipnuck, director of marketing and strategy.

Available in Q3, the video-on-demand Unicast service will deliver individual video streams to consumers from content aggregators, multiple system operators or companies like Verizon FIOS or AT&T U-Verse that deliver content through the Internet.

Customers have begun to sign up for the Unicast delivery, Shipnuck said.

The Verizon Digital Media Services platform, designed to support and process Web objects and data on mobile devices, also integrates advertising, metadata, and promotional content. Live content becomes available through the platform in Q4, which means content will process in real-time.

Verizon Digital Media Services built two facilities and 30 data centers to serve live and linear content provided from media owners to consumers. 

The platform automated processes. It digests media, movies, television programming or an ad from content owners and manipulates it "10,000 or 20,000 times because every device and every network and every retailer requires a different version," Shipnuck said. "We're doing this on behalf of the whole industry because it's at a scale that a single studio, network or retailer couldn't do on its own."

Verizon Digital Media Services is capitalizing on mobile trends. Smartphones are forecast to become the largest category in global device spending, with an estimated 108 million units shipping, resulting in $33.7 billion in revenue. In addition, the CEA estimates that global tech device spending will exceed $1 trillion in 2012, up from $993 billion in 2011.